Messy Bun snorts. “Ships are big. Oceans are bigger.”
“They don’t stop,” I tell her. “You think you’ve reached the end with them, the part where any other sane person says that’senough, and they throw the line farther. They dig until their hands bleed.”
I hold their gazes. “I’m theirs. I belong to them. They’ll come for me. The only thing that scares me is that maybe they’ll be too late.”
Kira leans forward, elbows on knees again, voice low. “They won’t be too late.”
“How do you know?” It comes out hard because I need it to be true for more than me. I need it to be true for every person in this room.
She glances at Split Lip, at Luis, at the others who look like they want to believe but can’t afford the collapse if they do, if it doesn’t happen. Then she looks back at me and says, simply, “Because they never took their eyes off you.”
Heat creeps up my neck. “That—” I start, ready to argue, ready to say I’m not a thing to watch.
“Not like that. Not just like that.” She shakes her head, small, cutting off the argument before I voice it. “We all saw it. It used to drive some of the girls batshit crazy. A kid I went out with bragged about getting to sit in the booth sometimes when the main guy took a smoke. He said there was a special watch list. VIPs, troublemakers, people who made money move. Your name wasn’t on that list.” She taps her temple. “But you were on theirs.”
“Conrad,” Split Lip guesses.
Kira’s mouth goes soft at one corner. “Conrad watched you like you were a seat at a table and he needed to know who else wanted it. Atticus changed how the hallway feeds looped afterthat bachelorette party tried to corner you in the staff hall for the housekeeping complaint that time. Nobody knew why. They just knew the angles moved.” She lifts a shoulder. “House gossip. The boys on the floor talk. The dealers talk. The cocktail girls know everything. They’re men. They’re loud when they think no one’s listening.”
“Atticus moved the cameras,” I say. The knowledge moves through me, warm and steadying. “Of course he did.”
“Conrad made it very clear we don’t bother you,” Kira adds. “Not with comp requests, not with shift switches…the guys—not with jokes that weren’t funny.” She looks down at her hands. “It was a relief. Some nights…it was a relief.”
Split Lip snorts quietly. “Men in suits being useful. Mark it on the calendar.”
“You’re telling me they’ve been watching me since day one,” I say, to be sure I have it in the right shape.
“Like you were theirs,” Kira says, and there’s no judgment in it, only observation. “Like they were waiting for you to figure it out or run. They expected both.”
Something in my chest that’s been vibrating since the hallway at the hotel—since the first time I realized Danner wasn’t a face but a hand—calms a fraction. The room doesn’t change. The ship doesn’t change. The bruise doesn’t stop throbbing. But my heart stops racing, and everything just…settles.
“So they’ll come,” Messy Bun says, not convinced, trying the words on for size.
“They’ll come,” I say, certain now that saying it out loud shapes the space. “Even if it’s to punish me for leaving. Even if theythink I chose to run. They’ll fight about it. They’ll all be wrong about something.” The smallest smile pulls at my mouth and hurts my cheek. “And they’ll still come.”
Luis looks at the door like the men we’re talking about might walk through it if he stares hard enough. Bandage Wrist’s grip on her makeshift wrap loosens a fraction. The humming girl exhales and settles her head on the woman’s shoulder like she’s finally heard a lullaby that works.
Kira sits back, eyes flicking to the ceiling as if she can already imagine a helicopter’s rotor thump. “So we hold on a little longer,” she says. “We stay small when we need to. We keep water. We hide anything that can turn into a tool. We don’t give them any reason to move us or punish us.”
“And we get names,” Split Lip adds, a general setting of our terms of survival. “We watch who has keys. Who leaves doors open. Who looks away on purpose. We don’t need to be dead weight when your guys get here.”
“No,” I echo. The words put steel in my spine. “We’ll be ready for them.”
The pipe ticks as it cools from a burst of heat. The ship groans, old and alive. Out beyond the hull, the ocean shoulders itself under the boat and doesn’t care about any of us. That’s fine. I don’t need the ocean to care about us. I just need it to hold us.
Kira tosses me a hairbrush with a few broken teeth. “Keep yourself presentable,” she says, mocking the rule and transforming it into something we can own. “Boss likes clean.”
I take the brush and run it through my hair, then hand it to Bandage Wrist, who goes up on tiptoe to pass it along to Messy Bun, who sighs and takes it like it’s something more than justplastic and bristles. Maybe it is. Maybe it’s a small rebellion to smooth your hair on a ship that wants you to forget you’re a person.
Footsteps thud far down the hall. Radios crackle, indistinct. The sound of a door slamming echoes through the metal.
“Eat,” Split Lip orders, pointing to a tray someone shoved under a bunk earlier. “We need your strength. No fainting damsels in here.”
A laugh breaks out where there shouldn’t be one. It makes the hair on my arms lift. The room becomes, for three heartbeats, a place where laughter is allowed.
I take the tray. The sandwich is stiff. The apple is bruised, sweet under the brown. I eat anyway. Chew. Swallow. Drink. Breathe.
“They’re gonna come,” Kira says again.
