Kit
The silence that followed the slamming of the sliding door wasn’t empty. It was heavy. It had weight and teeth, the kind of silence that rings in your ears after a crash cymbal gets hit too hard and leaves the high-mids screaming.
Alfie looked like he’d been shot. He stood there in his sweatpants, chest heaving, staring at the wood grain of the door Zia had just bolted through. The scent rolling off him was acrid—burnt sugar torched black, the smell of a pan left on the stove until it smokes.
"We broke it," Alfie whispered, his voice cracking. "We broke the board."
My own instinct was a physical roar in my blood.Chase.
It wasn’t a thought; it was a command from the base of my brain stem. Every muscle in my legs coiled tight, begging to sprint down that hallway. My hands uncurled and recurled into fists, needing to grab, to hold, to drag her back into the safety of the pack before she could get far enough away to remember she had an Exit Card.
I took one step. Just one.
Then I planted my boot into the carpet like I was kicking a bass drum pedal and locked my knee.
"Hold," I ground out. It sounded like gravel pouring down a chute. "Nobody moves."
"She’s running," Alfie choked out, finally turning to look at us. His eyes were wild, pupils blown so wide the gold was just a thin ring of panic. "Kit, she’s running. We told her we’re chemically obsessed with her and she legged it."
"She needed air," I said, though my heart was hammering against my ribs like a blast beat. "Too much input. We swamped her."
"I calculated the risk," Euan said from the table. He hadn't moved. He was staring at the empty space where Zia had been standing, his face grey, his scent sharp and brittle like snapped sesame crackers. "Disclosure was the ethical imperative. But the immediate reject response... the probability was 87%."
"Fuck the percentages, Euan!" Alfie paced a tight circle, hands gripping his hair. "She’s gone. She’s probably packing that go-bag right now. She’s going to call Rowan, invoke the clause, and we’ll be back to playing to an empty Click track by noon."
"Quiet," I snapped.
I closed my eyes. I cut out the panic and the noise of Alfie’s pacing and Euan’s spiraling logic. I listened to the bus.
We were cruising at sixty on the motorway. The engine hum was steady.
I listened for the sound of the side door release. The hiss of hydraulics. Thethumpof boots hitting pavement if we’d slowed down enough for her to jump.
Nothing.
Just the vibration of the chassis.
And then, faint but distinct, the sound of the rear bunk curtain railing.
Zzzzzzip.
Violent. Fast. But internal.
I opened my eyes. The tension in my chest didn't vanish, but it shifted. It went from 'catastrophe' to 'crisis management'.
"She didn't leave," I said.
Alfie froze mid-pace. "What?"
"She didn't go for the exit," I said, nodding toward the front of the bus. "She went to the back. To the bunk."
Euan’s head snapped up. He tapped his tablet screen, checking the internal sensors he definitely wasn't supposed to have running but we all ignored because they kept us safe.
"Confirmed," Euan breathed. "Heat signatures indicate she is in the rear quadrant. Bunk B. The soundproofed unit."
"She retreated," I said, the realization tasting like sweet molasses on my tongue. "She didn't eject."
It was a victory so small you'd need a microscope to see it, but I held onto it with both hands. In Seattle, she’d run to a different postcode. In London, she’d sprinted to a green room. Here? She’d run ten meters down the hall and built a fort inourbus.
