Georgia’s place.
It’s eight blocks from here. Maybe ten. Might as well be a fucking marathon, but between that and death, I’ll run the damn race.
I make it three blocks before I collapse the first time.
My knees hit the pavement, and the impact sends a shockwave of heat through my torso that makes me retch. Nothing comes up but bile and blood. I stay there for a moment, hunched over like a wounded animal, my forehead pressed against filthy concrete while the world spins in lazy, nauseating circles.
Get up.
Eliana’s face swims through my mind. Those lips, pink and pure.
Get up, Bastian. Get. The. Fuck. Up.
I get up.
Four more blocks. My vision tunnels to a narrow point of light surrounded by encroaching darkness. I think of my unborn child. If I die here, in some piss-stained alley between a shuttered bodega and a dumpster overflowing with rotting garbage, that kid will never know their father existed or that he tried. That he fuckingtried,goddammit.
I collapse again at block six.
This time, getting up takes longer. The pain has become something abstract now—a distant roaring, like a train passing through my body, obliterating everything in its path.
Back upright. Left foot. Right foot. Left. Right.
Don’t stop.
Don’tfuckingstop.
Georgia’s building materializes through the murky, foggy haze like a mirage. For a terrible moment, I think I’ve hallucinated it. But no. The fire escape is real. The graffiti-tagged dumpster is real. The cracked concrete steps leading up to the entrance arereal.
I don’t remember which apartment is hers, but I haul myself up the stairs anyway, leaving bloody handprints on the railing like breadcrumbs for the Grim Reaper to follow. Second floor. Third. Is this it? I don’t know, and being wrong will kill me. Each step is costing me something I can’t afford to lose. My vision strobes between too-bright and pitch-black, and somewhere in the middle, I catch glimpses of doors. Peeling paint. Brass numbers that swim and blur.
One of them looks familiar. Maybe. Or maybe I’m just dying and my brain is serving up comfort lies.
I pound on it with a fist that feels like it belongs to someone else. It’s as much strength as I can muster, but even still, the sound is weak, pathetic. More of a scrape than a knock. The flutters of a dying bird’s wings.
The door swings open.
Georgia stands there in a faded bathrobe, coffee cup halfway to her lips.
“H-hello,” I manage.
Then my legs give out, and everything flips upside down as I crumple across her threshold.
44
BASTIAN
trussing /'tr?siNG/: verb
1: binding meat with twine to hold its shape during cooking.
2: what your future mother-in-law does to your torn-open gut.
A blue-tiled bathroom wall.
The cold porcelain of a bathtub pressing against my spine.
Bright light overhead, a few bugs caught in the glass of the bulb, dark smudges, deader than dead.
