“He killed someone!” The confession bursts out of me like bile. “I watched him fucking cut off a dead man’s finger, Yasmin. We can’t wait, we can’t—Brandon might wake up, or Bastian might find us, and Zeke—” I pause for air. “Zeke’s his best friend. He’ll tell Bastian where we are.”
“But Eliana?—”
“Now, Yasmin! Right fucking now!”
Down the hall behind us, Brandon groans again. The sound galvanizes Yasmin. Her eyes go wide and she stops resisting, lets me pull her through the doorway and into the hall.
We sprint toward the elevator together, both of us barefoot, both of us bleeding, both of us running from men we thought we no longer had to fear.
The elevator doors slide open and we collapse inside. I slam the lobby button with my palm, leaving a crimson smear across the burnished metal.
As the elevator descends, we pant like animals. Our ragged breaths echo in the small metal cage. I try not to panic at how little I can see. The world has never been more dangerous and I’ve never seen less of it. Wisps of color and motion are all that remain. I’m drowning— wallowing— floating away— I need something to— to— to?—
My hand shoots out blindly and finds Yasmin’s. I grab it hard enough that she gasps, but she doesn’t pull away. Instead, she squeezes back just as tight.
I force myself to focus on that. The sensation of her palm against mine. The warmth of her skin. The tremor in her fingers that matches the earthquake in my own.
I have to focus on that, because if I don’t, I’ll start to think, and if I start to think, I’ll die. So I don’t think. Not about anything.
Not the darkness closing in.
Not Bastian’s face in that alley.
Not Brandon’s hands around Yasmin’s throat.
Not Zeke lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood.
Just this: Yasmin’s hand in mine.
The elevator dings. Lobby. As soon as the doors open enough to allow us to wriggle through, I pull her forward into whatever comes next. When we pass the horrified doorman, I yell at him, “Call an ambulance! People are hurt upstairs.”
I don’t stop to see if he listens.
2
ELIANA
ONE WEEK LATER
brine /brin/: noun
1: a salt solution used to preserve food and retain moisture.
2: the tears you’re drowning in.
I only know that a week has passed when I hear the church bells. So it’s Sunday, then. Seven days and eight nights since we ran.
The sounds of the motels—we go to a different one every night, so that no one can find us—have become reassuring in an uncanny sort of way. An ice machine rattles down the hall. A couple bicker and have sex and bicker some more in the room above us. The empty-belly growl of traffic on the highway that never, ever stops—these things let me know that we’re still alive.
For now, at least.
Yasmin thinks I’m sleeping. I can hear her pacing, another sound I’ve come to rely on. In this cramped room, it’s six steps to the window, pivot, and six steps back to the bathroom door. She’s been doing this for hours, ever since the sun came up. Or at least, I assume the sun came up. I can’t see it anymore.
I can’t seeanythinganymore.
It happened three days ago: I woke up and the pinhole was gone. Simplygone, without so much as a goodbye or a see ya later. Like someone had finally closed the aperture all the way, locked it shut, and thrown away the key.
I haven’t told Yasmin. I don’t know how to tell her that, while we’ve been hiding in this cash-only dump off Route 41, while she’s been squinting through the curtains at the parking lot every twenty minutes for black sedans or Range Rovers, while she’s been keeping us fed on gas station sandwiches and one bag of Cheetos after the next—I’ve been going blind.
