Footsteps above. Not on the floor—higher. Catwalks. Balconies. Someone with patience and a map in their head.
I drag a chair across the tile, slow and deliberate, then shove it hard into a stack of tables. The crash rings out, ugly and loud. I sprint the opposite direction before the echo dies, sliding across a grease-slick floor and diving through a service corridor marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
The door slams behind me.
The corridor is narrow and dim, pipes running along the ceiling, water dripping somewhere out of sight. My breath fogs faintly in the chill. I move fast now, pushing when the space allows it, slowing when it doesn’t.
I’m not trying to disappear. I’m trying to last, trying tostall. Let the other bitches get caught first. Last woman standing wins. It has to be me. There’s no other way.
I duck through another door and come out near the back of the mall, where storefronts shrink and corridors twist again. Who the fuck designs these places? Smart people who know how to trap shoppers. Make it hard to navigate, hard to find their way out. That way, they buy more shit.
Spend, spend, spend.
A lot of good it did them, this shithole empty mall now a mockery of their consumerist brilliance. The Rothwell Galleria, now known only as The Rot. Reduced to this, an emblem of the failure of an entire town.
When footsteps sound behind me, I cut sideways instead of forward. When I hear someone above, I stay low. When I hear nothing at all, I move faster. I’m learning how this place thinks, as if that’s possible.
My legs shake. Sweat stings my eyes. My lungs burn, but my head stays clear. Each choice buys me seconds. Each second buys me distance.
Somewhere, another girl screams. Then stops.
I don’t slow. I don’t look back. I don’t care. The more screams I hear, the more girls are caught, the closer I am to the prize. I keep moving, deeper into the maze, because whatever’s tracking me wants me where it can see me.
And I don’t intend to make it that easy.
8
VI
My foot catcheson something I don’t see in time.
I go down hard.
Fuck me.
The impact knocks the air out of me in a sharp, humiliating burst. My knee slams tile. Pain flashes hot and immediate. I bite the inside of my cheek to keep quiet and roll, scrambling into the narrow gap between two shuttered storefronts. My shoulder clips a metal gate and the rattle rings out, too loud in the corridor.
I go still. One breath. Two.
Nothing answers. The silence doesn’t mean safety. It means, I haven’t been heard yet.
I stay crouched, one hand braced on the floor, the other fist pounding to bleed off the initial pain. My lungs work like a bellows, too loud in my own ears. I force the sound down, pull air through my nose, slow and thin. Mypulse doesn’t care. I roll back onto my ass and look down at my knee.
Blood seeps through torn denim, dark and fast. The cut isn’t too deep, but it’s open, and the Rot doesn’t do clean wounds. Everything here has been touched by mildew and rust and the kind of grime that never washes out.
“Just great,” I whisper.
I can’t keep bleeding like this.
I shift deeper into shadow. The space behind the gates is an old boutique, stripped bare. The floor is littered with ripped shopping bags and broken hangers and the sagging carcass of a mannequin arm. Something small skitters near the wall and disappears into a crack.
I ignore it.
There’s a trash bag in the corner, half torn open. I kneel beside it and dig through, hands moving fast. My fingers come up slick with something I don’t want to think about. I find a strip of cloth that might’ve once been a shirt. Gray. Thin. It smells like old sweat and damp.
It’s still better than nothing.
I press the cloth against the cut and hiss through my teeth. Pain pulses up my leg in waves. I wrap the fabric around my knee, tight enough to slow the blood. My hands shake. I force them steady and tie the knot hard.
