6
ARIEL
They didn’t let me walk.
Keys kept a fist on my arm like the air might steal me. Upstairs hit like a slap. The fluorescent lights were too bright, and everything smelled like fryer oil and old smoke sweating off metal that didn’t belong in a home.
As my eyes adjusted, I got the kitchen first: dead stove, dented fridge, metal prep table with a roll of paper towels nobody ever tore. Two guys stood at the end of the counter, one with a radio, one with a clipboard, both using that fake-calm voice. Three doors in sight: the front down a short hall to the right, the garage straight ahead, the basement behind me to the left. Keys kept me moving and I counted without looking like I was counting, ten steps from the basement door to the garage threshold, two more to the little mudroom cutout by the back. In the kitchen and hall, I clocked four men total, plus a fifth voice I couldn’t place, somewhere past the garage. Add Keys on my arm, the watcher, and the tote-guy downstairs and we were at eight.
“Quit looking,” Keys said.
“I’m trying not to fall,” I said, which was true.
He hauled me across the kitchen into the converted garage that pretended to be a workroom. Roll-up door half open,rain sneaking in across the concrete. Pallets of boxes with a fake charity stamped on the sides. A gas can, a generator that coughed and then thought better of it. A bare bulb hung ugly from a hook. Wet footprints came and went in patterns. Out to the door, back to the pallet, out again, like the floor had learned their route.
That’s where I saw her.
Near the far wall, chained low to a pipe, a blonde girl slumped like the concrete had taken the last of her. Her hair was snared and dark with blood. A sun tattoo sprawled along her collarbone, the rays warped where bruises swelled under skin. One eye swollen shut; the other open but lost. Gauze half-taped at her mouth like someone meant to help and quit halfway.
My stomach went mean. I kept moving. If I turned her into a reason, I’d make her smaller. Reasons don’t get you out. Plans do.
A guy shouldered past with a crate. Leather flashed under his jacket, and I notice a patch with a skull and wheel and a crossed wrench. I didn’t know that world; I put the picture on the high shelf marked later.
Keys aimed me at the mudroom throat. There were hooks full of coats that wouldn’t come clean, a rubber boot collapsed by the door, a mat curled at one corner, and rain tapping the small window. The back door sat there with the latch you twist and mean it, and I thought: six steps from the kitchen table to this door if you’re moving fast, seven if you trip on the mat.
Keys stopped. He didn’t like standing still. His radio spat static.
“Hold staging. Route’s mud. Do not roll until green,” said a voice that could cut cardboard with consonants.
Keys ground his teeth where he thought I couldn’t hear. “Copy,” he said, not meaning it.
“Process the guy first. Keep numbers clean,” the voice added.
He shoved me half a step like that would make the order different. “You want me to park her?” he radioed back, already annoyed.
A second voice, crisp the same way, answered, “Clear the hall. Back downstairs. Guy first, no marks.”
“Great,” Keys muttered. “Field trip.”
We passed the garage again. The blonde didn’t lift her head; the chain twitched anyway. Rain cut sideways under the door and salted my face. I tasted it and stored the taste for later.
Back through the kitchen. I tracked men without staring: the one with the limp that got worse when he thought no one watched; the one with hands too clean for the work he wanted credit for; a tall one with a laugh that didn’t fit his mouth. Someone bumped a whiteboard and got told to watch it. Another man swore about tarps like tarps are out to spite him.
At the basement door, Keys banged it open, and light dropped in bars down the steps. I took them myself before he could drag me.
Downstairs was cold again because upstairs pretends to be warm. Keys shouted for the cage, a lock bit, and he shoved me through. He cut my wrist tie, popped a fresh zip on like a period, and didn’t put the ankle chain back.
“Stay pretty,” he said, like a leash, and slammed the door.
The echo climbed and died in the duct. His boots went away with the sound of a man who hates waiting. Above us, a man laughed too loud; somebody told him to shut up. The radio clicked with “…hold until green” like it enjoyed saying it.
Cap was already watching me. Of course he was.
“You hurt?” he asked, quiet enough it didn’t travel.
“No,” I said, because truth is a tool and lying to him dulls it.
He breathed once like he was setting weight on something that holds. “Show me what you saw.”
