Sam
By the time Sam arrives back in her apartment, there are only two hours before dawn. She is still trembling as she removes her shoes and heads into the kitchen for a glass of water. Her thigh still aches, but she doesn’t bother grabbing ointment or bandages. She doesn’t bother turning on any lights. Instead, she sits on the couch in the dark, glass of water in her hand, unmoving.
She can still feel Will’s grip on her, still see the cold glint in his eyes. Maybe she should feel lucky for being let off easily. She has seen other crewmen executed for far less than what she’s done, knows that Will and Diamond have given her a pass based on her high status. But the thought offers her no comfort. It might not even be true. At this moment, Will could already have sent another polemist to assassinate her quietly, then claim her death was an accident. Maybe he lied about how valuable she is to them.
She closes her eyes and leans her head against the back of the couch. If she were smart, she would check the rest of her apartment to make sure that no one is lying in wait for her, watching her every move, ready to end her life. But she’s so tired. There are too many questions in her mind, and she has no hope of answering any of them.
As she sits in the night and stares listlessly at the wall, she feels her phone buzz.
At first, she doesn’t register it. She doesn’t care. But when it buzzes again, she finally breaks her stare and reaches into her pocket. Pulls it out.
It’s an unknown number. She hesitates at the unfamiliar caller, almost hangs up. But her memory has been strange lately—maybe she’s not remembering if someone was supposed to call her.
She closes her eyes and answers. “Hello?” she mutters, rubbing her forehead.
“Miss Lang?” A man’s voice. Soft-spoken, earnest, sincere. “Are you alone?”
It’s Edward Sinclair, the young detective from the police station.
She stiffens, opens her eyes. “Yes?”
His voice is lower than she remembers, his words quiet and urgent, as if he doesn’t want to be heard. Immediately, she realizes that this is why his number is listed as unknown—he isn’t calling her from an official line at the station or a phone sanctioned by the police.
“Miss Lang, I have something for you.”
She swallows. “Is it the autopsy?”
“The preliminary results are, I must admit, more inconclusive than I’d hoped for. Full results will take several more weeks. But in going through our directory again last night, I found something else instead. A missing file.”
Her skin prickles. “Of what?”
“Remember how I said there wasn’t any surveillance footage from the side of the parking lot where your mother was found?”
Sam lies there and feels the world shifting around her. “But there is?” she ventures.
A faint sigh of confirmation on his end. “Are you ready?” he asks.
“Yes. Yes, send it.”
A moment later, a message comes through with a link. She taps on it, and it takes her to a video file frozen on its first screen.
She’s afraid to play it. There is a premonition in the back of her head that something is about to go terribly wrong, and her body withdraws instinctively from the danger. If she doesn’t know the truth, she can pretend to herself that it doesn’t exist. She can stand here in this shadow forever and stay safe.
Her eyes go back to the video. She taps on it.
Static. Then, with her heart in her throat, she sees her mother step out through the store’s sliding doors, a paper bag in her arms. She is walking rapidly, her posture resolute.
Sam’s eyes shift as a man steps out of a silver car. He blocks her mother’s path. Her mother freezes in her tracks, takes a step back, and looks like she starts to say something. But the man reaches out to touch her shoulder—and her mother shudders. By the time the man returns to his car and leaves, she has collapsed to the ground. And at the same time, Sam recognizes theman. She knows him as surely as she knows his searing gaze, as the times she has trained beside him, as the way she has learned from him how to hurt another person. And maybe she always knew, the truth was always there in the back of her mind, waiting to be acknowledged. Maybe she was just too afraid.
It isn’t Ari. It isn’t anyone from Lumines.
The man is Will. Constantine. Grand Central.
