She's not fully asleep yet. She opens one eye when I sit on the edge of her bed.
"I have to go to work," I tell her. "Rosa is sick so I'm covering her shift tonight."
She opens the other eye. "Are you working both shifts?"
"I'll still be back before you wake up." I smooth her hair back. "You know the rules."
"Door locked at all times," she recites. "Don't open for strangers. Call Mr. Roberts if I need anything. Call you the moment something feels wrong."
"And?"
" Don’t open the windows except if it's an emergency and I need to go out the fire escape."
"Good." I kiss her forehead. She's warm and soft and smells like the coconut shampoo she picked out last month, and I hold on for one extra second before I make myself let go. "I already texted Mr. Roberts that I'm going in early. He'll have his TV volume down, and his phone ringer turned up."
"I don’t need a babysitter. I'm practically grown," she says dramatically into her pillow.
"You're twelve."
"Almost thirteen."
"In six months." I stand up. She's already closing her eyes. "Call me."
"I know, Alex."
"I know you know."
She's drifting back to sleep before I reach the hallway. I slip out the front and pull the door shut quietly behind me. Using my key to make sure that all three locks slide into place before turning toward the elevator. When I reach the ground floor, I push through the door into the cool night air.
Taking the bus, I watch the city slide past the rain-streaked window and let my brain zone out, thinking about nothing in particular. Onyx after hours is a completely different creature from Onyx when it's alive. Empty, it's all hard floors and low shadows, the bass still faintly humming in the walls like a memory the building can't shake. The cleaning crew is usually four of us — Dani, a quiet guy named Paulie who listens to audiobooks on one earbud, me, and whoever the rotating fourth happens to be that week. We work without talking much, which suits me fine.
I start in the east corridor, which always takes the longest. Private booth spillover, the particular mess that happens when people spend too much money and stop caring about where things land. I put my headphones in, mop in long even strokes, and let my brain go quiet.
I'm thirty minutes in when that sound that haunts my dreams fills the air. One clean, sharp crack from somewhere above me. I instantly stop moving.
I've been afraid of those specific sounds my entire life. I pull out my earbuds and stand completely still and listen, and the building listens back, and for three full seconds there is nothing— just the hum of the walls and the distant drip of something in the kitchen and the blood rushing through my ears.
Then footsteps. Above me, two sets. One quick and uneven, off-rhythm, wrong. The other slow and measured and completely unbothered, the footsteps of someone who is far too unbothered by that sound.
My exit is on the other side of the building, and the men are between me and it. I look at the mop in my hand, the bucket, the long, empty corridor ahead of me, and I make the only decision available. I find the nearest door and slip behind it.
Chapter Two
Alex
The door leads to a small bathroom. It’s smaller than I remember it being, but then again, right now the entire building feels all too small, like a prison cell I can’t escape. Or maybe it just feels smaller because I have my hand clamped over my mouth, and the sound of my own heartbeat racing in my chest seems so deafening, I’m sure the men will hear it. I pulled the door shut softly and slowly until I felt the latch catch, and then I stopped moving entirely, because moving makes sound, and sound is like a GPS beacon right now.
I don't breathe, I don’t move, I just listen. The footsteps scuff the floor outside, eventually stopping outside the door.
I count. Thirty seconds. Forty. Forty-five. The seconds stretch out long and elastic the way they do when your body has decided that time is a resource, and it's going to spend every unit of it registering every possible threat. A voice, low and very obviously male, says something I can't make out through the muffling of the door. Another voice answers, shorter, more clipped.
Then silence for a moment, and then the footsteps move on. I stand in the dark and count to sixty, and then count to sixty again because I am not stupid, and I am not going out there prematurely just to die in a dirty club at three in the morning over two minutes of lack of patience.
When I finally crack the door open, it's barely an inch. The corridor is empty in both directions, and I slip out, easing the door back to where I found it, and start moving toward the east exit with my back against the wall, my footsteps as quiet as years of hard floors in unstable places have taught me to make them.
I'm almost to the turn in the corridor when I see the light from the main floor, and I stop. I spot two men standing near the bar.
And between them, on the floor, there is a body, a very dead body. The breath leaves my chest in a soft gasp. I’ve seen a body before. More than one, honestly. I grew up inside a world where bodies were sometimes the punctuation at the end of certain kinds of sentences, where you learned early not to look too long, not to make a sound, not to let your face process what your eyes were seeing in any way that could be observed and used against you.
