A second man crowds in behind him. Then a third. Just like that, the careful business of guarding me falls apart, because every instinct in the room has flipped from keeping me contained to keeping the baby alive, and a woman bleeding on the floor pulls men toward her instead of away.
They crouch. They reach for me. They are, God help them, trying to help. The young one is closest, white to the lips, fumbling for the doctor on the radio. For one bad second I’m sorry for him, a boy holding a tray job in a kidnapping. Then I remember whose desert this is, whose friend, whose baby, and the sorry burns off fast.
And on the little table by the door, where one of them set it down to free both hands for the emergency, there’s a phone.
I have already worked out the number. It’s the one thing I made myself memorize in all these weeks behind his walls, the way you’d memorize the way out of a burning building, the only string of digits in the world that could save my life. His. I’ve turned it over so many times in the dark that it’s the most solid thing I own. Ten digits, written by hand on a black card a lifetime ago. I hated him when I memorized them. The number stayed. The hate didn’t.
I move while they’re all looking at the blood. One hand, off the floor, onto the table, the phone already unlocked because the idiot was mid-text when I started screaming. My thumbs are shaking so badly I almost can’t, and I don’t have time for amessage, for a plea, for I’m scared or help me or I love you. I have time for one true thing, the only thing that matters, the thing that turns me from a missing woman into a place on a map.
I type three words.Calder Salt Works.
I hit send to his number a half second before the nearest guard sees what I’m doing. His face changes, and he lunges.
But here is the thing none of them understands, the thing that has kept being the difference my whole life. They have spent a day and a night treating me as cargo. Precious, fragile, a thing that happens to other people. They forgot there’s a person in here. The person was a competitive athlete before her body broke. She has fought men twice her size in parking lots. She has exactly one thing left to lose, plus a brand-new ferocious reason not to lose it.
So when he lunges, I’m already moving.
I throw the phone at the second man’s face, hard, and it buys me the half second I need. The bucket is the nearest thing with weight. I get it by the handle and swing it into the lunging guard’s head with everything I have, all the leg I used to have, all the rage I have now.
He goes down hard against the doorframe. I am up and over him before the others untangle themselves from the mess of helping me. Then I’m through the door, into the corridor, barefoot, bloody, free, running. The corridor tastes of smoke already, or I imagine it does. Doesn’t matter. Run now, taste later.
I don’t know where I’m running. That’s the part they never put in the fantasies. I just know it’s away, down a long corridor of cold concrete and dead fluorescent light, past doors I don’t have time to try, my bare feet slapping the floor, my breath sawing,behind me the shouting starting up, the careful quiet of the place breaking into the noise of men who have just realized the cargo has legs.
I make it around one corner. Another. I’m looking for a door to the outside, for the white blast of desert light, for anything, when a man steps into the corridor ahead of me. I skid. I turn. There are more behind me now. For one cold second I understand that speed and fury only get you so far inside a building full of armed men, that I am one barefoot pregnant woman in a hallway, that they are many, that they have guns, that the odds were always going to catch up to me eventually.
And that is the exact second the world ends.
It comes as light first, a white flash through the high dirty windows, and then the sound arrives a heartbeat behind it, a concussion so huge it isn’t a sound at all, it’s a hand that shoves the whole building sideways. The floor jumps under my bare feet. Dust comes down from the ceiling in sheets. Somewhere close, glass blows in. And then, under the ringing that’s swallowed the whole world, I feel it more than hear it, the unmistakable hammering of gunfire, a lot of it, close. Men are screaming who aren’t screaming about me anymore.
The men in the corridor forget I exist. They turn toward the noise, guns coming up, shouting orders at each other in Russian, and the whole shape of the night has changed in an instant, because this is no longer a building where the only emergency is me.
Something is attacking the Calder Salt Works.
I stand there in the shuddering corridor, my ears ringing, my heart slamming, and I have a choice. It’s the whole of who I am, this choice.
I could hide. Every sane cell in my body says hide, find a closet, a corner, a dark space behind something, fold down into it, wait for the noise to end, pray that whoever wins comes looking for me gently. That’s the safe play. That’s the play the old me would have made, the girl who kept her head down and her mouth shut, who learned that wanting things gets you hurt, who spent seven years making sure nobody had a reason to look at her twice.
But I sent three words to one number. And there is exactly one person on this earth who would tear a building apart in the desert at night to reach me, one man who told me he would end this, one man who swore it with my hand under his in the dark. I don’t know for certain it’s him. It could be a war I’m just caught inside of. But I didn’t fight my way out of that room and brain a man with a bucket to go cower in a closet now.
If he came, I am not going to make him search a burning building for me. I am going to walk toward him.
I make my choice. I go toward the guns.
I step over the man nearest me, the one the blast put on the floor, his weapon a foot from his open hand. Some cold clear part of me that has been planning since the back seat of that car bends and takes it, because a woman walking toward a gunfight should not do it empty-handed. The metal is heavier than I expect. I’ve never fired one in my life. It doesn’t matter. It’s not really for them. It’s so that when I find him, or when whatever’s coming finds me, I’m the one still standing instead of the thing on the floor.
Smoke rolls down the corridor toward me, dense and chemical, lit from somewhere by a flickering orange that wasn’t there before. The gunfire is ahead, past the smoke, getting closer or getting louder, I can’t tell which. My ears are screaming. My feet are bleeding. There’s a baby the size of nothing inside me, a stolen gun shaking in my two hands, and I have never in my life been less of a victim than I am right now.
I take a breath of the burning air. I think, one way or another, I am getting out of this building tonight.
Then I walk into the smoke, toward the war, toward the chance that he came for me.
31
SEVASTIAN
Idrive toward a name a dying man gave me, and every mile of it I’m braced for the chance that he sent me wrong.
That’s the thing eating me as the convoy tears north through the dark, three vehicles of my best men and enough hardware to start a small war. A traitor’s last words are worth exactly nothing on their own. Vadim hated me at the end, chose the hate over the truth, and a man like that might spend his final breath handing me an empty building forty minutes in the wrong direction while she bleeds out somewhere I’ll never think to look.
