The knock comes while he’s rinsing the bowl.
It’s small. Quiet. Made with a hand that barely reaches the door, a tentative, hesitant sound that is nothing at all like the firm, deliberate knock Erath had used the first time he’d shown up at this apartment. Sidney knows the height it’s coming from before he’s across the room. He knows the weight behind it.
He opens the door.
Penny is already moving. She launches herself at his waist with the total, unreserved commitment of a five-year-old who has decided that this is where safety is, and Sidney’s ribs detonate and his breath leaves him and he puts one hand on her head and one hand on the door frame and looks down at the top of her head, two messy braids and a rainbow sweater, and then up and down the hallway. Empty. Nobody.
He takes one moment to wonder how she got past the security door downstairs and then lets the question go, because security doors are apparently a suggestion in this family rather than a barrier.
“Hey, kiddo.” He keeps his voice calm. Light. Steady. The voice you use when a child is terrified and you need them to believe that you are not. “Where’s your dad?”
“He’s at home.” She looks up at him. Her eyes are wide and dark and her face is flushed from running and there’s a leaf inher hair that she hasn’t noticed. “He left me with Grams, but the bad lady is coming.”
“The bad lady.” Sidney pulls her inside. Shuts the door. Locks it. The deadbolt slides home and he kneels down, slowly, because kneeling requires the use of muscles that are directly connected to his ribcage, and puts his hands on her shoulders and makes his face as reassuring as he can manage. “Okay. Do you know where the bad lady is right now?”
Penny shakes her head. “No. But she’s coming.”
“How do you know she’s coming?”
“I can feel her.”
Sidney files this under “questions to ask the god of death when he’s available” and stands up.
“Okay. That’s okay. We’re going to figure this…”
Glass breaks.
Not in the apartment. Downstairs. The sound is distant but unmistakable, the crash of a door being forced, glass and metal and the whine of a lock giving way, and then an alarm, shrill and electronic, the building’s security system doing the one thing it’s supposed to do and doing it too late. Sidney’s head snaps toward the sound. He can hear movement in the stairwell, heavy footsteps, fast, too fast for someone climbing four flights, and the footsteps have the quality of weight being thrown around by something that is bigger than a person should be.
He doesn’t think. He acts.
He turns from Penny and crosses the apartment, pulling on his shoes as he goes. Doesn’t bother with a jacket. No time. No arm mobility. He goes straight to the living room window and fights with the lock, which is stiff, which is always stiff, and he imagines can hear something large moving through the stairwell, it’s hard to tell over the alarm and his own pulse. The lock gives. He shoves the window up.
He climbs out onto the fire escape into the night air, one leg over the sill, then the other, and turns and reaches back in and lifts Penny through the window. She’s light. She comes through easily, and she doesn’t scream and she doesn’t cry and the composure of this five-year-old child who is being extracted through a window in the middle of the night is something that Sidney is going to think about later and be very, very angry about, because no child should be this practiced at fleeing.
“Okay,” he says. “You’re going to hold onto my neck and put your legs around my waist. Piggyback. Got it?”
She nods. She wraps her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and she clings. Her grip is extraordinary. Sidney grabs the ladder and starts down.
His ribs are screaming. Not the dull, manageable ache that he’s been working through all day. This is a fresh, vivid howl, every rung sending a shock wave through the bones that are trying to knit and being denied the opportunity. His hands are sweating on the cold metal. His arms are shaking. Penny’s weight on his back is not heavy but it’s there, a constant pull that his body has to compensate for with muscles that are attached to structures that are broken.
Above them, the sound of his apartment door coming apart. Wood and metal, the frame splintering inward, and then something entering the apartment that displaces air the way large things do, with weight and momentum and disregard.
Sidney does not look up. He looks down. He puts his hands on the next rung and the next and the next and the metal is cold and his ribs are breaking apart and Penny’s arms are tight around his neck and he keeps going.
His feet hit the alley. He doesn’t stop. He shifts Penny’s weight, finds his balance, and goes. Not running, his ribs won’t allow running, but a jog, urgent and uneven, his body listing to the left where the damage is worst. He takes the alley tothe street, turns left because left is away from the building, and moves.
“Okay,” he says. He’s breathing hard. Every inhale is a negotiation and his ribs are winning. “We’ve gotta get you to your dad. Where can we find him? Do you know where he is?”
“Yeah.” She speaks into his shoulder, her breath warm against his neck. “He’s at home.”
“Home home? The, uh…” He doesn’t know what to call it. “Where he lives? Down… below?”
“Yeah. I can show you.”
She directs him. Left at the corner. Straight for two blocks. Right at the yellow building. Her directions come in landmarks rather than street names, the navigational logic of a person who has been alive for five years and experiences geography through color and shape rather than signs and numbers. Sidney follows them. He doesn’t question why she came to him instead of going to Erath directly. He knows what fear does to decision-making. He knows what it is to run toward the person who feels safe rather than the person who makes sense. And the fact that he is that person for Penny, the one she ran to when the bad lady came, settles over him, heavy in a way he doesn’t have words for.
They move through the Old City and out of it, into neighborhoods Sidney doesn’t know well, the character of Haven shifting from old-world cobblestones to wider streets and older, industrial buildings. The crowds thin. The streetlights get farther apart. Penny’s directions get more specific, more certain, and Sidney can feel her attention sharpening against his back, her body leaning in the direction she wants him to go.
