Page 31 of Bram

My nose was broken. Every shift of my face sent the bones grinding, a new angle every hour. When I looked down, blood fell slow and even onto my shirt. Rope had cut channels into both my wrists, and the skin along my forearms was raw, a little slick where it oozed. Emma was worse. Her lip was split and puffed, one eye punched shut, purple spreading fast. She curled up, arms around her legs, chin buried. Sometimes she shivered, but it was too hot for that.

We’d been here long enough for hunger to switch off. I licked at the inside of my mouth and tasted dust and copper. We didn’t talk. Not at first. Nothing to say that wasn’t a whimper. I could hear the guards outside, two of them, one breathing wet, one clearing his throat every few minutes. They didn’t talk to each other. Once, one of them laughed — not at us, at something on his phone or in his head. That scared me more than the threats.

I waited until Emma’s breathing settled, then slid along the wall to close the gap between us. The scrape of my jeans on the floor made her flinch. I didn’t touch her. Just sat there, shoulder to shoulder, and matched her posture, as if that made us harder to separate.

Emma broke first. Her voice was ruined, a whisper that cracked in the middle of every word. “Do you think it’s really this hot outside,” she asked, “or is that just in here?”

I took a breath and felt my nose squish against itself, the cartilage off its tracks. “Probably both,” I said. “This room’s a kiln. But I think it’s always like this out here.”

She nodded, the bare movement of her head making her wince. Her hair was greasy, stuck to her cheek. She didn’t bother brushing it away. “I used to get ice cream every Saturday. In San Bernardino. Even in October.” She turned her good eye up to the window, tried to catch the color of the sky. “Mom hated when I went out alone, but she wouldn’t say why. Said the air wasn’t safe. Like it was radioactive.”

“Was it?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. I mean, it’s a shithole, but not that bad. Sometimes I’d walk to that coffee place, the one by the train station. The barista was in her twenties and wore a nose ring. She’d write something on my cup, not my name. A quote or a pun, something she’d think I’d like. She said people are always giving away secrets when they order coffee. You know?”

I nodded. My lips were cracked. “You can learn everything about a person from their order.”

She tried to laugh, but it hurt. “Yeah. Or from how they hold the cup. She said some people act like it’s a bomb and some like it’s a trophy. And you can tell the difference by the way their thumb wraps around the lid.”

“Which were you?”

Emma considered this, then said, “Bomb.” She looked at her hands, fingers tight on her knees. “Never wanted to keep anything. Just wanted it not to explode in my face.”

The guards passed, heavier this time. I heard one of them stop and press an eye to the window in the door. He lingered, then shuffled on. Their shadows slid along the floor, distorted by the glass and the dying light. I wondered how many other people they had stashed in rooms like this, how many names I would recognize if I tried the handles down the row.

Emma sniffed and wiped her nose with the heel of her hand. Blood crusted under her nostrils, dried black. “Julie?” She didn’t look up.

“Yeah.”

“Did you ever think something was off? Like, not about them. About us. About the way we were. Even before.” She jerked her head in the direction of outside, meaning the whole fucking world.

I let that sit. I’d spent years policing my own reactions, waiting for someone else to slip, but the truth was I was always the one out of step. “I thought it all the time,” I said. “You know what Mom used to tell me? That we’re all born with a defect, and it’s your job to sand it down before anyone sees it. She said that’s what school was for. To make you better at hiding it.”

Emma nodded, satisfied, like she’d been waiting for confirmation. “I think mine got bigger every year. I used to lie awake and make lists of all the things that would happen if anyone found out.”

“Found out what?”

She looked at me, her one good eye going sharp for a second. “That I didn’t want any of it. The whole family, the house, the future. I wanted out, but I never knew what that meant.”

I reached for her hand and left it open between us, palm up. She hesitated, then let her fingers fold around mine. Her grip was cold, but it got firmer with every second. We didn’t let go.

There was a long stretch where nothing happened. The room seemed to shrink, the air getting heavier with every breath. My head pounded. I remembered the way Bram looked at me that last night, eyes dead flat, his hands gentle on my face even though he wanted to shake me. I thought about the blood in the parking lot, about the way he kept saying it was fine even when it soaked through his shirt. I hadn’t let myself say it out loud, not even to myself, but I wanted him in here with me, wanted it so bad it made my teeth ache.

Emma cleared her throat. “He’s coming, you know. Bram. Or the other one, with the red hair.”

I almost smiled. “Rusty. Yeah. If they have to burn this place to the slab.”

“Would you want that?” she asked.

I had to think. I didn’t know how to want anything but control, and right now, all I wanted was out. I thought about the first time Bram came to my office, the way he filled the doorway without moving, how he dropped a manila folder on my desk like he was delivering a verdict.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what I want anymore.”

She squeezed my hand. “That’s better than not wanting anything.”

It got dark. The sun disappeared, and the slit window went black. Someone clicked on a bare bulb overhead, and the shock of it made both of us squint and duck. The guards started talking outside the door, low voices, a joke in Spanish. I recognized one of the words — puta. I wondered which of us they meant.

We waited. The voices drifted off, replaced by the drone of a TV somewhere down the hall. They’d fed us water, poured straight from a plastic bottle into our mouths, which meant they didn’t want us dead yet. That was almost comforting.