Chapter 44 Counting Is A Prayer When You Don’t Have One
COUNTING IS A PRAYER WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE ONE
Granite - Sleep Token
Hatchet
They say seventy-two hours without sleep is the limit – when the mind folds, eats shadows, starts seeing ghosts.
I’m past the point where limits mean anything.
Not days. Not anymore. One long stretch of grey hours since the island fell away and the leash settled under the skin at the base of the skull. The warehouse light never fully dies; it only flickers like an insect refusing to stop buzzing.
Temporary, Valentine said.
Hold position, Branson said.
Temporary becomes a room that smells of rust and rain and old oil, a strip light that turns every face the colour of sickness, and a silence that isn’t peace – it’s containment.
Ghost is folded into a corner, knees tight, whispering to someone that I can’t see.
The words come out jagged, like broken glass.
Sometimes Ghost answers himself. Sometimes he answers Silas and Donnelly.
Hopefully there’s no other voices in his head; those two create.
enough trouble as it is. Valentine pretends not to hear until it gets loud enough to file into a report.
Honey keeps his hands busy. Not with a gun – there aren’t any, there can’t be – but with straps, with zip ties, with inventory, with counting. Counting is a prayer when you don’t have one.
Snow paces. Scuffed boots, restless laugh, torn tune – “Kookaburra sits…” – over and over until the melody rots. Bones told him to stop. Nightshade hit him once. Now no one wastes breath. Nothing stops Snow doing whatever he wants.
Nightshade’s hands are raw where concrete didn’t give and his control slipped. When he speaks, it’s clipped, directed at Valentine. When Valentine doesn’t answer fast enough, Nightshade’s voice goes quiet in that way that steals oxygen.
Valentine’s phone vibrates again and again. Seytan. He ignores it. Maybe he’s afraid of what she’ll say. Maybe he already knows.
Bones wears a groove into the concrete. His hand keeps finding the burner phone like it’s a pulse he can restart by touch: promise, absence, promise, absence.
I don’t sleep. Eyes closing is a trap. Behind lids, Kayla appears – laughing at something Honey said, mouth bright, head tipped back – and then the image breaks apart into water, into fire, into a room that I can’t access. The brain flips channels on a broken television.
Kayla.
The name is everywhere without being spoken. In pauses. In the way eyes slide to Nightshade. In the way the air tightens when Ghost whispers.
Sometimes I swear I can smell her – lightning-before-it-strikes, freedom, cold air – and it twists me up until my fingers need to break something to prove she was real.
Ghost flinches when I move too fast. Honey grounds me with a steady hand on the shoulder. Bones watches. Always watches.
Snow laughs and says she ran. Says maybe she’s better off. Says maybe—
The third time, I break his nose.
It happens without ceremony. Fist, cartilage, wet crack. Snow hits the concrete laughing through blood like pain is a joke he’s proud of.
Honey catches me before I can follow through, arms locking around my chest. Not restraint, as punishment. Restraint as triage.
Nightshade turns, exhaustion carved into him. “Enough,” he says, but the word is thin.
Ghost whispers something sharp from the corner and it slices the room open. Donnelly.
“Do it,” the voice says. “Kill something. She’ll come back if you bleed.”
Ghost jerks upright, pupils blown. “Shut up,” he rasps. “Shut up, shut up—”
The warehouse goes very still.
Valentine looks up, face grey – the look of a man watching the last threads of control slip.
“We need rest, order—” Valentine starts.
“What we need,” Nightshade cuts in, “is that call.”
The burner on the crate vibrates.
Once.
Every head turns.
Bones snatches it so fast the motion blurs. “Branson. Talk.”
Static. Paper. Then a tired voice: “Your attitude’s still intact. That’s reassuring.”
“You got something or not?” Bones says.
“Trail’s cold. We found the staged wreck,” Branson replies. “Highlands. No bodies. Damage pattern’s wrong. It was a diversion.”
Nightshade’s spine goes rigid.
“Secondary ping,” Branson continues. “Faint. Intermittent. East. Could be interference. Could be bait.”
“That’s not good enough,” Nightshade says.
“It’s all I’ve got,” Branson snaps. “I’ll call when I have coordinates.”
The line dies.
Silence stretches.
Snow starts laughing again – thin, high. “East, west…who cares? She’s gone. Maybe she doesn’t want to be found. Maybe she wasn’t taken. Maybe she ran.”
Nightshade is on him in a blink, hand at Snow’s throat, slamming him into a pillar. Snow chokes and giggles like it’s foreplay. I wish I’d killed him, not just broken his nose.
“Say that again,” Nightshade growls.
“You can’t save a ghost,” Snow wheezes, teeth red.
Bones wrenches them apart. Valentine pinches the bridge of his nose like he can squeeze the headache out.
I shake. Not fear. Restraint. The space between impulse and action narrowing until it’s a blade.
Nightshade wipes his knuckles on his jeans. “We move when Branson calls again,” he says. “We need to be ready.”
“When?” Honey asks.
“Soon.”
No one believes him.
Snow opens his mouth again, still smiling, still needling, still trying to press the bruise until it becomes a wound.
I don’t plan it. Planning belongs to people who still think time is negotiable. My hand finds the scaffold pipe Valentine used earlier to test the shutter chain. Weight fits my grip like it was made for me.
A single swing.
A dull, resonant crack. Immediate. Snow’s grin collapses into a wet sound. He staggers into a pallet rack; wood snaps.
Silence whips back.
Snow drops to his knees, stunned, making an animal noise, trying to laugh and failing.
Bones is moving before Snow hits the floor, checking airway, pupils, the angle of damage. Dramatic. He’s not even unconscious.
More’s the pity.
Honey clamps me from behind again – this time two arms like straps – and holds me, not fighting me, just stopping the next thing.
I don’t struggle. The motion’s finished. That’s all my body wanted.
Nightshade looks at me like something sanity-shaped has shifted in his own head and clicked into place.
Valentine’s voice is low and hard. “We can’t afford to fall apart.”
Snow coughs and tries to grin. “That’s all you are—”
“No,” Nightshade says. Command. “We control the next move.” He turns to me. “Don’t do that again.”
I don’t answer. Can’t. But my stare says: then stop letting him talk.
The pipe lies by my boot, harmless now, obscene anyway.
Waiting doesn’t make us calmer.
Waiting makes us feral.