Chapter Eight
Amani didn't know what time it was when the blanket lifted.
The kitchen had no clock that he could see from inside the cage, and the blanket Grainger had draped over the top blocked the windows.
He'd stopped crying hours earlier, stopped out of exhaustion rather than resolution, the tears simply running dry the way a faucet runs dry when the pipes are empty.
He'd slept in snatches, waking each time to the disorienting compression of the cage, the pain in his feet, and the smell of his own sweat.
The heavy, absolute silence of the house was almost too much to bear.
Then footsteps. Light flooded in, harsh and morning-bright, and Grainger's face appeared on the other side of the bars.
He was smiling. Of course he was smiling.
The cold expression from hours earlier was gone as if it had never existed, folded away and stored in whatever compartment Grainger kept it in.
What was left was the warm, gentle, grandfatherly face that Amani had come to understand was not a mask over the cold but a partner to it.
They coexisted. They were both real. And the warm one was worse because it was the one that reached through the bars and unlocked the cage and said, "Good morning, little cub. How did you sleep?"
How did you sleep? As if the cage were a guest bed. As if this were room service.
Amani uncurled himself from the cage and tried to stand and couldn't. His feet, which had been screaming through night, had settled into a deep, pulsing throb that spiked into agony the moment he put weight on them.
The gauze was stiff with dried blood. His left heel, where the cactus spine had been, felt hot and swollen.
He made it upright by holding the kitchen counter, his weight on his hands, his feet barely touching the tile. Grainger watched him with the concerned expression of a caretaker observing a patient.
"You'll need to stay off those feet today," Grainger said. "I'll bring you breakfast. Then perhaps you can read to me from the couch. You don't need your feet for reading." He chuckled at his own observation, and Amani's jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached.
The day passed in a haze of pain and compliance.
Amani read from the couch with his feet elevated on a cushion that Grainger placed for him.
The collar burned its steady low burn against his throat, and his voice came out flat and hoarse and nothing like the voice that had once filled a club.
The old crane brought him food, toast and eggs, prepared by Grainger himself, which were perfect because everything Grainger did was precise and controlled.
He brought water and ibuprofen and fresh gauze for the bandages.
He changed the dressings on Amani's feet with the same careful, practiced hands that had washed them the night before.
Amani let him. There was nothing else to do.
His escape route was gone, his feet couldn't carry him across a room, let alone across a desert.
The front door might as well have been a wall.
The windows might as well have been painted on.
Everything he'd cataloged and planned and calculated over three days of careful observation had been reduced to nothing by a single failed attempt and a pair of ruined feet.
He read. Grainger didn't seem to notice… or maybe didn’t care, that his voice had gone dead. He sat in his armchair with his blanket, his water, and his eyes half-closed as he listened to Amani read about English manor houses. He was content.
In the late afternoon, Grainger took his nap.
Amani sat on the couch with the book in his lap and the desert visible through the window and he stared at nothing.
He had stopped planning. He had stopped calculating.
For the first time since the van, his mind was quiet, not calm, but empty, the way a room is empty after you've taken everything out of it.
There was nothing left to plan with. No moves to make.
No angles to work. Just the couch and the pain and the silence and the slow understanding that compliance was no longer a strategy. It was becoming who he was.
He thought about what he'd said to Sero, months ago, when the bat was at his lowest. What you felt was real. What he took was wrong. Both things are true.
He wondered if Sero would say the same thing to him, if Sero could see him now. If anyone could see him now.
Outside the window, something moved in the scrub. A rustle of dry brush, quick and low to the ground. Probably a lizard. Maybe a rabbit. Probably nothing.
Amani watched it until his eyes blurred, and then he turned back to the book and waited for whatever came next.