27. Sniper
twenty-seven
Sniper
The meat room had no windows and no clocks.
Everything was concrete, stainless, tile.
Even the light was fake—strip fluorescents overhead, flickering in a pattern just off enough to make the skin crawl.
I hung there, spread eagle on the table, wrists in steel cuffs cinched to rings bolted into the frame, ankles locked down and spaced wide enough that my hip joints clicked if I shifted too hard.
My right shoulder was packed and bandaged, gauze taped down with an economy that said the job was to keep me alive, not to heal.
Blood still leaked, a slow crawl from the pit of the arm down to the joint of the table.
I worked the cuffs in five-second intervals.
Thumb, then wrist, then a flex of the ulnar, followed by a short rest so the nerve didn’t go dead.
I’d been at it for hours. The skin on my right hand was worn raw and weeping; on the left, the first three fingers had already gone white.
Pain was pain. If you let it name you, you lost.
The room sloped down to a central drain.
Stainless shelves, wiped spotless. Overhead, meat hooks on a rolling track—one with a small brown stain at the tip, probably old, probably not.
Camera in the upper corner, red eye steady.
The door was steel, reinforced, keypad on the inside.
I noted every detail because the game was the details.
You could survive almost anything if you made it about the data, not the feeling.
Emma came in with a knife. Not dramatic—she just opened the door and walked in, the blade loose in her right hand like it belonged there.
She wore pajamas: pale blue, maybe a hospital issue, maybe just her style.
She was barefoot, but her stance was perfect.
No wasted motion. The knife was a hunting number, heavy in the handle, clipped to the inside of her wrist with the edge down, which told me she’d actually trained.
She closed the door behind her, thumbed the lock, and walked over to the table.
She didn’t speak. Just looked at me, then at the wound, then at my face.
The way she watched was clinical, but not clean.
There was a tremor there, deep in the muscle, like she was holding herself still out of habit, not nature.
She rolled a stool up to the table, the legs screeching on the tile, and sat. She put the knife on the shelf, handle toward me, blade flat. Her hands rested on her knees, fingers laced.
We stared at each other for a long time. I counted ten breaths before she spoke.
“Adam’s dead,” she said. Like a fact, not an opening.
Nothing moved in my face. I’d already run the probability. I just waited for the rest.
She studied me the way a person studies a crack in a windshield—calculating if it would spread, if it was worth fixing, or if the whole thing needed to be replaced.
“You thought he’d be the one to do it,” she said. “Easier to plan around.”
I said nothing. But I clocked the feeling: a strange, hollow lightness behind the sternum. I’d planned for Adam. I’d mapped out every permutation, every axis of violence or negotiation, all of it math. Emma was the wild card, and I didn’t like wild cards.
I flexed my wrists again, slow and deliberate, feeling for any new give in the hardware. Still nothing.
“Is Jasmine alive?” I said.
Her face did a thing that looked like it wanted to be a smile, but didn’t quite make it. She looked at the camera in the corner and nodded toward it, like she was tipping off a sniper on a rooftop. “She’s watching,” Emma said. “Right now.”
I turned my head and looked straight into the lens. I held it for three seconds, then spoke.
“I’m alive,” I said. “They tried to break me, but it’s not going to happen. I’m working the problem. Don’t stop. Jasmine, don’t ever fucking stop.”
I paused, then said, “Jasmine,” one time, just the name, not a question or a command, but as if to anchor it in the air.
Then I looked back at Emma.
Her eyes had lost their focus for a second. She hadn’t expected me to use the broadcast, or maybe she’d expected me to beg. I didn’t.
She picked up the knife, balancing it in her hand, point down, then set it back on the shelf.
“You want to know what happens now?” she said.
“Not really,” I said. “But I know what has to happen for me to leave this room alive.”
She made a noise, halfway between a breath and a laugh. “You’re good,” she said. “Adam always said you were good. But this isn’t club business anymore. It’s just us.”
She reached over and, without warning, sliced the zip tie holding the left ankle restraint. Not the chain—just the plastic tie doubling it down. She watched my leg, my hip, waiting to see if I’d try a move. I didn’t. You don’t play your hand when you don’t have one.
She nodded, like I’d passed a test.
“You don’t hate me,” she said. It was a statement, not a question.
“I don’t care about you,” I said, flat. “You’re a factor. That’s all.”
For a second, she looked tired. Bone-tired. I saw the lines under her eyes, the way her hair was starting to split at the ends, the bare patch of skin at her wrist where the veins ran blue and shallow.
“Do you know why I do this?” she asked.
I looked at the knife. “Control,” I said.
She shook her head, slow. “No. It’s not about control. It’s about proving I can’t be controlled.”
I let the silence eat that up. There was nothing worth saying.
She reached across the table, slow and careful, and put her left hand on my chest, just over the wound. It wasn’t sexual, not at first. It was clinical, checking the heat of the skin, the wetness of the bandage. But when her hand stayed, when her palm pressed down harder, it became something else.
“Adam thought you and Jasmine were some kind of answer,” she said, voice so low I almost missed it. “He thought if he broke you, he’d break every rule he hated about this world.”
She closed her eyes, pressed her palm harder against the dressing. The pain shot up my neck and into my jaw, but I didn’t let it change my face.
“Did it work?” I said.
She opened her eyes. “No,” she said. “Because you don’t stop.”
She took her hand off me, wiped the blood on her pajama leg, and picked up the knife.
“I want you to watch,” she said. “I want her to watch, too.”
She cut the bandage off my shoulder, fast and rough, and the wound started to pulse. She leaned in close, the scent of her hair sharp, and then she licked the blood off the knife’s edge. I watched every microsecond of it, because sometimes you have to record the crazy before you can counter it.
She let the knife rest on my chest. Then she did something I didn’t expect: she bent over and kissed me, full on the mouth, her tongue cold and clean against my teeth.
She pulled back, smiled a broken smile, and said, “Tell Jasmine that the only way out is through.”
Then she set the knife down and walked out.
The door clicked shut. The camera in the corner tracked my face.
I worked the cuffs again. And I waited.
***
I didn’t see her come back. The meat room door was silent; the only warning was a cold flicker of airflow that made the hair stand up on my forearms. Emma just appeared in my line of sight, one second not there, the next sitting on the stool like she’d been carved into it.
She wore different clothes this time: a long-sleeve thermal, black, and cotton pants that looked borrowed from a high school wrestling team.
Her feet were bare again. She held the hunting knife in her lap, tip resting against the inside of her thigh.
She watched me, saying nothing. The silence in the room was a real thing, not absence but presence, thick and low and loaded.
“You know,” she said finally, “when I was ten, I spent six months living in a car with my father. We had a system. Rules. Everything was timed: when to eat, when to sleep, when to be invisible. He called it the program.”
Her eyes were fixed on my face, like she was reading a slow news ticker for the end of the world.
“Adam never bought into the program,” she said. “He thought it was a scam. He thought rules were just a way to filter out the people who’d survive anyway.”
She picked at a loose thread on her sleeve, the knife’s tip moving in tiny, precise circles. “I built this place for people like him. For people who think they’re too smart to get caught.”
She looked at me, dead on. “But you—you’re not like that. You don’t think you’re special. You just don’t know how to stop.”
I said nothing. My wrists had gone numb, but the left shoulder was still sending signals: dull ache, hot pulse, a cold patch where the skin had split and never quite scabbed over. The pain was clean, but it made the world brighter. Everything she said lodged in my head like shrapnel.
She stood, set the knife on the metal shelf by the table, and pressed her hands flat to the steel. She leaned in, hair falling forward, eyes black as the inside of a pocket.
“You want the truth?” she said. “Adam didn’t die for you. He died for Jasmine.”
She watched my face for the flinch. She didn’t get it.
“She broke him,” Emma said. “And you know what? I don’t even hate her for it. She was the first one who didn’t play the game. She just went straight for the win.”
I shrugged, or tried to. The right shoulder burned. “Adam died because of Adam.”
She smiled, but only with her teeth. “That’s what I told him. But he never listened.”
She lifted the knife again, ran her thumb along the flat of the blade. “You think Jasmine is going to get out of this? You think you’re going to see her again?”
I said, “I know I will.”
For the first time, something broke in her face: a small muscle twitched at the edge of her mouth, then the whole expression just... unspooled.
“You know what I hate about men like you?” she asked, almost gentle. “You make me want to believe you.”