Grace
The day starts with a nod. The woman from the comms room, the one who wouldn’t look at me the day I came in. She’s coming the other way down the corridor while Marek walks me to the admin floor, and instead of finding something interesting on the wall, she looks right at me and nods. Small. Real.
I nod back, and it takes me half the corridor to notice my shoulders. They’re down. I’ve walked this building for days with them set rigid, waiting for the next look, and somewhere between my door and here they came down without asking me.
Vanya has work for me. Real work.
“Sit,” she says, and slides a laptop across the table. There’s an audio file open on it, and a pair of headphones. “Fresh intercepts. Six voices, all women, short clips. You know what the handler sounds like. Tell me if any of these is her. Take your time. Play them as often as you need.”
My hands aren’t quite steady when I put the headphones on. Not fear. It’s that she’s handing me a job only I can do, and we both know it. The pads press against my ears, sealing out the room, and a stranger’s voice comes through so close it could be inside my head.
I listen to the first clip four times. A woman giving what sounds like directions, calm, clipped.
“Not her,” I say. “This one talks to be understood. The handler talked to make you wait.”
“Explain that.”
“She never rushed a sentence. Ever. And her pauses were longer than normal pauses. You’d think the call dropped.” I move to the next clip. Then the next. Number four makes me stop and play it six times, and Vanya watches me do it without a word.
“Not her,” I say finally. “The pitch is close. But this woman says ‘um.’ The handler never said ‘um.’ Not once in months.”
“You’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
Vanya takes the laptop back and types something. “Then you’ve eliminated four this morning, and two of them mattered.” She glances up at me. “That’s worth having. Same time tomorrow.”
It’s not the sealed findings. It’s not a map with Serenity on it. But I did something with my own ears that a machine couldn’t do, and Marek has to lengthen his stride to keep up with me down the corridor.
Kaylin ambushes me outside the dining hall.
“You’re eating with me. Don’t argue, you’re too thin, and I’ve been saving you from the soup.” She’s already got a hand on my sleeve, towing. “There’s actual chicken in it today. I complained to Alex twice, so he said he’d fix it. You’re welcome.”
“You’ve been fighting the soup for me?”
“I’ve been fighting the soup on everyone’s behalf.
You’re just the excuse.” She drops me into a seat and sits across from me and talks with her spoon in the air—about the soup, about a leak in the storage block roof, about a card game I’ve apparently missed three of.
Ordinary things. She gives me twenty minutes of a normal life, and I don’t think she knows she’s doing it, which is what makes it work.
Decker comes in halfway through, gets a tray, and sees me. He crosses the room and sits down beside me like it’s the only open chair in the building, which it isn’t.
“Kaylin,” he says.
“Big man.” Kaylin doesn’t miss a beat; she just widens the conversation to fit him. “Tell her the soup’s improved. She won’t take my word for it.”
“The soup’s improved,” he says, and steals a roll off my tray, and Kaylin laughs, and for a minute it’s just the three of us and lunch.
He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t have to.
His arm is a warm line an inch from mine, and I can feel it the whole time, and once, when Kaylin says something that makes me actually laugh, I look over, and he’s watching me instead of eating, and his mouth softens at one corner.
Marek collects me before I’ve finished. Vanya wants a second pass on clip four while it’s fresh.
Decker catches up to me in the corridor outside the admin floor. Just steps into my path, easy, like he’s got all day, though neither of us does.
“You look pleased with yourself,” he says.
“I eliminated four voices. Two of them mattered.” I hear how it comes out—proud, lit up. “I was useful today, bear. With my own ears.”
His face softens, and he reaches up and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear, slow, in the middle of the corridor where anyone could see. “Course you were, sweetheart,” he says, like it was never in question.
My heart kicks. I’m still feeling it when Marek clears his throat. Vanya’s waiting. Decker steps back and lets me go with a look that says later, and my heart kicks again.
I carry that look back to the admin floor and through a second hour with the headphones on. The light’s gone gold through the wire glass by the time Vanya dismisses me. Serenity is closer. I made her closer, twice now. The building is thawing.
And the man is mine.
I start a list of things I’ll tell Serenity when we get her out. That the mountains here go purple before dark. That there’s a girl called Kaylin she’s going to love. That I met someone, he’s enormous, and she’s going to laugh when she sees how gentle he is.
That’s where I am when the cold creeps in under the door, and I go to the duffel for my thicker shirt.
It’s at the bottom, folded, where I left it. I work my hand down the side, past the jeans, and my fingers hit something hard and flat that has no business being there.
I go still, arm deep in the bag.
I know the shape. My fingers know it before my head does, because I carried one exactly like it for months. I close my hand around it and draw it out, and I’m holding a phone. A cheap black burner, the kind you buy with cash. The kind that lived under my mattress once and sent me to the drops.
I don’t move for a long time. The room is exactly as it was.
The door is locked—I locked it; I lock it every night.
Decker made me promise. Marek is in the corridor—him or another guard, every hour of every day.
And someone walked past all of that, opened my bag, slid this under my folded clothes, and walked out again.
I press the power button. Not knowing is worse.
The screen lights. Charged. Waiting. One message thread, no name, no number I know.
The first message has no greeting. It starts in the middle, the way she always started.
Did you think we couldn’t reach you in there?
My stomach drops. There’s no sound; it’s black letters on a gray screen, and I still hear her saying it—level, no hurry.
You’ve been busy. Sitting in rooms. Answering questions. That was unwise.
Don’t tell yourself the bear will keep you safe. He might not be on your side.
I breathe out at that one. Almost a laugh, ugly and short.
That’s the game—of course that’s the game. It’s what I’d do. Poison the one person I trust, get me alone, make me easier to move. She spent months teaching me how she works, and this is how she works.
“Fuck you,” I whisper. “I’m not falling for that.”
I’m already reaching to power it off when the next line stops my thumb.
Ask him why we never killed you.
The gold light is still coming through the window.
The heater ticks. And I’m back in the briefing room, watching Nadia look up from her laptop, saying, “Why did they want her back that badly?” And Viktor saying, “Park it,” too fast. And Decker against the wall, not moving. Not asking. Not surprised.
You’re worth what your sister’s worth now. Same blood. Same price. He knows exactly what that means. Ask him why he never told you.
I glance at the door, then back at the phone.
You want to know what’s happening to Serenity?
My thumb hovers over the keypad. If I respond, I’m back in their game. I’m not playing it. I need to get this phone to Viktor. Right now.
But I can’t stop myself scrolling.
Her blood is being sold. Drop by drop, to whoever pays. She is running out. That is what waiting costs her.
That’s all. That’s the end of the thread.
I read it again from the top. Then again. The plastic goes slick under my fingers. I keep waiting for the dismissal to come: enemy poison, they’re liars, they threatened Serenity for months and never told me a true thing they didn’t have to.
But the dismissal won’t come, because too much of what I've already seen agrees with her.
Vanya asked me—Same mother? Full sister?—and when I answered, she wrote nothing down. She asked if the handler ever wanted to know about my family, my line. My bloodline.
Blood.
The Syndicate tried to take me on that road. I thought it was to kill me. The same when that dragon came. They weren’t trying to kill me; they were trying to take me back.
Something changed what I was worth, and everyone in that briefing room said nothing. And the man who had his hands on every part of me last night stood against that wall and kept his mouth shut too.
Same blood. Same price.
If it’s true, then I finally know why Serenity was taken and what they’ve been doing to her all this time. Her blood is being sold. She is running out. And Vanya’s investigation, Viktor’s quiet planning, all their patience, has been running against a clock nobody told me about.
Decker knew. He must have. He knew from when he first went to Viktor. I'd felt it in him, and told myself it was nothing. And all this time, while he’s been holding me, and touching me, and fucking me, my sister has been bleeding out.
Why didn’t he tell me?
I spent days in that cave. Days in this building. Sitting across the table from people, thinking I was helping by telling them about someone on a phone. Letting myself get giddy over a man. A man who never once let me know that we never had the time.
Serenity’s been slowly dying.
I rub my face and realize that my cheeks are wet. When I pull in a breath, there’s a sob in it, and tears are dripping off my chin.
The room has gone dark around the phone screen without my noticing. Down the corridor, Marek shifts his weight, the same small sound as every night, in the building where I finally started feeling I could trust again.
I look at the messages until the screen dims, and the question comes up in me slow and cold.
Why didn’t he tell me?