Chapter 2 #2
While most buildings in the Rookery are made with scraps of metal leaning on rickety frames or plaster, this one is made with slightly crumbling mortar and old bricks.
It’s decaying but looks solid enough. The paint is peeling and the curtains in the large windows are moth-eaten, but it seems like a paradise compared to the dirt patches I’m used to sleeping on.
The sun has begun to set, the haze of the Rookery smudging the oranges and pinks in the sky.
Staring up at my new home, I see what Otyx meant by “other ways.” Scantily clad women and men are beginning to hang out the windows of the three-story building and are milling around in front of the door beckoning passersby.
My blood turns cold. Otyx runs a bordello.
If I’m not able to make money as a pickpocket, I’ll have to sell myself.
My stomach does backflips. I should have run.
Maybe it’s not too late. I take a step back, readying myself to bolt.
Otyx turns and gives me a salacious grin.
He grips my arm tight as he all but drags me through the open double doors at the front of the building.
I should fight. I know I should. But my body isn’t keeping up with my mind.
Logic and reason have abandoned me as I let Otyx pull me down the hallway and up the stairs.
“No backing out now, Red,” he rasps, the grin on his face showing his gray and brown teeth.
The uneasiness I’ve struggled with my whole life threatens to take my breath from me.
I’ve grappled with panic since I was a small child.
My mother tried multitudes of methods to help calm me, to help me get it under control.
Most of them were useless. The most helpful method we found was for me to smell a piece of cloth soaked in fragrant oils, usually lavender.
When I was eleven, she brought home a beautiful silver necklace with a small cage pendant to hold the cloth.
She said this way, I would always have it with me.
I haven’t taken it off since and it was something my mother knew not to try and sell.
I thought of selling it about a month ago but when it came time to let it go, I couldn’t.
It’s all I have left of my mother, of my old life.
Just as my dagger is all I have left of my father.
I snatched it out of the merchant’s hand and ran, leaving the coin on his stall.
The burning panic in my chest starts to overwhelm me and my breathing is becoming shorter and more erratic.
I want desperately to reach for my necklace, to put it to my nose.
The cloth inside doesn’t smell like anything anymore—it has been far too long since I’ve had access to oils—but the motion sometimes helps calm my heart and refocus my breathing.
But I fear if Otyx sees it, he’ll take it as some kind of deposit.
I leave it tucked safely in my pilfered dress that’s two sizes too large for me.
Otyx drags me by the arm up three flights of stairs, seemingly not noticing or not caring about how rapid my breathing is.
It’s also possible he can’t hear it over his own labored breath.
He pulls me down a narrow hallway that can barely contain both of our skinny frames side by side, stops in front of a chipped door that is nearly cracked in half vertically, opens it, and shoves me inside.
“Welcome home,” he sneers before slamming the door behind him.
I’m distantly surprised it didn’t crack completely in half with the force.
I hear a key turn in the lock, sealing me inside with my panic.
I look around the tiny room. It is empty except for a bed with a bare, sagging mattress and a moth-eaten blanket.
The walls are chipping plaster and paint and at the end of the bed is a small window that is no more than a thin pane of glass roughly grouted into the wall.
I’m sure that if I pushed with enough force I could pop the thing out or at least break it.
I’m definitely small enough to fit through the hole.
Peering through it though, I realize it is a sheer three-story drop to the packed dirt alley below.
Even with the rain softening the dirt, that road would still be hard as stone.
I’m not stupid or desperate enough to try that.
Instead, I sit down on the bed and let the panic envelop me.
Tears spill over my eyelashes, soaking into the fabric of my oversized dress, my breathing strained and fast. My hands feel both numb and full of bees simultaneously.
I shake them to try and relieve the sensation.
It doesn’t help. I knew it wouldn’t. I stand and begin to pace the tiny space to try and release some of the energy and panic building in my system, then bring my necklace to my nose and try to calm my gasping, focusing on inhaling through my nose and exhaling through my mouth slowly.
The attack grips me for what feels like hours, though it’s impossible to gauge time when my mind and my body are fighting against me.
I try to calm myself, to tell myself everything will be alright, that I don’t know if this is a bad place to live, that I won’t have to whore myself out for that slimy, scrawny man.
I try to remind myself that I’m not in any danger at this moment, that I might never be in any again.
That maybe this will be the best thing to happen to me since before my father died.
Eventually, I sit down on the mattress as my breathing becomes easier and my heart rate returns to normal.
I am able to calm myself enough to lie down on the worn mattress, the hay it’s stuffed with stabbing my skin through the thin fabric.
I continue focusing on my breathing until the panic subsides, but the tears just won’t stop.
I cry until my skin is raw from the tears, cry until I’m too exhausted to stay awake, and sleep finally takes me.
I want Mama.