Cap
Ariel's scream yanked me out of whatever passed for sleep down here.
I hit the wire before I was fully awake, hands finding the seam on instinct, and her fingers slammed into mine from the other side. Ice cold, locked on so tight I felt her shaking through it.
"Hey." I kept my voice low, steady. "I've got you. You're dreaming. Look at me. Well. Don't look at me, it's too dark. Just listen. You're okay."
A breath hitched. Then another. She swallowed hard. "I. Yeah. I'm okay. Sorry."
"Don't apologize." I leaned my shoulder into the seam so she could feel the weight of me through the wire. "You're safe right now. Nothing's coming."
Upstairs, footsteps crossed. A door groaned somewhere and went quiet again. Then the particular kind of silence this place had, the heavy kind, the kind that pressed, settled back over everything.
Her grip on my hand didn't loosen. I didn't try to make it.
I knew what the dream was about. I didn't need her to tell me. Let me go — same pitch, same break as when they'd tried to haul me out of the cage earlier. Her brain was replaying it. That made sense. That was what brains did when you gave them nothing useful to do in the dark.
What I was turning over in my own head was the part she didn't know about.
The last thing before this room had been her on the phone.
Her voice, thin through the static: Cap.
And then tires. A scream. Nothing. I'd chased her location ping all the way into the industrial zone, telling myself the whole way that this wasn't a setup, that I wasn't walking into something, that she needed me and that was all that mattered.
I'd been lying to myself. I knew that now.
The grab had come fast. Black van, burned-rubber turn, someone saying take the guy alive in the kind of tone that meant they had instructions. Then concrete and bleach and the sound of her voice again, somewhere in the dark, saying my name like a question she was afraid to get answered.
I should have waited for backup. I hadn't. That was on me, and I was going to be sitting with that for a while.
"You okay?" I asked her.
A beat. "Not really," she said. Small and honest. I appreciated that she didn't dress it up.
"Yeah," I said. "Me either."
She let out a breath that wasn't quite a laugh but was in the neighborhood of one. Her grip shifted. Less desperate, more deliberate. Like she was choosing to hold on now instead of just reacting.
I turned my attention back to the room while she settled.
I'd been working through it piece by piece every time the guards went quiet upstairs.
Cataloguing what I knew, what I didn't, what I could use.
The cages were welded ugly. Fast work, the kind you did when you needed something functional and didn't care if it was good.
The front seam on mine had drag marks where the whole unit had been shoved into place and dropped, which meant there was a shallow groove where the frame met the concrete.
Sloppy construction was always the thing that got you out of somewhere, in my experience.
Somebody always cut a corner. You just had to find which one.
Upstairs, voices drifted. Low, lazy, the kind of conversation that happened between men who were bored on a long shift. A phone buzzed on something wooden and went unanswered. A half-hearted whistle started and fell apart before it got anywhere.
Then a light snapped on over the staircase.
The door opened. I tracked the footsteps automatically, four steps, a pause, three more, and the man who came down wasn't one of the ones I'd seen before.
Jeans and a work shirt. Toolbox hanging off one hand, flashlight in the other.
He had maintenance written all over him, and something else too.
A look around the room when he got to the bottom of the stairs that lasted about a half-second too long before he made himself stop doing it.
Regret. That was what that look was. The kind you developed when you'd been telling yourself you didn't have a choice for long enough that you almost believed it.
He went two cages past Ariel and crouched down, swearing quietly at whatever he found there.
"Outlet's loose again," he muttered to nobody, setting his toolbox on the concrete. He worked fast, not careful, fast, like speed was the thing that made this okay, tightening a plate, working a plug, tugging at a floor bracket that squeaked under his hands.
That was when the screw pinged free.
It came off the lip of his kit and hit the concrete and rolled, ticking along the groove under my cage. He didn't notice. He was already back at the outlet, muttering at it.
I didn't move. I just let my hand hang loose through the wire and watched where the screw came to rest. Right by my boot.
Standard steel. Shallow head. Useless for most things.
Useful for a man who needed a pick, a shim, something to work at a weld that was already ugly to begin with.
I shifted like I was trying to find a more comfortable position, there wasn't one, but they didn't know that, and tapped the screw with my toe, rolling it into the shadow under the frame.
"Done for now," the maintenance man said, loud enough for whoever was upstairs. He snapped his toolbox shut and stood, knees complaining. "Line is sketchy. If the compressor trips again, call it. I'm not eating that repair twice."
A grunt from upstairs. He went back up without looking at any of us again.
The door latched. The room exhaled.
"Cap," Ariel whispered.
"I've got something," I said.
"What kind of something?"
"A maybe." I kept my eyes on the shadow where the screw was. "But a real one."
She didn't push for more than that. She'd learned early on that I didn't make promises I couldn't back up, and I didn't talk up a plan before I knew it was a plan. It was one of the things I liked about her. She read me well enough to know the difference between I'm working on it and I don't know.
Tess, across from us, had been quiet for the last little while, but now her dry voice cut through. "They missed pickup yesterday."
"What does that mean for us?" I asked.
"Means they're antsy," she said. "They hate holding stock overnight. Too many variables. They push for first light when they can. Fewer eyes on the roads, fewer questions at checkpoints."
Ariel's fingers tightened on mine.
First light. That was information.
"Hum something," I told Ariel.
A pause. "What?"
"That thing you do when you're grading papers. Under your breath. You probably don't even notice you do it."
A small silence, and I could feel her trying to figure out how I knew that. "You noticed."
"I notice everything you do." I shifted slowly, working my boot toward the shadow under the frame. "I need cover noise. Hum. Nothing with a melody, just something steady. If I say clear, you stop. If I say heads low, you keep going no matter what."
"Heads low," she repeated, like she was filing it.
"You told me once that your favorite thing about riding behind me was tucking your head down and letting the wind do the work. That's the image. Head low, keep going."
"I said that was a nice feeling," she said. "Not that it was my favorite thing."
"Close enough." I kept my voice even. "Hum."
She did. Soft, almost nothing, just enough to blur the small sounds I was making as I worked the screw loose from the shadow and got it into my palm. Up my sleeve, pinched in the cuff seam where it wouldn't shift or click.
Upstairs, a cabinet opened. Something poured into a bowl. A faucet ran for a slow count of twelve. Normal sounds in the wrong place, like a painting of a kitchen hung on the wall of somewhere terrible.
I was starting to map a plan, the weld on the front seam, the groove, the screw, the slack in the chain if I angled right, when the door banged open hard enough to bounce off the wall.
Different man this time. Faster on the stairs, sloppier. The flashlight came on midair, the beam swinging wild before it found us.
He was looking at Ariel's cage before he hit the bottom step.
"Right where we left you," he said, in the tone of someone who found that funny. He walked the beam along the wire until it found my face, held it there for a second. "Reach for her again and see what it buys you."
He let that land, then swung the light back to her. "You. Stand up."
Ariel went still. The soft sound of her humming stopped.
He liked that. I watched him like that. The way he leaned into her freezing, the small smile it put on him. I stored it. Filed it. Men who liked that kind of power were always predictable in the same ways. They went where the fear was. Which meant they could be moved.
"Don't make me come in there," he said.
A voice from two cages down, rough, thirst-worn, the kind of voice that had been through a lot and still decided to use itself, cut right across him.
"Leave her. She's new."
He swung the beam. "Who said that?"
"Me." The woman. Tess, I thought, by the direction. "You want to swing on someone, swing on me."
The light found her. Small against the bars, chin up, eyes flat. The chin-up wasn't bravado, I realized. It was a decision. Like she'd done the math and this was the answer she'd come to.
He crouched to get an angle on her, which told me he'd done this before. Crouching was the move of someone who knew the geometry of a cage.
Ariel's breath went sharp beside me. My hand closed on the wire.
He jabbed the baton through the gap under the latch, fast, practiced, and caught her under the ribs. She folded but didn't go down. Didn't make a sound either, which took more out of a person than the hit did.
"Hit where it counts," she said, breathing through it.
He did.
Keys. The latch pin scraped. He shouldered the door and went in half a step and grabbed her by the hair and the sound that followed, twice, concrete block, the second hit worse than the first, was the kind of sound you didn't unlisten to.
She slid down the bars and hit the floor.
He looked at what he'd done. Small smile.
"Anyone else?" he asked.
A radio coughed on his belt before he could look back at Ariel.
Bring your ass up. Boss wants the floor clear.
He stood there for a second too long. His fingers moved around the flashlight. I could see him weighing it.
Now. Inventory's here early.
He spat and stepped back. The cage door swung shut on its own weight. The flashlight cut. Boots on stairs, hard and fast, and then the door, and then the specific silence that follows something you can't take back.
A drip somewhere. Her blood finding the seam in the concrete.
Ariel's breathing had gone thin and uneven beside me. I didn't try to smooth it over with words. Some things you had to let sit for a minute before you could do anything with them.
"She was trying to help me," Ariel said finally. Her voice frayed at the edges.
"I know."
"She didn't even know my name."
"I know."
The wire pressed cold into my forehead. I'd been leaning into it without realizing. Some part of me looking for something solid. Every part of me wanted to come through that cage door. Wanted to make noise, make something happen, make someone pay for the sound I was still hearing in my head.
But wanting didn't open doors. Plans did.
I set my jaw and breathed through it.
Not again. I wasn't losing another one. Not in a place like this. Not because I got impatient and did something that burned the one real advantage I had, which was that they still didn't know what I was capable of when I had time to think.
The screw sat cool against my wrist bone.
Ugly weld. Wrong-set frame. And now I knew the guard's patterns, the timing of the radio checks, and that there was a boss who showed up early and liked his inventory in order.
We were getting out of here.
I just had to be smart about it.
"Ariel," I said.
A beat. "Yeah."
"I need you to trust me for a little longer."
She was quiet for a second. Then her hand found mine through the seam, and she held on.
"I already do," she said.