10. Jasmine
ten
Jasmine
My fingers didn’t want to close. The swelling had started this afternoon, red at the knuckle and a faint blue where yesterday’s torque left its mark.
I flexed once, twice, then slid the wire into the keyway.
The move was muscle memory, pure autopilot.
Tension left, feather touch, then hard right to catch the first pin.
The lock was good enough to fool a random cop, but not me.
The springs sang back, metallic and hungry, every twitch broadcasting up the length of my arm.
The first attempt was over before it started.
The pins were gummy, choked with old grease, and I over-rotated.
The wire slipped and jabbed the soft space under my nail.
Pain crackled, sharp, but I didn’t make a noise.
Just reset. My breath came slow, cold in my nose and hot in my chest. I focused on the pattern: wiggle, tension, lift, rotate.
The second attempt, the pop-can shim bent, and I had to fish it out with my pinky, twisting it free so careful it almost made me laugh.
Next cell over, Renata was awake. I knew it from the way the air changed; she always held her breath when I was working.
I didn’t look, but I could feel her eyes drilling the side of my head.
She never said a word. Not in English, not in Spanish, not even in the gutter tongue that women invent in rooms like this.
Her hands were always locked around the bars, white-knuckle, and her face swung between raw hope and the kind of horror that only made sense if you’d already failed once.
I risked a glance. Renata’s face was in shadow, but her mouth was a thin, flat line. She nodded—barely, maybe only in my mind.
On the third try, I went slow. Slower than human patience should allow.
The wire almost snapped when I hit the last pin, so I braced it against the cot’s frame and rolled my thumbnail across the bend, flattening it, reforming the angle with the tiniest pressure.
My jaw was locked so tight I could hear the cartilage pop.
Sweat ran down my wrist and puddled in the meat of my palm.
I kept my breathing shallow and even, never letting it spike.
If Adam had been watching live, he would have seen nothing but a woman sitting on her cot, staring at the back wall.
The pain in my thumb was a strobe. First it was a surface thing, then it grew roots, pulsing up the tendon.
I counted three beats, then flexed the hand, and the wire slid forward with a noise so small it could have been dust. The lock gave a click—not a TV show click, but a real one: wet, nasty, reluctant.
It held for a second. I thought it had failed. I almost let myself feel it.
Then the shackle rotated. A fraction. I felt the change not in my fingers, but in my ribs. I wanted to scream. Instead I set the lock down on the cot with both hands. The weight of it, solid, warm from my skin, was the most honest thing I’d touched in a week.
I eased my body up—ankles first, then knees, then stood using only the pressure of my thighs and calves.
My feet made zero sound on the slab. I moved to the cell door, and for the first time since I landed in this shithole, I put my hand around the bars and didn’t feel like I was touching my own tombstone.
The underwire in my right hand, the pop-can shim in my left, I worked the lock with no theater at all, just the grim, technical precision of a woman who never wanted to be in this position again.
It opened. I felt the bolt slide. I didn’t believe it at first, so I closed it and did it again. Same result: click, shift, open.
I stood there with the cell door open, not moving, not breathing, for three full seconds. I looked down the row. Nobody had moved. Renata’s eyes were wide, and her hands were shaking so hard I thought she might snap a finger off.
I looked at her, and the face she gave me was part prayer, part dare.
I whispered, not even trusting my voice: “I’ll send help back.”
Renata nodded. Her lips moved, but I don’t think she said anything. Just breathed.
I stepped out. My left foot, then the right, then both on the other side of the line I’d lived behind for five days.
For a second, I stood in the corridor, the air sharp and clean compared to the cell's humidity. I felt the distance—maybe three feet, but it might as well have been the whole fucking world.
I didn’t look back. I didn’t need to.
I moved.
Every step was planned and then re-planned in the microseconds it took to execute.
I hugged the cinder block, palms flat, toes out, keeping low and to the right, where the shadow from the upper ventilation pipe made a perfect crawlspace for five feet of invisible.
The overhead camera’s lens wasn’t a threat until the last seven feet, and by then I could be at the main door if I hit the mark.
I counted off in my head—one, two, freeze, three, duck, four, five, six, seven—timing it to the cycle of the buzzing light.
In the other cells, the bodies stayed motionless.
Maybe asleep, maybe just not interested in another ghost running at the wall.
The main steel door was the only way out, and I’d watched Adam use it a dozen times.
He always made a show of twisting the deadbolt, key on the inside, then would push it open with a casual shove.
When he left, sometimes he’d throw the outside bolt, sometimes not.
There was no pattern, or if there was, it was locked inside his idiot-savant brain.
Tonight I was betting on lazy. Or maybe overconfident.
The kind of man who builds a box and then doesn’t believe anyone could actually slip the lock.
I stood in front of the door, every nerve in my forearm jangling.
I put both hands on the handle and pressed, slow, putting my whole weight into it so if it made noise it would be the smallest possible groan.
The rubber gasket sucked at the frame, gave a little fart of air, and then the door swung outward, smooth and perfect.
No alarm. No click. Just a cold draft that hit my face and told me the world was still waiting.
The stairwell was concrete, three turns, twelve steps per flight, with each tread painted with anti-slip yellow lines.
The paint had worn down to bare grit on the edges.
I took the steps two at a time, feet landing silent in the socks I’d been living in for five days.
I hit the top and palmed the exit bar, praying it wasn’t keyed from the outside.
It wasn’t. It boomed open, a sound like God slamming a trashcan lid, and I flinched so hard my molars sparked.
I waited, breath stuck in my lungs, counting the seconds for footsteps or the distant voice of a jailer. Nothing.
Outside, the air was so clean it was like drinking cold water with your lungs.
The surface was a slab poured into a gravel field, weeds rimming the cracks where the earth was trying to take the building back.
There was no fence, just a fall-off into the black.
The Arizona sky was so dense with stars that for a second I forgot where I was, forgot even my own body, just stared up at the impossible dome of it.
To the north was a sawtooth line of mountains, all silhouette.
To the east, the faint orange smudge that meant Kingman, or maybe the truck stops that fed off it.
I picked east, guessing by the feel of the wind and the memory of the sun’s angle on the walk from the car to the bunker.
That, and the desperate hope that if I went west, I’d just run into more desert and die with a hundred thousand years of human history laughing at me.
I started to run. Not a jog, not a panic sprint, but the low, gliding stride of someone who’s spent years moving fast on uneven ground.
I kept my arms tight, fists to my ribs, never crossing my own midline.
The socks shredded open by the third hundred yards; by then my feet were just another part of the pain.
The brush was sparse, but every plant was a goddamn weapon—little daggers, prickles, seeds that stuck and itched and then bled.
My calves seized up from the cold, then burned loose, then went numb.
At some point I realized I was crying, the tears freezing at my cheeks, but I never stopped.
The best-case scenario was that I ran right into traffic, flagged down a Good Samaritan, and got shot by a cop with an inferiority complex.
Worst case, I died under a mesquite tree and fed the bugs for a week.
Either way, it was better than waiting for Adam to drag me back in.
I ran for what felt like hours, but it was probably less than thirty minutes.
I counted my own heartbeats, lost count at two thousand.
I peed my pants a little—didn’t matter, didn’t care.
I heard nothing behind me, not even the sound of a door.
Maybe he hadn’t noticed yet. Maybe he was letting me go, just to see how far I’d make it.
At 2:24 a.m., I saw headlights.
I dropped into the nearest ditch, hard, the rocks punching through the skin of my knee so deep I almost screamed.
I pressed flat to the ground, feeling the cold suck the heat out of my bones.
The engine was high-revving, maybe a V6, not a truck but not a compact either.
The lights swept the scrub, then shut off.
There was silence for a few seconds, then the slam of a car door.
“Jasmine.”
His voice was exactly the same as it had been every morning, calm and warm, the kind of voice you would want telling you the world was ending. I pressed my face to the dirt, hands jammed over my mouth. He called again, not louder, just closer.
“Jasmine.”