CHAPTER 20 #2
My fingers hover above the tram brake release.
A speaker on the workbench clicks.
“Don’t touch that.”
I touch it.
The switch is dead.
Or decoy.
The phone on the bench lights with text.
WRONG ORDER.
A hard laugh comes out of me.
It hurts my shoulder.
“You’re getting repetitive.”
Gavin’s voice sharpens for the first time. “You don’t know anything about repetition.”
I reach for the schematic.
A sting bites my fingers.
I jerk my hand back.
A thin wire runs along the edge of the paper, almost invisible.
Not enough to electrocute.
Enough to punish.
I look at my fingertips. Small red line. Blood. Ridiculous.
Fine.
I use the Edda folder to lift the schematic edge without touching the wire.
Under it is another diagram.
Older.
Original Blood House red door practical.
Manual hold pin. Exterior release. Safety release bypass.
And a signature line.
GAVIN ROOK — ACCESS SYSTEMS CLEARED.
Below it, another handwritten note:
PER V.H. — KEEP LIVE FOR CAMERA.
My stomach goes heavy.
There.
Not the whole truth.
A piece with weight.
I fold the page into the Edda folder.
The speaker goes dead quiet.
Then Gavin says, “Put that down.”
“No.”
“You always were slow.”
“No,” I say. “I was obedient.”
The word changes the room.
It changes me saying it.
The old self would have called it loyalty. Production discipline. Chain of command. Protection. A good man doing the least bad thing in a room run by worse men.
Obedient is uglier.
More accurate.
A door opens somewhere beyond the mechanical room.
Footsteps.
Not close. Not far.
I look at the control panel again.
If the labeled switches are decoys, the real controls are elsewhere. Secondary controls. Gavin favors them. I told Clara that. I should listen to myself occasionally. It would surprise people.
The room has one other exit: narrow maintenance passage behind the pump bank. Fresh water runs from under it.
Avery’s water.
Or Clara’s trap.
Or both.
I move toward it.
The phone buzzes on the bench.
Live feed.
Clara turns toward the camera inside the shuttle set. She can’t see me. She can’t know the camera connects here. Still, for one second, her eyes hit the lens like she is looking directly through every wall I ever put between us.
My chest tightens.
On screen, her mouth forms two words.
Not my name.
Not help me.
The camera angle is too poor to be sure, but I know.
Wrong door.
She figured it out.
Of course she did.
She always gets to the wound faster than I get to the bandage.
I run.
Bad idea.
My shoulder punishes it. The floor punishes it. The maintenance passage punishes it by narrowing halfway in so I have to turn sideways, bad shoulder scraping the wall. The concrete is damp. My borrowed windbreaker catches on a pipe bracket and tears. The air tastes metallic.
Behind me, Gavin’s voice follows through another speaker.
“If you get there, she still won’t forgive you.”
I keep moving.
“She shouldn’t,” I say.
The passage ends at a small door with no handle. Only a keypad.
Four digits.
The screen reads:
FIRST TAKE.
I hate him.
Not dramatically.
Practically. Deeply. With tired precision.
First take.
Scene 17. Take 2 opened Crescent Vault. First take here?
The first time Laurel got stuck.
The first incident two days before her death.
Date? Call sheet. Three days? No. Blog two days before. Additional photography date three days before death, first warning. My mind has been punched too many times tonight.
I try 1701.
Red.
I try 0217.
Red.
I try 0317.
Red.
The screen flashes.
ONE TRY LEFT.
A small camera above the keypad tilts.
Gavin is watching.
Good.
“Want to help?” I ask.
The speaker crackles. “You didn’t help her.”
“No.”
Silence.
I look at the keypad.
First take.
Not scene number. Not date.
First thing Clara said after Laurel died.
The door was locked.
Words, not numbers.
Keypad won’t take words.
Locked.
I enter 5625.
Green.
The door opens.
For one unbearable second, I almost laugh.
Then something hits me from the side.
Shoulder first.
The bad one.
Pain takes the room apart.
I hit the concrete wall and go down hard, folder trapped under me, breath punched out. A boot drives into my ribs—not full force, more placement than damage. A man crouches above me in a dark jacket, face lined, hair thinning, eyes small and bright behind wire-frame glasses.
Gavin Rook looks like a retired math teacher who would report you for parking wrong.
I hate that.
Villains should have the decency to look like the damage they do.
“You always solve things after someone else pays,” he says.
I try to move.
His knee presses into my shoulder.
White-hot pain floods the side of my body.
A sound leaves me before I can stop it.
Gavin smiles.
Small. Ugly. Real.
“There he is.”
My hand finds nothing useful. Concrete. Water. Torn windbreaker fabric.
The Edda folder is half under my ribs.
Gavin reaches for it.
I clamp my elbow down.
His face tightens. “You don’t even know what you’re holding.”
“Evidence.”
“Scraps.”
“Then you won’t mind.”
He presses harder on my shoulder.
The room swims.
I focus on his left hand. No ring. Grease under one fingernail. Small scar near thumb. A technician’s hand. A man who can make doors lie.
“Victor paid you,” I say.
Gavin laughs once. “Victor pays everyone. That’s not the interesting part.”
“What is?”
“He thinks money is loyalty.”
“And you?”
“I think footage is.”
He reaches under his jacket.
My body reacts before thought.
I slam my head forward into his face.
Bad choice.
Effective enough.
Pain splits across my forehead. Gavin reels back with a curse, hand going to his nose. I roll, dragging the folder with me. My shoulder almost makes me black out, but almost is not useful enough to count.
I kick his knee.
He drops.
I get one hand on the doorframe and pull myself through the door.
Behind it is not the shuttle set.
It is worse.
A viewing booth.
Old control glass looks down over the shuttle tunnel. Through it, I see the tram below, Avery inside, Clara on the platform, Alvarez at the door, Diana behind him. They are maybe thirty feet away and completely cut off by glass, locked doors, and the track below.
There is a main control console in front of me.
Real switches.
Real brake lever.
Real old analog emergency stop under a clear plastic cover.
Gavin lunges behind me.
I grab the emergency stop and slam it down.
Nothing happens.
Of course.
Gavin laughs through blood. “Disconnected in the lawsuit.”
He hits me low.
We go into the console together. Metal bites my hip. My bad shoulder slams the edge. The folder flies open. Papers scatter across the floor.
On the monitor, the tram jerks forward another foot.
Avery screams.
Clara grabs the outside handle of the tram door.
The speaker in the booth picks up her voice now.
“Stop it!”
Not to Gavin.
To the room.
To every man who kept confusing moving parts with choices.
Something in me breaks clean.
Not anger.
Not guilt.
The last piece of obedience.
I drive my elbow back into Gavin’s ribs. He grunts. I turn, shove him into the wall of panels, and this time I don’t look for the obvious emergency stop.
Secondary controls.
Gavin favors secondary controls.
I scan lower.
Under the console: a maintenance bypass box, half open. Three wires clipped into a portable switch unit. Red. White. Green. Gavin’s remote.
He sees me see it.
“No,” he says.
There is no time for clean.
I grab the wire bundle and rip it out.
A flash pops.
Heat bites my palm.
The lights in the booth drop to emergency red.
Below, the tram grinds and stops so hard the frame shudders.
Avery slams against the restraints.
Clara nearly falls, catches herself on the car.
But the tram stops.
Stopped.
For half a second, that is the whole world.
Then Gavin hits me with something heavy.
The side of my head explodes in light and sound.
I go down beside the console.
This time, the floor does not stay where it should.
Gavin’s shoes move past me toward the door.
I try to reach him.
My hand doesn’t listen.
He kneels and grabs my hair, yanking my head up enough that I see the control glass.
Below, Clara is looking up.
She sees me.
Of course she does.
Through the glass. Through red emergency light. Through all the wrong doors.
Gavin puts his mouth near my ear.
“Tell her,” he says, breathing hard. “Tell her why Laurel got the first lighter.”
I taste blood.
My forehead presses cold concrete.
Clara’s face is small through the glass and too far away.
Gavin shoves a phone against my mouth and hits speaker.
The booth audio crackles below.
My voice, broken and amplified, fills the shuttle set.
“Clara.”
She stops moving.
I hate him for that most.
For making my voice another door.
Gavin presses harder. “Say it.”
I could refuse.
Maybe he kills me. Maybe he runs. Maybe Clara loses seconds looking up.
No.
No more timed truth.
No more pieces.
I look through the glass at Clara.
“You gave Laurel the lighter,” I say, each word scraping out of me. “Because I gave it to you first.”
Her face changes.
Down below, the red emergency light catches on the water at her feet.
I force air into my lungs.
“After the first locked-door take, I gave it to you at Marla’s. I told you everybody on that set needed a way out. You gave it to Laurel before the fatal take because she was scared.”
Gavin’s grip tightens.
Pain tears across my scalp.
I keep going.
“I let you forget that because remembering meant knowing she was scared before she died. And because remembering meant knowing I knew too.”
The shuttle set goes silent except for water dripping.
Clara stares up at me.
Not soft.
Not forgiving.
Fully awake.
Gavin releases my hair with disgust. “Romantic.”
I laugh once, blood in my mouth.
“No,” I say. “Recorded.”
His face shifts.
Too late.
I look at the console mic still lit red.
The booth audio is open.
Everything I said went below.
Maybe to Alvarez’s body mic.
Maybe to Diana’s phone if it survived.
Maybe nowhere useful.
But the words are out.
Not when the room forced them.
When she could hear them.
Gavin sees it and raises the metal tool again.
The freight elevator hums somewhere behind us.
A door unlocks.
And below, Clara looks away from me and straight at the tram door.
She chooses Avery.
Good.
That is the last clear thought I have before Gavin brings the tool down again.