Chapter 21 #2
The blade was in his fucking boots. I took them off him, and I looked inside them, and I looked at the leather and the tongue and the insole…
but I did not look in the sole. It’s such a sophomoric hat trick for assassins, I didn’t even check for it.
There is a blade in the toe of each of his boots that flicks out on a spring like a switchblade.
I hit the concrete.
I’m on my side and the world has gone very loud.
He crouches. He reaches down and pulls the knife from the housing in his right boot. Four inches of black steel, already slick. He turns it once in the light to check the edge, then looks at me and doesn’t say anything.
“Good luck with worthwhile,” he teases. Then he kicks me in the chest so hard I feel my own rib break, a green-stick crack from the inside, and everything goes white.
I cannot breathe. I can’t get one single molecule of air in, and I lie on my back on that dock with my mouth open and nothing goes into it.
He stands, scooping me up like a ragdoll. I grab his throat, but it’s useless. Before Ruslan walks to the edge of the dock, dangling me over the water, I scream at the top of my lungs. “Run, Belai! RUN!”
I barely splash as I hit the water. Then the Anacostia swallows me whole.
Not fast. There’s no plunge, no rush, no cinematic sinking. It’s far more ceremonious than that. The river opens, and it closes, and then it just holds me in the dark and does absolutely nothing at all.
Cold. God, it’s cold, cold in a way that August has no right to be, and the dirty river water soaks into my calf, thigh, and hip like somebody’s pressing thumbs into all three wounds at once.
My jacket fills. Eleven pockets, all of them full of water now.
The fabric goes from clothing to dead weight in about two seconds and it pulls me down.
My rib grinds when I try to kick.
That’s the real pain. Not my leg, I could rally through that.
The rib. I think it pierced something when it snapped.
I get one good scissor of my good leg and propel about an inch upward but something behind my sternum shifts and grates and the pain is so enormous and so specific that my whole body simply quits.
I float downward in the black, running out of air.
Down here it’s silent. A certain euphoria starts to settle as I give up on breathing. And what I don’t expect is how I’m okay with it.
Up on that dock the world was all noise, the freight and the boots and my own screaming, and six feet under the surface of a dead river there is no sound whatsoever. Just the pressure in my ears. Just my heart, slamming, but slowing.
I open my eyes in the dirty water. It’s no different than behind closed lids. There’s nothing to see. Not black. Nothing. No shape to it, no curves, no edges. I land at the bottom of the river and extend my palm to feel the warm silt.
Soft.
It’s so soft down here.
So peaceful.
I could swallow the pain, swim to the surface, face the world above. But why? Why fight?
That’s the entire thought I have, floating in the mud at the bottom of the Anacostia River with a broken rib and three holes in me. It would be so easy to slip away.
Nobody would even have to know.
I could just stay and let this dirty river wash me clean of it all: the contract.
The deposit. The bar. Dani’s blonde hair going red in the back seat of the car.
Everything I’ve stolen, every person I’ve hurt, Mabel Edwards with her hands pinned to a desk, my father’s disapproving scowl mixed with his sinister smile…
the look of anguish on Callen’s face when he finds out what I did.
Cricket’s sorrow when she learns how I betrayed them all.
I could just stay down here and hide from it forever. Alone. Let the river floor bury me with my secrets.
Callen would never have to know what I am. The most appealing thing I can imagine is a version of the world where Jeffrey Callen thinks I drowned…innocent.
He’d grieve. I know that. But he’d remember a woman who made him happy for a short time, and he would never have to know how contrived it all was.
Because…it wasn’t. The scenery was wrong, but the story was real.
I love him. And I could leave the earth right now letting him have the version of the story that won’t rip him apart.
I could give him that.
It would be the kindest thing I’ve ever done for anybody.
What about Belai?
His name goes through me like a hook through a lip.
He’s up there. By himself.
He’s up there on that dock because I summoned him there. I know he’s bleeding on that dock right now and there is nobody up there but the man who did it.
Get up, a voice in my mind tells me.
I can’t.
GET UP, SAOIRSE.
I don’t want to.
Not for you. For Callen. He deserves better than kindness. He deserves the truth. He deserves a fight for his friend’s life.
My hand closes on something in the silt—a rope, a cable, a root, some rotted mooring line going up at an angle out of the mud. Whatever it is, I pull on it like a handle and get myself upright.
Then it’s just work.
Hand over hand. My right leg kicking, the left one hanging off me, dead weight. My rib is a hot spike being driven in on every pull and I pull anyway, and the water goes from black to a dirty gray-brown and there’s light in it, city light, coming down in long smeared columns.
My lungs are gone. My lungs went thirty seconds ago and what’s happening in my chest now is not breathing, it’s a body screaming at a brain that isn’t listening.
Six feet.
Four.
I break the surface with a sound I’ve never made before in my life.
Air.
I take it in in huge, shredded gulps and half of it is river and I go under again and come back up and vomit water onto my own chest. I am trying to cry but I don’t have enough air for it yet.
The dock’s a black shape ten feet away.
I get to it. I don’t know how. There’s a piling, slimed and furred with something, and I get both arms around it. I dangle there with my forehead against the wet wood and my body shaking so hard my teeth are cracking together.
There’s a rusted ladder bolted to the concrete. Four rungs.