Chapter 5 Phoenix #2
He grunts, more outrage than pain at first, hand flying to his face. Blood blooms across his lip in a bright, obscene smear. His eyes go wide in animal surprise—prey shouldn’t kick this hard.
Before he can form the first swear word, I’m already moving. I slide down, grab momentum, and bring my knee up, driving my foot through his chin this time. His teeth click together audibly, a sharp, satisfying clack. His head snaps back.
His eyes flash something I haven’t seen on his face yet: fear.
I roll hard toward the side of the bed, jam my free knee between us, and shove with everything I’ve got. He staggers back into the chair; it skitters. The lamp bounces; the bulb flickers.
For a heartbeat, his face is a series of snapshots: blood at his mouth, fury in his eyes, a dark smear on his chin where my heel caught him.
I don’t wait to admire my work.
I drop off the bed, landing hard enough to jar my teeth, and lunge for the only direction that isn’t him.
The door.
He charges. I hear the roar, the rush of air as his weight surges after me, the skid of his boots on concrete. He’s bigger, stronger, used to people folding.
I’m not folding.
I drop low, my shoulder brushing the floor, and thrust the screw out of my palm the way I practiced in my head a hundred times: short, mean, no hesitation. A punch with a point.
It sinks into the meat of his forearm as he reaches for me. The resistance is horrible and thick, like pushing through gristle. There’s a half second where my brain tries to refuse the reality of it, and then it gives, plunging in.
He yells, real this time—a ripped sound forced up from the bottom of his lungs. His arm jerks back on instinct. The screw tears a jagged line out of him on the way, and hot blood spills across my knuckles, slick and sticky, nothing like in movies.
I smell copper and sweat and something chemical. My stomach flips, but there’s no space for nausea.
His fingers scrabble at my shoulder and slip. He loses purchase.
Two seconds. Maybe less. It’s just enough.
The door.
He left the top latch thrown but didn’t drop the second bolt. I heard it earlier, the missing click. My father used to say numbers never lie. Neither do sounds, if you train your ear.
I trust my ears now.
I slam into the handle with my shoulder, let my weight become the weapon, driving right at the weak spot. Locks don’t care about panic. They care about leverage.
It gives with a crunch and a screech. Cold air knifes in through the gap, shocking after the stale warmth of the room. The metal frame shudders as I wrench it open and spill through.
The hallway isn’t a hallway.
It’s a throat.
A narrow spine between stacks of metal, walls looming in dull gray and flaking paint.
A catwalk runs along the right, grated floor showing the drop below.
The sound under the floor is louder out here, a full-body hum that vibrates in my bones, something huge and mechanical alive beneath me. Wind rides it, low and constant.
Behind me, Danner curses, the word echoing in the metal throat like a promise. Something heavy skitters—maybe the chair, maybe the lamp clattering to the ground. He’s on his feet. I picture him clutching his forearm, blood running down to his wrist, mouth split and swelling, ego bruised even worse.
He’ll be slower.
Not by much. But slower.
I have two seconds. Maybe three. They’re a gift wrapped in pain.
I run.
My bare feet slap against the grated metal, rattling it. Every step sends a sting up my legs, but I don’t stop. The catwalk pitches me toward a square of light ahead, brighter and whiter than anything I’ve seen since I woke up here.
Salt slams my tongue on the next breath, thick and sharp and undeniable.
I clear another set of doors, push through one more with my shoulder, and then the world doesn’t just open—it drops away.
For half a second my brain can’t process it. My body expects walls, ceiling, some new shape of cage. Instead I get sky.
My heart stutters, misses a step, then folds in on itself like bad origami.
I’m not on a river. Not sitting at the docks, waiting for the city lights to glitter on black water. There’s no bridge, no skyline, no graffiti-tagged pylons.
A deck stretches out beneath me in a grid of painted lines and welded fixtures, the scale wrong in a way that makes my eyes water.
Containers rise in stacks—red and blue and gray, tower-high on either side, their sides streaked with rust and salt.
A crane arm sleeps, folded against the sky.
Coiled ropes, yellow hazard markings, metal boxes with warning stickers I don’t have time to read.
The wind hits hard, slapping my hair back, stinging my eyes, dragging the thin fabric of my shirt against my skin. The sky is nothing more than a white-blue burn, bright enough to hurt.
And past the rails… nothing
Nothing.
No shoreline. No bridge. No tugboats cutting paths in murky water. No bluff where the trees hold their breath before the drop. Just water. Rolling out forever in tight, hard chop, tips frothing white, the horizon a thin, sharp seam.
My knees hit the deck before I even know I’m falling. The impact sends shockwaves up my thighs. My palms skid on paint and grit as I catch myself, skin burning.
For a second everything tilts, the way it does when a drone shot in a reel climbs too fast and your stomach stays on the ground. The angle of the containers, the horizon line, the railings—all of it slides in my vision.
The hum under my body is louder here, deeper. Engines. Massive ones. Churning us forward through open water, farther from anything resembling home.
I’m on a ship. A cargo ship. A ship out to sea.
The realization doesn’t come in a neat sentence. It hits in broken pieces: the rise and fall under my knees, the slap of waves against hull, the wind scented of salt and oil and distance.
My throat tightens around air that suddenly feels too big to swallow.
For the first time since I woke up in that metal box, since the first bolt slid home and the dark closed in, since I counted the screws and catalogued the welds and made lists in my head to stay human, I feel something crack.
I close my eyes.
The tears don’t ask permission. They surge up hot and helpless, burning their way out. They slide down my cheeks, mixing with the sting of the slap, the salt of the wind, the sour taste of his breath still phantom in my nose.
I press my forehead to the deck, the paint cool against my skin, and I let myself cry. Not for long. Not loud. Just enough that the pressure in my chest finds a seam.
Behind my ribs, something ugly and hard answers back.
Whoever took me…they got me on a ship. They put cuffs on the bed and a chain on my ankle. They gave me rules and thought I’d be grateful for a brush.
They think distance is the same as safety.
I curl my fingers into fists against the steel, feel the dried blood on my knuckles crack.
They’re wrong.