Chapter 11 Phoenix
Phoenix
They march me back down into the belly of the ship, past coils and drums and a hatch that breathes heat.
The man—I have to call him something other than ‘The Man’ in my head—keeps an even pace beside me, not touching me, but not needing to.
Two others follow with rifles held low. We take a grated stairwell that rings under our feet and a corridor that smells like metal and something sweet rotting in a drain.
Every turn steals a little more of the air.
He stops at a door with a familiar dent near the hinge and rusted number stamped above the handle that I recognize. My heart sinks.
He nods to one of the rifle men, and he unlocks and opens it.
“Back where you were,” the neat man says, as if he’s returning luggage to the correct room. “Someone will see to your shirt and bring food later.”
He lifts his chin at the guard, and the door opens wider. I step inside.
Seven heads lift. The light is yellow and thin but the room’s the same—bunks bolted in rows, buckets in the corner, a length of pipe with no insulation carrying warmth along the ceiling.
I hear my name in a whisper (Phoenix?) and then I hear what I must look like in the catch of breath that follows.
Blood on my shirt. Blood on my mouth. A lot of it mine. Most of it not.
I’m not the only one who sees the way the girls curl in to make themselves smaller. Even Luis takes a half step back. My stomach churns with the urge to apologize for bringing proof of someone else’s violence into their space. An apology won’t change anything.
And I’m not sorry that I fought. I’d fight again.
I will fight again.
“It’s okay,” I lie, as gently as I can. “It’s not all mine. I’m okay.”
Split Lip—the girl with the squared shoulders and the authority of someone who’s had to carry other people—moves first. “Shower,” she says, and nods toward the back where a short, tiled alcove holds two shower heads and a drain. “Quick. Before someone remembers we exist.”
I peel my shirt over my head, at this point uncaring of modesty. These women, this boy—they don’t care. They aren’t going to look at me like that.
The room sees the blooming bruise under my ribs and the angry scrape at my cheekbone. No one says that I don’t look okay. No one needs to. Messy Bun’s mouth trembles and then steadies.
A girl I recognize from the casino steps forward with a towel.
She used to run drinks on the mezzanine, a small, pretty thing with blade-sharp cheekbones and glitter eyeliner that survived three shifts.
Kira. She used to call me “hey, book girl” when I came by the staff bar for water, because I always had a book in my hand to read during my break.
“Here,” she says, soft. “Come on.”
The water is not hot, not really, but it’s more than a trickle.
Kira reaches past me for the valve and adjusts it until the stream threads from the spray.
I stand under it and watch the water turn pink and then red where it strikes the floor.
I don’t want to see it, but I need to see it.
Danner’s blood, mixed with mine, goes down the drain in ribbons.
My hands shake when I scrub. Kira steadies the bar of soap with her palms.
“Who was it?” she asks, not looking up.
“Danner,” I say. My throat feels raw. “He’s dead now.”
Kira’s hands still. Water runs loud in the pause. “Good,” she says, and there’s nothing soft about it. “He deserved worse.”
Behind us, a small ripple moves through the bunks. Someone exhales a breath they’ve been holding for weeks. Someone else laughs once, a dry crack of sound. The woman who rocks and hums goes quiet. Luis steps closer, just a little.
Kira turns me carefully, eyes scanning for new damage the way ER nurses do. “Lift,” she says, and checks my ribs with her fingertips. “Can you breathe deep?”
“It hurts,” I answer, honest, and pull air all the way in to prove it.
She nods, practical. “Not broken, maybe bruised.” She scrubs my forearms, my hands, the crescent moons under my nails. “I wasn’t sure I was going to see you again.”
“Me either.” I close my eyes and scrub my face. The scrape on my cheek bites. I like the sting. It means my body still reports to me.
“Who killed him?” Luis asks from outside the stall. He’s trying to sound casual and can’t. “Was it…one of us?”
“No.” I let the water run over my scalp until the ship is the only noise in my head. “That…man. The neat one. He told me the rules.”
Split Lip snorts. “That’s The Broker. He loves his rules.”
“They love breaking them more,” Kira says, bitter. She passes me a thin, clean T-shirt. “Put this on.”
I do. The cotton clings damp to my skin.
The air bites my wet hair. I wring it out and tie it up with a strip of torn sheet that someone presses into my palm.
The girls see everything, inventory everything.
Tools, water, cloth, information—they move them around like currency because that’s what they are.
“Did he hurt you?” the girl with the bandage around her wrist asks. She’s eighteen maybe, eyes too old.
“He tried.” My voice doesn’t shake. It feels like an achievement. “I fought.”
“She fought,” Kira repeats, louder. “And he’s dead.”
“It won’t change anything,” Messy Bun whispers. “They’ll just replace him.”
“It changes something,” Split Lip says. “I won’t say thank you to the man who pulled the trigger. But I’ll say good riddance.”
A hum starts up again in the pipe overhead. The ship shifts under our feet; somewhere metal knocks on metal. Kira guides me to an empty lower bunk. I sit, my muscles thanking me with a tremor.
“How long have you been here?” I ask no one in particular.
“Five days,” says Bandage Wrist.
“Three weeks,” says Messy Bun.
“Two months,” Split Lip says, and the way she says it tells me she stopped counting somewhere after the first thirty days.
She pushes the hair off her forehead with the heel of her palm, a gesture so full of fatigue it hurts to watch.
“They move some off. New ones come on. Sometimes someone doesn’t wake up. ”
Luis’s mouth tightens. He sits on the edge of the bunk above me, legs swinging small, not touching the floor.
“Okay, so let’s go over this again. You said some of the crew is with them.” I ask.
“Some,” Split Lip answers. “Others are paid to look the other way. Some—” she cuts her eyes toward the door and keeps her voice low—“The captain is paid. He won’t help us.”
Kira presses a bruise pack wrapped in a cloth against my ribs, the old-fashioned kind you break in the middle to activate. Cold radiates into the ache. I guess the need for first aid is common enough that they are kept supplied with fundamentals?
“We’re on a schedule,” she says. “Mornings they check the rooms. Afternoons they ‘train’ the ones they’re shipping off somewhere soon. Nights…it depends who wins at cards.”
The words do what they are meant to do—show me how hopeless our situation is. Despair creeps in, taking shape. The feeling in the room, lifted just a bit by news of Danner’s death, drops with each detail.
Messy Bun lies back down and turns her face to the wall. The humming girl starts up again, quiet at first. The woman rocking her rests her chin on the girl’s hair and looks at a point on the far wall like she could walk through it if she stared long enough.
“I saw the lifeboats,” I say, because I need to talk about anything that isn’t the shape of a night here. “They look like they’re sealed. Locked.”
“Two are,” Split Lip says. “There’s a third the crew calls the coffin. You don’t want that one.”
I shudder and decide not to ask.
“Radio?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “The wheelhouse is locked when we’re out. When it’s open, they post men outside with rifles. I don’t think the captain speaks English to us on purpose. He does when the other men are around.”
“Are any of the crew decent?” I hear the smallness of the question, the way hope makes your voice too light.
Kira answers, careful. “There’s a baker—works nights, brings bread. He won’t look at us. Once he left a bottle of aspirin on a cart and pretended he didn’t. There’s a kid who mops and always leaves the mop by the door when he goes. Little things.” She shrugs. “Little things don’t open doors.”
“They keep you together on purpose?” I ask. “So you don’t go crazy by yourselves?”
“Together means less manpower to watch.” Split Lip’s mouth pulls. “Together means you can make an example once and everyone learns. They like efficiency.” She takes the ice pack from my ribs and presses her fingers gently along the bruise. “You’ll be black and green by morning.”
“Pretty,” I say. “It’s fine. He’s dead. That helps me breathe.”
“Good.” Kira sits on the bunk across, elbows on her knees. She takes me in like she did gamblers on the mezzanine—assessment, not judgment. “You looked for help up top?”
“I tried,” I say. “I found you instead.”
“Lucky us,” Split Lip deadpans, but there’s no heat in it.
Silence stretches. In it, I can hear the hopelessness starting to gather again.
It’s in the slow blink of Messy Bun’s eyes.
It’s in the way Bandage Wrist keeps worrying the strip around her wrist, an unconscious hand-to-mouth repetition of a thought she’s trying too hard not to have.
It’s in the way Luis’s feet stop swinging.
I won’t let it settle. I’ll let it pass over me, but it’s not going to settle in and get comfortable.
“Listen,” I say, louder than I mean to. It makes every head turn.
Even the humming quiets. I make my voice steady.
“I told you before…they didn’t just steal me from nobody.
They stole me from the four worst men to steal from if you want to sleep at night.
Conrad. Atticus. Maverick. Storm. They are going to find this ship. ”
Messy Bun snorts. “Ships are big. Oceans are bigger.”