Food sucked.
Sex did not exist.
And I couldn’t sleep worth a shit.
Another door.
Empty.
Finally, I made it to the last one. People were still fighting behind me, the sounds of furniture breaking and gunfire blurring together. It did not matter. We were almost done! I took a breath, pushed on the knob, and flung the last door open.
At first, the room looked bare, but only the way ghosts are right before they say boo.
The dank, crusted space yanked me straight back to the mattress in the middle of Daphne’s room, and my stomach roiled. Maybe from memory. Maybe not, but it smelled wrong, like rotting scabs that never saw daylight. I nearly slammed the door shut when a shivering bundle of shadows dragged my eyes to the middle of the floor.
Bang.
Whatever was huddled there stayed so quiet you’d think it believed that if it remained silent enough, I wouldn’t see it. That shit was kid logicand… Something broke behind my eyes. Hot at first. Then burning.
“Shit,” I whispered, stepping inside and shutting the bedroom door, reaching for the light on my phone. I was never one to tremble, but there wasn’t a shred of safety left in my body to keep my hand steady. This was a nightmare. My literal fucking nightmare.
Another gunshot cracked closer, sending red spray under the slit in the door when I saw two small bodies frozen in terror,bundled up in a mesh of skin and bones. From what I could make out, there was one boy, maybe six, and a girl, no older than five. Oversized shirts hung off their frames, which sat lifeless under clumps of matted hair.
“Please,” someone begged from somewhere else in the house. “Please don’t. I’m not a part of this. I just… I just needed the drugs.”
There’s such a thing as being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sex workers got a pass, but there was no way to know if that plea was lying.
Bang.
“Asher,” the little girl whimpered when the boy wrapped his hands over her ears, pulling her close to shield her.
“Stay still, Emm,” he whispered. “Maybe he doesn’t see us.”
But Ididsee them.Wasseeing them. Could neverunseethem.
“Get up,” I growled, swallowing the bile crawling up my throat and moving when I realized Nathem had changed direction. “Now.”
They didn’t. They only stared at me from their huddle.
“Is your family out there?” I asked, unsure why, because there was nothing I could do to stop this moment from hurting them. Absolutely fucking nothing. Just like I couldn’t keep Karsten from knowing Daphne’s face, or Wolfe from exposing it.
They blinked, their hollow eyes remaining still.
“Emm,” I whispered, crouching toward the girl. “I know I seem scary, but I will not hurt you.”
It was strange to be feared this way, recalling the warmth in Daphne’s eyes whenever I entered the frame. To her, there was no safer place than me, but for this hollowed-out, starving little thing, I was the devil in a face mask.
“We don’t have family,” the boy answered quietly, throwing up an arm over her chest as if that would stop me. “We’ve beenhiding since the bad men came. This used to be our house. I mean, we found it first.”
Flashbacks of Daph and me sleeping in an outhouse one winter sat broken in my spine. There were tons of unclaimed children in this city, hiding in dumpsters, eating off the street, disappearing forever, and you would never know it because kids are resourceful, and they understood how to hide.
“Okay,” I urged. “Get up.”
Bang.
“NOW!”
They scrambled to their feet, tattered and barely clothed, holding onto one another.