I leave it on her pillow. On top of her phone.
The bathroom door handle turns.
I am out of the room before it opens.
The hallway is empty. Fluorescent lights. Carpet that muffles my footsteps. I hear her voice behind me—Max?—muffled through the door I just pulled shut, and I don't stop. The elevator is at the end of the hall and I walk toward it with my split lip and swollen shut eye and my jacket and the bond in my chest pulling three directions at once, and I don't look back.
I can’t look back.
I can’t let anything stop me.
Not again.
∞∞∞
Wren's car is idling at the gas station on the corner of Ridgeway and Fourth when I round the block.
The fluorescent canopy light turns everything the color of old paper. She's in the driver's seat. Boots on. Hair pulled back. The engine running, the headlights cutting through the last of the dark. She sees me crossing the lot and her face does the thing—the quick inventory, the assessment. My lip. My eyes. The way I'm walking. She reads me the way I read rooms: fast, total, silent.
I get in the passenger side. Pull the door shut.
She doesn't say anything for a beat. Lets me settle. Lets the car hold both of us.
"What the hell happened? You look like shit," she says. Soft.
"Thank you."
"Your eye, your lip—"
"It's nothing."
"That'snotnothing, Max. Did Zero–"
"It's nothing I want to talk about right now."
She looks at me for one more second. Then she nods. Puts the car in drive.
"Where are we going? I gave Reeves the slip when I left, she’s going to be livid." she smirks.
I've been thinking about this since the driveway. Since Zero's face in the moonlight and the letters under three doors and the sound of Bane's voice through the office wall saying twelve weeks like a death sentence. I've been thinking about which precinct, which station, which desk I'm going to walk up to and put my name on a piece of paper that cannot be taken back.
"The Seventh Precinct."
The car swerves. Not much—an inch, maybe two—but enough that I feel it. Wren corrects, her knuckles going white on the wheel.
"The police?" She looks at me. Quick. Back to the road. "Max, what the hell happened? Who did that to your face?"
"It's not about my face."
"Then what is it about? You call me at five in the morning, you're standing at a random gas station with your face split open, and now you want me to drive you to a police station—"
"The facility, Wren."
She goes quiet. The word does what it always does between us—drops the temperature, strips the air, puts us both back in a hallway with concrete walls and locks that cycle at three in the morning.
"I'm going on record," I say. "Everything. What they did to us. What Kline is still doing to the omegas in that building. There was a federal case—Atlas was building it—but it fell apart. The prosecutor got pulled. Kline's lawyers got to the deputy AG and it's dead." I swallow. "But there's a detective at the Seventh who's been working a state-level case for months. He lost his federal backing but he doesn't have a victim willing to testify. He doesn't have a name on a report."
More information I overheard and filed, as if I knew days ago–weeks ago–that this was always how it was going to end.
