"I'm sorry, Maeve," I say. I reach over and take her small hand in mine.
"It’s okay," she says, though her eyes are shimmering. "Dada says he’s a ghost now. But ghosts are scary."
"Ghosts aren't real," I say firmly, even though I’m currently being hunted by one. "They’re just memories that don't know where to sit down. And your dad? He’s a big, grumpy wall. Nothing gets past him."
She smiles then, a small, shy thing. "You're like the lady in my book. The one who wasn't scared of the dragon."
"Oh, I’m terrified of the dragon, Maeve," I laugh, and it’s the most honest thing I’ve said in days. "I’m just very good at pretending I’m not."
The door opens.
I look up, expecting Lorcan, but it’s Echo. He’s leaning against the frame, his hands in his pockets, looking at the puzzle spread across the floor. He looks at me, then at Maeve, his expression unreadable.
"Boss wants to know if you've eaten," Echo says.
"I’ve had a bagel and a crisis," I say, not standing up. "Tell the 'Boss' that I’m busy solving the desert."
Echo snorts. "Maeve, Kieran’s looking for you. It’s time for your lessons."
Maeve sighs, a long, dramatic sound that reminds me so much of Lorcan I almost giggle. She stands up and brushes the dust off her dress.
"We'll finish the sky tomorrow, Atara?" she asks.
"Tomorrow," I promise.
I watch her walk out, her hand in Echo’s. Echo pauses at the door, looking back at me.
"She doesn't usually take to guests," he says. "Most of them are too scared of her dad to look her in the eye."
"I’m not most people, Echo."
"I’m starting to see that." He closes the door, and I hear the deadbolt slide home.
I sit back on the rug, surrounded by pieces of a sky I can’t see.
I came here with one goal: escape. Map the guards, find a car, get back to a world where 'trajectories' meant career paths, not bullet paths. For two days that plan has been the only thing holding me together.
But I’m a numbers person, and the numbers just changed.
Silas didn’t take Maeve’s mother for leverage. He took her to hurt. An eye for an eye—you take what a man loves, so he has to keep living in the hole where it used to be. That’s not a kidnapping strategy. That’s a man balancing a ledger written in people.
And sitting here on this rug, I finally understand the line item I’ve become. Silas saw me at that breakfast table in Ireland. Silas decided I’m what Lorcan loves now—he’s wrong, but it doesn’t matter what’s true, only what’s in his column. Which means I’m not a hostage anybody’s going to ransom. I’m a debt he fully intends to collect. The second I’m outside these walls with no men and no warning, I stop being Atara Ross with a 3.9 and alease in Brooklyn. I’m just the next thing he takes from Lorcan to make him bleed.
So, let’s game it out. Say I do it—pick the lock, beat the rotation, make the gate. Where do I run? Home, to my mother’s little house in Queens? To Tania’s couch? I’d be a flare going up in the dark, leading a man who keeps score in bodies straight to the doorstep of every person I’ve ever loved. Running doesn’t get me out of the equation. It just adds names to it.
And it isn’t only what’s waiting out there. A bad escape in here, a tripped alarm, an open gate, a guard pulled off his post to chase me down, is exactly the kind of crack a ghost crawls through. I picture Maeve in her yellow sundress somewhere in the middle of that, and my blood goes to ice water.
This is the part Mark would never believe: that I’d run the whole spreadsheet, and it would tell me to stay. Not because I’ve surrendered, God, no. Because the cage, as much as I hate it, and I do, I hate the locked door and the clothes in my exact size and the burner phone with three numbers in it, is the one place on the entire planet where my staying alive doesn’t get somebody else killed.
But I need to be sure.
I know I can’t just leave, but I need to be sure. I don’t want to be kept by a man who sees me as property, especially when I can’t think straight about it.
I can’t leave.
If I leave, who’s going to help her find the sky? Who’s going to tell her that ghosts aren't real when her Dad comes home with 'sauce' on his hands?
Lorcan is a monster. I know that. I felt the heat of his anger on the plane. I saw the coldness in his eyes when he destroyed my phone. He is a man who treats the world like a balance sheet of debts and punishments.
