Grace. I’m here to help.
I remember that too. I remember not believing it. Running from him the same as I ran from the rest of it, because by then everything with a face was something to get away from.
I look at the driver.
Decker.
The supply room comes back whole. Three feet of space that didn’t feel like three feet. My name in his mouth like he meant to keep track of it. I told myself that day it was nothing. Big men are common at Aurora. My body doesn’t usually have opinions about them.
It had one about him.
Something inside me leans toward him now, warm and unwelcome, and I want to shove it down. My body doesn’t get a vote on this. Not after what just happened.
How did he see me?
I guess it doesn’t matter, because he’s got me now. He’d been watching. Those times we met weren’t accidents. He was surveilling me. I just didn’t know to be afraid of it yet.
He’s Aurora’s tracker. The rumor Nadia never quite finished saying out loud, in a hallway I wasn’t supposed to be in. Someone new, kept off the roster, digging into something for months. I didn’t have a face for it then.
I got one in the supply room, the day he asked about a clean count, and I understood—clipboard still in my hand—that he hadn’t come in for an airway kit at all.
Whatever he’s been building, I’m the answer to it. He wasn’t standing behind that hardware store by accident today, and I don’t think anything since has been an accident either.
He’s taking me back to answer for it.
“You have to stop the truck.” My voice comes out steady, which has always been my one useful trick. “Please. You don’t understand what’s happening.”
He doesn’t look over. “Then tell me.”
I don’t.
Because the rest of that sentence is Serenity, and Serenity is the reason I’ve spent months being someone I don’t recognize. If Aurora finds out what I did, I’m done. And if the Syndicate finds out Aurora knows, Serenity’s done too.
“I can’t,” I say.
“Then I can’t either.” He says it like a fact that doesn’t need his opinion attached to it. And that’s when whatever’s been holding me together since the alley gives out.
“You don’t get it.” My voice climbs, and I let it climb. “There’s no time. You can’t just take me from there. I have to go back. Please. You have to let me go back—”
He glances at me, then puts his eyes back on the road. “You want to go back there? To them?”
“Yes!”
“Not happening. I’m taking you back to Aurora.”
“I can’t!” It comes out close to a scream. “I can’t go back there.” My hands won’t stay still—the belt, the door, the belt again, useless, everywhere at once. A truck passes going the other way and something in me lunges for it without permission, twisting toward the window, banging a flat hand against the glass hard enough to sting.
The truck doesn’t slow. Nobody looks over.
I go for the handle next. I get half an inch of give before the central locks drop under his thumb—one flat sound—and the handle stops moving.
So I hit the glass instead. Both fists. I’ve stopped forming words, just noise, enough of it that anyone with working ears should have to notice. A sedan goes by on the other side of the road and doesn’t slow. A truck behind it does the same. I keep hitting the window like the tenth time will do what the first nine didn’t.
“I’ll go out the window,” I say, and I mean every word of it. “The next one that comes, I’m opening it. I don’t care what speed we’re at.”
He pulls over.
For one full breath, I think I’ve won. I think he’s letting me go, and my shoulders come down from around my ears—
