1
Pink Static
The ceiling had water stains.
I stared at them for a long time before I remembered how to blink. Three shapes—one that looked like a rabbit if I tilted my head, one that looked like nothing at all, one that looked like a map of somewhere I'd never been. The light through the curtains was wrong. Too yellow. Too thin. The wrong time of day for waking.
I didn't remember falling asleep.
I didn't remember checking into this room.
The sheets were white. Not the pink I'd trained myself to expect, just white. Cheap. Rough against my skin. They smelled like bleach and something floral, something trying too hard to cover the smoke and sweat and whatever else had lived here before me.
My hands were clean.
I lifted them above my face, turning them in the pale light. The nails were short, bitten down to nothing. The knuckles were scraped raw—healing, mostly, but a few still scabbed. Someone had washed them recently. Someone had scrubbed the blood from the creases of my palms, from the space between my fingers, from under those bitten nails.
I didn't remember doing it.
The gun was on the nightstand. Black. Compact. A Glock 43, I thought. This one was clean. Recently fired, recently cleaned. I could see the faint score marks on the slide where someone had wiped it down.
I didn't remember firing it.
The knife was under my pillow. I reached for it without thinking, my fingers finding the hilt with the ease of muscle memory that bypassed thought entirely. Ceramic blade—no metal for detectors, no reflection to catch the light. Gabriel's favorite. He'd given it to me on a day I couldn't quite place, in a room that kept shifting between pink and grey and the color of nothing at all.
"Every good girl needs a good blade."
His voice. I could hear it—almost. The words were clear, but the tone kept sliding away from me. Was he warm when he said it? Clinical? Amused? I pulled at the memory like a loose thread and the whole thing unraveled.
"You're ready."
Different memory. Same voice. Different room—or maybe the same room, decorated differently, or maybe I was imagining the whole thing.
"You're ready."
When had he said that? The night he left? A week before? A month? Or was it a dream—one of those dreams where you woke up certain something had happened, certain someone had spoken to you, certain the world had shifted while you slept?
I couldn't remember.
I sat up slowly. The motel room came into focus around me—cheap furniture, beige walls, a television bolted to the dresser. The curtains were drawn but light bled around the edges, casting everything in that yellow, tired glow. My clothes were folded on the chair by the window. Black jeans. A dark sweater. Boots with bloodstains on the toes that someone had tried to scrub out and hadn't quite managed.
Someone had undressed me. Someone had folded my clothes.
I didn't remember that either.
The bathroom light flickered when I turned it on.
Fluorescent, buzzing, the kind of light that made everyone look like a corpse. I stood in front of the sink for a long time before I could make myself look at the mirror. The woman who stared back was someone I almost recognized.
Pale. Too pale. Dark circles under her eyes like bruises, like someone had pressed their thumbs into the hollows of her face and left stains. Her hair was tangled, falling around her shoulders in snarls that would take an hour to brush out—if she could find a brush, if she remembered where she'd put it, if she'd ever owned one in the first place.
Her throat was bare.
I touched it. Pressed my fingers to the hollow where the collar used to sit. The skin was smooth—no marks, no bruises, no sign that anything had ever rested there. But I could feel it. Phantom metal, phantom weight, phantom pressure against my windpipe. I could feel the ghost of it pressing down, and my fingers traced the line where it used to sit, and I couldn't tell if the memory was real or if I'd dreamed it or if I was dreaming now.
Gabriel's face.
I tried to call it up. Tried to see him—really see him, the way he looked when he stood over me, the way his mouth curved when he said my name, the way his eyes went dark in the moments before he touched me.
