My mother was that. My father was that.
Two people who'd have done anything for what was theirs, and what was theirs was me, and they died on a kitchen floor keeping their mouths shut about a boy across the street.
Nobody's been that for me since.
Python leans forward on his forearms.
"He's not wrong on the security," Python says. "Take the head count. You put Amara, Razor, me, Boulder, Brick, Doom, Rooster, Lashes over that border, plus whatever Vegas brings—this club's got Zorro, Axel, one prospect and a cartel man on the gate holding a compound with nine women and five kids in it, and a man up in Arizona who's been reading our mail for a decade." He sits back. "I'm not saying no. I'm saying somebody's got to say the number out loud."
"The number's said," Amara says. "Anybody else."
And I hear myself talking.
"Eleven doors," I say.
Every head at that table comes around.
I don't know I've stood up until I'm standing. Razor's hand goes flat on the table and Amara's comes up off it an inch, and I know exactly what that inch is—it's the start of the gesture that puts me back in my chair and reminds a woman with no patch that she was brought in here as a resource, not a voice.
Nine years I waited for a door to open so somebody could decide what happened to me next.
I'm not sitting down.
"There are eleven doors inon that hallway," I say. "Twelve rooms, but the second one on the right flooded the summer before I got out and they never fixed it. So eleven. And I know what's behind every one of them, because for nine years learning it was all I had."
Amara's hand stays where it is. She doesn't bring it down.
"Fourth door on the left is a woman from Guerrero. She's been down there longer than I was. She doesn't talk anymore, and not because they did anything to her throat. Because she decided not to. Sixth door's a girl who came in the winter before last and cried for twenty days and then stopped, and stopping's worse. Everybody down there knows stopping is worse." My voice is steady and I have no idea how, because nothing elseabout me is. "Eighth door on the left was a girl who couldn't have been seventeen. I never saw her face. Not one time in two years. I knew her by the way she knocked."
Zorro's looking at the table again.
"You want to know what it sounds like," I say. "That's what everybody in this room is sitting here not asking me. It's fine. I'll tell you."
"Mila." Finn's voice, low, from the foot of the table.
"No." I don't look at him, because if I look at him I'm finished. "He said they're not ours, and he's got the right to say it, and I've got the right to answer it. That's the deal, isn't it? Everybody talks before anybody votes."
Amara's hand goes back down flat on the wood.
"Talk," she says.
So I go back down there.
I don't want to. I've spent nine months keeping the door on that hallway shut in my own head, and I open it now in a warm room full of men because it's the only currency I've got.
The smell comes first, the way it always does—wet concrete, bleach, and the sourness of eleven women who get one bucket of water a week.
"Concrete and dirt strip the words out of everything, so you don't hear sentences. You hear sound with the edges worn off." My hands are on the back of the chair in front of me and they're not shaking yet. "You hear a door open. That's the worst of it, the door. You count footsteps coming down that hall and you know before they stop whose it's going to be. Every woman on that hallway is doing the same count at the same time."
I have to stop.
Not for effect. My throat's closed and I have to wait it out, standing up, in front of Amara, Lashes, and these men, and nobody says a word while I do it.
"And when they stop at somebody else's door," I say, "you feel relief."
Boulder's head comes up.
"You lie in the dark relieved that it's her and not you. And then you go on living inside a body that felt that." My eyes have gone hot and full and I let them, I don't wipe them, I keep going. "That's the part nobody wants to hear about. Everybody wants the part where we held each other up. And we did, we did that too. But there were nights I heard that door stop somewhere else on the hall and I said thank you. Out loud. In the dark. To nothing." My voice breaks, and I keep talking through the break. "I said thank you while a girl I loved was on the other side of a wall having the worst night of her life. I have to carry that. She's still down there, and I got to leave, and I said thank you."
