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Behind me, a long silence. Then her breath, ragged, dragged in through her teeth. It was no surprise. It was the sound people made when the floor fell out of the world. I had heard it before, in other cars, on other nights. I had never once wanted to fix it.

I had facts and no comfort to offer. The facts were worse.

I reached down and switched on the radio, turning the dial until I found the first station that wasn’t talking. A slow saxophone drifted into the car, low and smoky. It would do. It would prevent any further questions, the kind I did not have answers to.

The engine hummed. The wet road hissed beneath the tyres. In the mirror, she had folded herself small against the seat, and the streetlights swept over her, bar by bar, and left her in the dark again.

❦ ❦ ❦

The neon sign came into view first, blinking VAC NCY through the mist. I cut the headlights a street early and let the sedan roll into the car park on the engine’s idle, tyres whispering over wet gravel.

I did not park nose-in, as I had left it. I reversed into the space across from 118, nose pointing out. The entry mattered. The exit mattered more.

I killed the engine and sat very still.

Eleven cars, as before. The pickup with the flat tyre. The van with its curtains drawn. Above the office door the camera hung from its housing, its loose cable swaying in the damp. Behind the glass, the clerk’s shape was bent over a phone, lit blue from below. No one looked up.

Water dripped from the gutters in a slow, uneven rhythm. The ice machine was silent. Somewhere beyond the fence the freeway breathed.

“Stay,” I said.

She did not answer.

I put the grenade in the glovebox, shook out my coat, and stepped into the mist. I checked the walkway in both directions before I opened her door. She had pulled herself into a tight shape on the seat, knees drawn up, arms locked around them. Dried blood had cracked across her mouth. Her bare feet were black with dirt and gravel. I laid the coat across her shoulders. She flinched, but she did not throw it off.

“Can you walk?”

“Yes.”

She swung her legs out and stood, and her knees folded at once. I caught her before she reached the ground. She went rigid in my hands, a sharp, wild flinch, as if the touch burned. I held still until it passed. Then I looked at her feet, and at the broken glass glittering across the asphalt, and made a decision.

I lifted her.

The weight settled against me, solid and warm. Her head lay near my shoulder, and I felt her heartbeat through the coat, quick and hard and far too young for what it had been asked to bear. She did not speak. Neither did I.

Five metres. Under the sign. Past the pickup. Past the dark window of 117. I did not look at the office again.

The key stuck, then turned. The door gave with its familiar grudge, and the stale cigarette air rolled out to meet us. I carried her through and kicked the door shut behind us. Locks. Chain. Back to the wall, listening.

The window unit rattled in its socket. Through the thin wall a game show audience applauded itself. The neon pulsed through the curtain, red and dark, red and dark.

I set her down on the end of the bed. The brown spread sank beneath her. The sports bag lay open beside her hip, and the dull gleam of steel showed inside.

Too late. She had already seen it.

I zipped the bag closed with one hand and pushed it beneath the bed with my boot. She watched every movement.

Then I pulled the cloth from my face.

I did not know what I expected. A flinch. A scream. Instead she stared at me, wide-eyed and unblinking, her gaze moving over my face the way a person reads a map in the dark. It caught on the scar along my cheekbone. It followed it into my beard. It stayed there.

I let her look.

“Bathroom,” I said at last, nodding toward the narrow door. “There is a towel. Wash.”

She did not move.

I took the chair from the corner, set it facing the door, and sat. It was going to be a long night.