Chapter 24

She heard the blood drip against the hard concrete floor of the closet she was hiding in. This wasn’t the safehouse she thought it had been, that much was clear now. Her delirium from hunger, trauma from the violence with the detention guards, and adrenaline from her escape, a three-card-monte of pain, all worked together to push her into a hallucinatory state whereby she’d wandered into a random building, robbed a poor teenager of their hand terminal to place her call to Amaya, and assaulted a janitor to steal his keys before locking herself in one of the hundreds of custodial closets in the residential building she’d chosen to enact her chaos.

It wasn’t until she ended the call with Amaya and allowed herself a moment to take in the silence that she realized blood was running down her right leg and had been pooling in the dead guard’s too-big shoe. The blood was a warm sticky fairy’s pool of sap in which her toes rested. If she tried hard enough, she could hear the schlick, schlick, schlick as she tapped her toes to a song playing in her head. That damn guard. The single bullet she’d fired must have gone through him and bounced back against her shin.

She’d come out of her fugue before calling Amaya, but didn’t realize she was in the wrong building until after she’d ended the call. It was too late to call back. They wouldn’t answer and she shouldn’t call - it put them all at too much risk. The single call had placed them all in a significantly higher bracket of risk already, so that was out of the question. Figure this one out on your own, toots, she joked. She chuffed at her joke and, briefly forgetting her injury, spread her legs to stretch and bumped her shin against the equipment rack she was sitting next to. “Fuck!” she shouted. She slapped her hand over her mouth, painfully aware of the noise she’d been making. The tears had threatened to come when the guards first started beating her after the very first call to Amaya, but she kept them back. Now, though, she began to cry.

Now, here she sat, bleeding from a bullet ricochet wound in a closet, silently sobbing as she came to the realization that she’d given her only lifeline the wrong address. She was a dead woman. She could try to make her way to the location she’d given Amaya, of course, but the risk of going back out into the exposed hallways of the building she’d laid waste to earlier was too great. She’d be recognized by one of the many custodial staff and detained until Jurisdiction enforcers arrived to take her back to the very cell she’d just escaped, or picked up by the cameras and arrested by tower security, or worse. Better to bleed out here with some dignity than go back to the cell where that fat fuck almost raped you, she reasoned.

This sucked, there was no way around that, but she remembered what Marcus told her back in the skiv and was suddenly back in her cell, the smell of insta-boil noodles and body odor from her cell-mate; Chin up, better times to come. ‘Til then, fix your place here and now, little bird. She smiled and promised Marcus to be better.

Remember who you are. Be who you are. Move up from here. I am Zoraya Kessler, I survived. I will survive.

She’d done what she could: called Amaya to tell her to come to Cirrus, bandaged her wound with some antiseptic and a band-o-sporin pad, and taken stock of her situation. Doing what she could, though, wouldn’t keep her alive for much longer, that was clear now. She was hungry, bleeding, and alone. If she didn’t figure out a plan soon, she may as well mark this closet as her death-hole. Figure this out, Z. You’re smarter than this. She slapped her face lightly with both hands and tried to focus.

A knock on the door startled Z from her stupor and she bumped her knee painfully against the storage rack again. She hissed in pain as a child’s voice called to her from behind the door.

“Miss? Are you alright? I saw you limping… .and there’s blood. Do you need help?” The voice stalled momentarily as its owner tried to find the words before they all gushed out like water from a shower head. “Also-you-took-my-hand-terminal-and-my-mom-will-be-really-mad-if-I-come-home-without-it.”

Oh my god, I robbed a little girl, she remembered, and the guilt washed over her as if a trap-door had opened above her to drown her in sticky guilt. “I’m… I’m alright, I don’t need help. Thank you, though,” Zoraya responded.

“…but, my hand terminal… Can I have it back?” the voice asked sheepishly, yet somehow condescendingly, from the other side of the door. Zoraya’s mouth turned up slightly on one side as she found a smile. This was a brave little girl, she had to give her that. Most kids would probably have run home to their parents after getting robbed by a babbling bleeding stranger.

“Oh, yeah of course. Sorry about that,” Zoraya said as she slid the child’s terminal through the space under the door. “Here you go.” Zoraya was sitting on the opposite wall from the door, but the closet was small, so she only needed to lean forward slightly to reach the door. The terminal clicked against the door as it caught briefly before popping between the gap. Zoraya let her head rest against the door and listened for the girl. She heard the rustle of the young girl picking up the terminal and sliding it into a pants pocket or maybe a backpack.

“Thanks. Well, I hope you stop bleeding,” the kid offered, before Zoraya heard her steps fade down the hallway. Weird kid, but I hope she makes it home safe, Zoraya thought to herself. Now, back to the problem at hand. Bleeding leg, my backup is going to the wrong place, and I might actually starve to death if I don’t eat something soon. Oh, right - and, she’d just given her only line of communication back to the little form which she’d stolen. Home run, Z.

The antiseptic pad seemed to stop the bleeding for now, and the time she’d given herself in the closet was working to calm her nerves. She was thinking a little more rationally now that the adrenaline was leaving her system and the numbing agent in the pad was working, but Zoraya knew that a clock was running; she could hear its imperceptibly ticking march against the deadlines she’d set for herself. I’ve got time; just be smart with it, she reasoned with herself, and it almost felt true. Presuming Amaya did decide to risk an attempt at meeting, she would arrive at the meeting place Z gave her in a few days to a week. It wouldn’t be easy, but she could do it. She would get something to eat, she would make her way to the address she’d given Amaya, and she would find a place to wait until they arrived.

She looked around the small closet in hopes of finding something that she could use; a janitor’s lunch-pail for some food, maybe, or an unused uniform for some fresh clothes. Her eyes landed on a gray cover-all suit on a hanger strung up and hanging over a pair of rubber boots on the electrical panel in the corner. Finally, some god-damned luck, she thought, reaching for the hanger and boots. Hardly a stylish getaway outfit, but it would get her out of the building and avoid suspicion on the street. She carefully stripped out of the bloody guard’s uniform and stepped into the cover-alls and boots. Zipped up and fitted, the suit was about a size too big, but she figured it looked much better than the ripped and bloody uniform that she was wearing previously.

She balled up her bloody clothes and placed them in the corner behind the storage rack to conceal them as much as she could and then moved to the door to leave the closet. She placed her hand on the handle and her ear to the faux-wood material of the door, listening for any movement out in the hallway. Her heart fluttered as she heard voices and footsteps approaching the closet.

“Right mess this is, mate. Sure hope someone cleans it ‘fore Uli and them are over later,” she heard a male voice complaining from the hallway.

“True that, bruv,” another male responded, “else you ain’t gonna’ host another one of these parties again, eh?” The second male laughed as he finished speaking.

“More like you’ll be cleanin’ it up. Bruv,” the first man said teasingly.

“Ah, fuck you,” said the second man. They both laughed as their steps slowed and they came to their apartment door.

From what Zoraya could hear, they were only a few doors down from her closet. She listened intently as the two men unlocked their apartment door and went inside. A series of faint beeps signaled that they were now in their flat and the rest of the hallway was quiet. Time to move.

She opened the closet door and risked a quick peak into the hallway and noticed two things. First, her stomach jumped up into her chest when she saw how much blood she’d left on the floor in the hallway. Not enough to be worried about dying, yet, but more than an average bloody nose of insignificant scratch would leave behind. Second, she saw a little girl of about 10 standing at the end of the hallway watching her. Weird, but whatever. No time to worry about her, she said to herself, and stepped out into the hallway as she pulled the door closed quietly behind her.

Simultaneously, an apartment door two units down the hall opened, the door that Zoraya heard the two men go into earlier. A short and pudgy middle-aged man, dressed only in some leisure shorts and sandals, his hairy gut hanging over the front of his shorts, stepped into the hall. He locked eyes with Zoraya momentarily and began to walk briskly towards her. “Oh good!” he shouted, raising a hand into the air to catch Z’s attention, like he was hailing a transport. “Oy, Jan-o! You lot gonna clean this up today?”

Zoraya turned and shambled down the hallway towards the stairwell and the little girl. At the sudden commotion, the girl bolted into the stairwell at the end of the hallway. Z heard the man’s confused shouts dying down behind her. He’d given up and was leaning against the wall, winded from the couple of excited steps he’d taken, with a hand on his head, scratching where hair used to be. “Right-o, thanks for the help, asshole,” he managed to gasp after her between heavy breaths.

Clearing the hallway, Zoraya ripped the stairwell door open and moved down the stairs as quickly as she could manage. Her first couple of steps had almost certainly ripped open the wound on her leg, but the antiseptic pad was still holding for now - at least enough that she didn’t feel blood pooling in her boots yet. She noticed that she was backtracking onto a trail of blood that she left earlier in the day when she’d come into the building the first time. She made it to the ground floor and followed her trail back to the entrance to the building. There was no sign of the girl she’d seen earlier. For the best, she thought. She hoped, again, that the little girl made it home safely.

She opened the door from the stairs and crossed the threshold into the lobby of the tower. The stairs had been dimly lit, and as her eyes adjusted to the bright lighting of the lobby she was struck by how quiet it seemed. As she looked around the lobby she noticed that almost all of the usual hussle and hustle was absent. A couple of front desk attendants stood nervously at their kiosks, but the rest of the lobby was empty. She shuffled along the side of the room to find the door to get back out onto the street, but not before one of the front desk attendants noticed her and attempted to get her attention, just like the man in the hallway had done.

“Excuse me, custodian?” the attendant closest to her called after her. He looked like he was just a kid; short, curly blonde hair, freckles and pimples, a squeaky voice that betrayed the fact that puberty had yet to visit him. She couldn’t stop, he would almost certainly recognize her if she let him get a good look at her.

“Sorry, off shift,” she said over her shoulder to him and waved a dismissive departing salutation with her right hand.

“But the blood!” the kid yelled back, surprised and frustrated that Zoraya did not share his immediate need to clean the blood. “It’s your job to clean the mess!” he said, gesturing to the trail of blood Zoraya had just come back from. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the other attendant raising a terminal to his ear and speaking softly, probably calling the Jurisdictional Officers. Definitely time to get gone.

“Clean it yourself, then,” she said back gruffly, turning to look at the kid. He took a step back, clearly offended at the custodian’s disrespect. Z turned and opened the front door of the lobby to step onto the street.

Alright, kiddo. Let’s get to Rosewood.