Herring

Crew with an AR-15

The blindfold smelled like old coffee and regret. Not my regret. Someone else's. The fabric had history.

We walked. Or rather, he walked and I stumbled along behind him like a drunk toddler, one hand on my shoulder steering me through what felt like seventeen different kinds of terrain. Concrete. Gravel. Something wet I didn't want to identify. A step down. Then another. Then a third, and I stopped counting because the air changed—cooler, danker, the particular breath of places that haven't seen sunlight since the last geological era.

Deia: "Are we in a sewer? Please tell me we're not in a sewer."

Anders: "We're not in a sewer."

Deia: "Are you lying."

Anders: "I'm always lying. But this time I'm not. It's a drainage tunnel. Completely different. Sewers carry waste. This carries rainwater."

Deia: "That's the same thing with better branding."

He didn't laugh. But I felt his hand twitch on my shoulder. Which, for Anders, was practically a standing ovation.

More walking. Echoes now—our footsteps bouncing off walls I couldn't see, multiplying into a small army of blindfolded idiots. The air grew warmer. Then cooler again. The acoustics shifted from tunnel to chamber, and I heard voices.

Multiple voices. Male. The particular cadence of people who had been awake too long and were running on whatever combination of caffeine and poor life choices kept night operations afloat.

A door. Heavy. Metal. The sound of it swinging open was the sound of something that didn't want to be opened.

Anders: "We're here."

The blindfold came off.

I blinked. The light was dim—industrial fixtures hanging from a low ceiling, casting everything in a sickly green and a tinge of yellow that made people look like they'd already died and were just waiting for someone to notice. The room was a bunker. Literally. Iron walls. Concrete floor. A table in the center littered with maps, laptops, coffee cups, and what I desperately hoped was not a grenade but probably was a grenade.

Five men stared at me. Six, counting Anders. All of them frozen mid-whatever, like I was a pop quiz they hadn't studied for.

Man One—broad, bearded, built like a refrigerator that had decided to grow a personality spoke: "What the fuck."

Man Two—thinner, glasses, the kind of face that had seen too much internet and not enough sunlight: "Anders. Who is this."

Man Three—younger, maybe early twenties, with the specific energy of a golden retriever who'd been raised by wolves: "Is that a child? Did you bring a child?"

Deia: "I'm nineteen."

Man Three: "A fetus. You brought a fetus."

Anders: "She's a new business partner."

The room absorbed this information poorly. Man One set down his coffee with the deliberate care of someone preventing himself from throwing it.

Man One: "You're out of your mind."

Anders: "Possibly."

Man Two: "A random stranger. You brought a random stranger into the bunker. Does she even know what kind of business this is?"

Deia: "I'm getting the sense it's not Amway."

Man Three snorted. Man One did not.

Man One: "She still looks wet behind the ears."

Deia: "Maybe that's because I almost drowned two weeks ago. The wetness is metaphorical and also possibly residual."

Man Three: "I like her."

Man One: "Shut up, Leo."

Leo—apparently—did not shut up. He grinned at me like we were already friends. I decided he was either the best person here or the most dangerous. Possibly both.

Anders: "She won't have much of a choice."

Man Four—silent until now, older, grey hair cropped short, a face like a closed fist—finally spoke.

Man Four: "Where did you acquire this... love interest?"

The room went quiet. Anders' expression didn't change, but something behind his eyes flickered.

Anders: "Excuse me?"

Man Four: "I'm just saying. You disappear for hours, come back with a teenage girl, call her a business partner. We're all thinking it. Didn't know you liked them this young."

Anders picked up a coffee cup from the table—not his, someone else's, still half-full—and threw it at Man Four's head.

Man Four ducked. The cup shattered against the iron wall behind him, spraying lukewarm coffee across three people and a laptop. Leo yelped. Man Two started dabbing at his keyboard with his sleeve. All this occurred with the calm and composed demeanor of something that occurs every other day.

Deia: "Coffee. At this hour. Makes sense, I guess. Running a night operation. Gotta stay awake to commit your various felonies."

Man Two: "It's cold brew. We're not savages."

Deia: "My mistake."

Anders: "She'll be taking on a small job. Nothing too crazy. We're hitting an oil deposit. Friends overseas want some barrels smuggled. She ensures they're in good condition. Helps with loading. That's it."

I stared at him.

Deia: "That doesn't sound like a small job."

Anders: "It's relatively easy. Security is mostly lax. Roads are free. Not much to worry about."

Deia: "Those are all words that precede someone getting shot."

Leo: "She's got a point."

Man One: "I'm still stuck on the part where we're trusting a newborn with an oil heist. What can she even do?"

Oil heist. Things were escalating again. Fast.

I spoke up before Anders could answer.

Deia: "First of all, I haven't agreed to anything. Second of all, I could go to the police. Right now. This whole operation. Every one of you. I know where the bunker is. I know your faces. I know Leo has terrible taste in friends."

Leo: "She's not wrong."

The room went still. Then—slowly, like a wave building—they started laughing. Not nervous laughter. Real laughter. The kind of laughter that comes from people who have heard threats from actual dangerous people and find mine adorable by comparison.

Man One: "You could try. Whether you're willing to bet your life on that is another question."

Man Four: "The police aren't a problem, girl. Not the ones who matter."

I looked at Anders.

Deia: "Then why were you running from them that night. On Falk Street."

Anders: "Scale. Smaller police are easier to manage. A patrol officer, a beat cop—those are controllable. The convoy that night was not. Different animal."

Deia: "Manage. You mean bribe."

Anders: "Same thing."

Man Two: "She's not very smart, voicing opinions like that in a place like this."

Deia: "I'm smart enough to know when I'm being recruited for a felony by a man in three coats who carries an AR-15 in his clown car of horrors."

Leo: "Clown car of horrors. I'm using that."

Man One ignored him. He turned to Anders.

Man One: "How does she know you were on the run?"

Anders: "She was there. The one on the news."

The room went quiet again. But different this time. Not annoyed. Interested. Leo's eyes went wide.

Leo: "Holy s**t. The bridge girl. You're the bridge girl."

Deia: "I get that a lot."

Man Four: "You pulled the bridge girl into our bunker."

Anders: "She pulled herself. She came to Falk Street looking for work. I intercepted."

Man One: "Why didn't you drop that bombshell earlier?"

Anders: "We'll discuss it later."

Man One looked like he wanted to discuss it now. But something in Anders' tone—or maybe the memory of the coffee cup—made him reconsider.

Anders turned to me.

Anders: "You don't have to do this. You can back out. Walk away. Forget you saw any of this. But if you decide to come—uh, a particular street. Midnight. Three days from now. You'll know which one."

I opened my mouth. Closed it. The room was watching me. Leo gave me a small, almost encouraging nod. Man Four looked like he was calculating the cost of a shallow grave.

Anders: "Think about it. Don't think too much. If we wanted to hurt you, we would have. A long time ago."

He reached into his coat—the coat of infinite surprises—and pulled out a mask. Black. Featureless. I hadn't seen the others leave, but suddenly they were moving, gathering things, and several of them had masks too. Where the f**k had those come from.

Deia: "Wait. Where did—"

Anders: "This is less painful than knocking you out."

Deia: "What—"

Gas. From somewhere. I didn't see the source. It filled my lungs before I could stop it—sweet, cloying, wrong. I tried to run. My legs didn't cooperate. The room tilted. Leo's face was the last thing I saw, and he was waving.

Bastard.

I woke up on a sidewalk.

Cold. Damp. The particular cold and damp of Seattle at an hour that didn't deserve a name. My cheek was pressed to concrete. My ribs ached. My everything ached. The sky above was the color of a bruise that had given up on healing.

I sat up. Slowly. The world swam and then settled. I was two blocks from my apartment. Two blocks. They'd dropped me two blocks from home.

My hand was clenched. I opened it.

A piece of paper. Folded. Crumpled from my grip.

I unfolded it.

Midnight. 3 days. You'll know where.

I turned it over.

Don't think too much about it.

I sat on the sidewalk for a long time. The paper in my hand. The ring on my finger—pink and gold and green—catching the faint glow of a streetlamp. The city was quiet. Not peaceful. Just... holding its breath.

I thought about Aldy. About my floor. About the rent increase crumpled on my kitchen counter. About Varietta's face underwater. About Anders' hand on my shoulder, warm and solid. About Leo waving goodbye while I was being f*****g gassed.

I got up. Walked home. Unlocked the door. Aldy was there. The floor was there. The crack in the ceiling was there.

I sat on the floor—my floor, my beautiful, correctly-textured floor—and I cried.

Not the quiet tears from the alley. Not the calculated tears I'd used to bargain with men who wanted to hurt me. Real tears. Ugly tears. The kind that come from somewhere deeper than sadness, somewhere older than grief. The kind you don't plan and can't stop.

I cried for my grandmother. For the fish. For the bridge. For the cold dark water and the hands that pushed me down. For the rent I couldn't pay and the life I couldn't hold together. For the girl I used to be, the one who brought fish to school for luck and believed, stupidly, beautifully, that it might work.

I cried until there was nothing left. And then I lay on the floor, breathing, and let the silence fill the space where the tears had been.

Three days.

Midnight.

You'll know where.

I closed my eyes. The ring was warm on my finger. The floor was cold beneath me. And somewhere in the city, a man in three coats was waiting for me to decide what kind of person I was going to be.

I fell asleep on the floor. It felt right. The floor had never lied to me. The floor had never asked me to be anything other than what I was.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid f*****g— always a f*****g i***t…