The Cut I Don't Remember Earning

The Burner Phone

Cole didn't yell. I'd almost have preferred it if he had yelled; I could've read, could've filed it under normal reaction to your girlfriend getting stared down by a stranger in an unmarked car. What he did instead was go very still, the particular stillness of a man doing math he doesn't like the answer to, and ask Nova four questions in a row without raising his voice once.

Make and color of the car. Which direction. How close. Whether they got a plate.

Nova didn't have a plate. Nobody ever seemed to have a plate, in my limited experience of these things, which felt less like bad luck and more like a pattern I hadn't lived here long enough to have noticed yet.

"You're not leaving the property alone again," Cole said to me, not a request, and I didn't have the energy to argue with it, mostly because some quiet, uncooperative part of me agreed with him.

He didn't ask what the man had said. I don't think it occurred to him that there'd been words at all; Nova hadn't caught them, and I hadn't volunteered that I had, because I still didn't know what to do with a name I couldn't place, spoken by a stranger who'd clearly expected it to mean something.

It didn't mean anything. That was the problem. I turned it over the whole ride back, the whole rest of the afternoon, tried it against every name I'd learned since waking up in this life; Doc, Ink, Rowdy, Priest, Nova, Fisher, Tank, and it fit none of them. It sat in my chest like a key to a door I didn't know existed yet.

By the time I got back to my apartment that night, I'd made a decision I probably should've made days earlier.

If some earlier version of me had been scared enough to hide a warning in her own jacket lining, she might not have stopped there.

I searched slowly, methodically, the way you search a house you suspect isn't as empty as it looks. I went through drawers I'd already gone through once, this time running my fingers along the backs and undersides instead of just the contents. I checked the lining of every jacket I owned, not just the cut. I pulled the mattress half off the frame and immediately felt ridiculous doing it, and kept going anyway, because ridiculous felt a lot better than the alternative, which was doing nothing and staying exactly this lost.

I found it in my boot. The left one, the one I never wear, shoved to the back of the closet, a small, cheap phone, the kind you'd buy with cash and never register for a name, taped flat against the inside of the sole where nobody casually reaching for footwear would ever think to check.

My hands were shaking again by the time I peeled it free.

It still had a charge, barely. One bar, blinking like it was annoyed at being woken up. I sat down on the closet floor with my back against the wall and stared at the screen for a long time before I made myself open it.

One contact. No name. Just a string of numbers saved under a single letter — M.

No call history. No messages. Whoever set this up had either used it exactly once or planned to use it exactly once and never got the chance.

I thought about calling Cole. I thought about it hard, actually, for longer than I felt comfortable admitting, showing him this, letting him decide what it meant, letting someone else carry the weight of not knowing for a while. But some old, tired, entirely too-familiar instinct stopped me before I could pick up my real phone. Don't hand people your problems until you understand them yourself. Don't be the thing that needs managing.

I know that instinct is a flaw. Kai told me as much, practically to my face, three nights ago. I picked up the burner phone anyway.

It rang twice.

"It's about time." A man's voice, low, clipped, tired in the specific way of someone who's been waiting on something for longer than they meant to. Not a voice I recognized. Not the man from the gas station, not the one from the car, someone else entirely, someone whose voice existed nowhere in the small, incomplete map of people I'd met since waking up in this life. "Did you get her out yet?"

I didn't say anything. Couldn't, for a second, my mouth working around in the air with nothing behind it.

"Hello?" A pause, sharper now, wary. "Who is this?"

Her. Not me, the way he'd said it, flat and expectant, like it was a known fact between us, a task assigned and overdue, told me this wasn't about me at all. Someone else. Some other her I apparently owed an answer about, an answer that was already late by whatever clock this man had been keeping.

I thought of Nova, seventeen and curious and asking careful questions nobody would answer for her. I thought of the name the stranger had mouthed through a car window, a name I still couldn't place. I thought, with a cold drop in my stomach, of every woman in that clubhouse who might be worth getting out of somewhere.

"Say something," the voice said, harder now, "or I hang up, and we're back to nothing, the same as the last four days."

I hung up first.

I sat on that closet floor for a long time afterward, the dead phone heavy in my hand, my own heartbeat loud enough to fill the whole small room. Four days. He'd said four days, the same four days I'd been walking around wearing a name I hadn't earned and a ring nobody had explained and a warning I'd apparently written to myself in a hand I didn't remember using.

Whoever M was, whatever he was waiting on, he'd been waiting since before I lost my memory. Which meant this — this call, this contact, this entire hidden phone — wasn't something that had happened to me during the two missing days.

It was something I'd set up before them. On purpose. Like I'd known, even then, that I might need a way to reach someone the club couldn't overhear.

I thought about the note again. Don't trust the ring. Trust him.

I was starting to understand, sitting on that floor with a stranger's unfinished question ringing in my ears, that whoever I'd been before I lost those two days had been playing a much more careful, much more frightening game than anyone currently sitting at that breakfast table had any idea I was capable of.

And somewhere out there, a man named M was still waiting for an answer to a question I didn't understand yet, one that started with did you get her out, and ended somewhere I hadn't found the courage to imagine.