4: The Pit
1051 Words
The room was a broom cupboard with a mattress thrown in. Ava found it by smell—industrial cleaner failing to cover something older. Sweat. Blood. The particular ammonia of someone else's fear.
She lay down. The sheet was damp. She stared at the ceiling, counting water stains.
Placeholder.
She pressed her palm flat against the wall. Concrete. Cold. Then—vibration. A low frequency that started in her teeth and traveled down her spine. Not machinery. Voices. Distorted by distance, by steel, by the particular acoustics of a building that had heard too much.
She pressed harder. The cold bit through her skin, into the cuts on her palms that stung, that ached, that reminded her with every pulse that she was human and healing slow. The vibration continued. Someone was screaming, three walls away, and the wall was thin enough to carry it.
She didn't sleep. She listened.
The screams had shapes. Some high, breaking. Some low, stubborn. One sounded like begging. Another like rage.
Then one that sounded like please, do you know who I am, and Ava's stomach turned because she heard Ryan in it. Not his voice—the tone. The expectation that pain would negotiate. That the world would bend back.
She got up. Her legs shook—human weakness, blood loss, the floor tilting until she caught herself on the doorframe. She followed the wall with her hand until she found the source—a steel door at the end of a corridor she hadn't walked. No handle. A scanner pad, dark.
She stood in front of it. The screaming stopped. Started again. Closer now, or she was imagining it. Her breath came too fast. Her heart hammered against her ribs, too loud, announcing her presence to any wolf who cared to listen.
Footsteps behind her.
"You're not sleeping."
Silas. Blood on his cuffs, fresh enough to gleam. He didn't look surprised to find her there.
"The wall," she said. Her voice was thin. She hated it. "It vibrates."
"The Pit." He stepped past her, pressed his palm to the scanner. The door clicked, opened a crack. The sound that escaped—wet, rhythmic—was worse than screaming. He closed it. "You don't go in. You don't listen. You don't ask."
"I didn't ask."
"You stood here for ten minutes." He looked at her for the first time. Not her face—her hands. White-knuckled on the doorframe. Trembling. "The room's the other way. Sleep. Or don't. Tomorrow you work either way."
He walked toward the front. She didn't follow.
She found the sink instead. Ran water until it went cold, splashed her face three times. The mirror showed a stranger. Good. The girl in the reflection had dark circles, chapped lips, a fever-brightness in her eyes that meant something—infection coming, or collapse, or the particular madness of humans who push past their limits.
She didn't sleep again. She waited.
Morning came gray through a high window. Ava's eyes burned. Her hands shook from caffeine and exhaustion and the particular clarity of having crossed a line she couldn't name. When she stood, the room spun and she had to brace herself against the wall until it passed.
Silas didn't look up when she entered. Just jerked his chin toward the table.
A man lay on it. Conscious. Gash from elbow to wrist, deep enough to show yellow. He watched her with flat, mean eyes.
"Stitch it," Silas said.
Ava looked at the needle. The thread. The wound.
"I don't know how."
"Then he'll bleed."
"You making me a test subject now?" The man glared at Silas, not her. "Last time you had a girl in here, she puked on my boots."
Ava picked up the needle. Her hands were steady. She didn't know if that was courage or shock or the cold from the wall still in her bones. She started.
Too slow. The thread dragged. The man hissed—not at her, at the fire in his arm. She didn't apologize. Didn't stop. Her stitches were crooked, too tight in places, loose in others. Ugly. Functional.
Her vision blurred at the edges. She blinked hard, forced focus. Human stamina, draining fast, running on fumes and fury.
She tied it off. Cut the thread with scissors that shook slightly in her grip.
Silas inspected the arm. Poked a stitch. The man grunted.
"Clean the table," Silas said.
That was all.
Ava wiped the blood. Her own reflection looked up at her from the wet metal, distorted, unrecognizable. She exhaled. Didn't know she'd been holding her breath since she woke up.
This was the first thing she'd done today that wasn't for Ryan's eyes. Wasn't for her father's approval. Wasn't performance.
Just blood and thread and the fact of her own hands.
End of day. Ava mopped the same floor she'd mopped that morning. The water in the bucket had gone pink, then brown, then something worse. Her back screamed. Her feet had swollen in her shoes—she'd found a pair in the back room, too big, rubber, someone else's castoffs—and every step was a negotiation with blisters that had burst, that wept clear fluid, that wouldn't heal for days because she was human and humans didn't knit back together overnight.
The steel door opened.
Silas stepped through. Blood on his knuckles. His collar. Not his—she could tell by the way he moved, loose, uninjured. He stopped when he saw her.
"You stayed," he said.
Not a compliment. An observation, like noting weather.
"You said you'd teach me," Ava said.
"Hmmm."
He walked past. Close enough that she smelled copper and something chemical, sharp. His shoulder nearly brushed hers. Didn't. She felt the heat of him—wolf temperature, higher than human, a furnace walking past her ice—and her own body flinched from the contrast, from the reminder of what she wasn't.
Then, at the doorway to the Pit:
"Tomorrow the sutures go deeper. Don't eat breakfast."
The door closed behind him.
Ava stood in the empty room. The mop handle was rough against her palm. Her back ached. Her hands smelled like antiseptic and someone else's blood. She swayed, caught herself on the mop, stood straight again.
She didn't smile.
She just kept mopping.
- Writer
