And, worst of all, he knows Sofia.
I let him kiss me. I let him touch me. I let him—my eyes burn, behind the protective sheen of my smog glasses. I let myself think that maybe I wasn’t alone after all, that maybe I didn’t have to stay alone. That maybe my life wasn’t just going to be hatred and grief and revenge. And as a result, I let myself run straight into the arms of the person who turned the last year of my life into a nightmare. Heartbreak and sorrow and hatred tangle as they sweep across my body, making me shudder, making me want to find a shower, a real shower with water like they don’t have down here, and stand there for hours, for days, until I’ve washed away every skin cell that ever touched the Knave of Hearts.
Even by the time I reach the elevator to the other levels of the city, my skin hasn’t stopped crawling. The smog fades, gives way to sunlight, to clarity, and I barely notice. I remain on foot, remembering how easily the Knave tracked me when I was in LaRoux’s custody. My lungs ache—no, my heart aches.
Just keep moving.
My mind grabs only snapshots of the minutes, the hours, that follow. I know I have to focus, I know I can’t fall apart. Not yet. But the only fragments that stick with me are the ones that hurt, the ones that penetrate the thickening fog of panic. My fingernails catching on the loose brick in the alley where I keep my emergency glove, the key to Kristina’s apartment. My legs aching and heavy as I sneak past the doorman in my old building while his head’s turned. My hands shaking so much that I almost can’t use the key-coded glove to send the elevator to the penthouse suite. My eyes blurring and stinging as I scramble through the bedroom in search of the gun, praying LaRoux’s heavies didn’t return for it. The surging of my heart in my throat when I find it hidden beneath the duvet I pulled off the bed during my struggle. The line of fire along my index finger as I smash the glass of the picture frame concealing the drawing of my father. The sick nausea in my belly as I ransack Kristina’s jewelry box, grabbing the strings of diamonds and pearls I never touched in the three months I lived here. The stabbing of my heart as I wait for the elevator back down, dread rising with each beat that when the doors open, Gideon’s face will be there on the other side.
This time when I stumble back across the lobby I don’t bother to look at the doorman. I’m never coming back here again. It doesn’t matter if I look like I’m falling apart.
The sunlight feels like knives when the revolving doors spit me back out onto the street. My eyes are burning still, and when I bump into a couple as I head for the sidewalk, they take one look at me and draw away in a hurry. I glance at the glass-fronted doors and see red-rimmed eyes, a streak of crimson where I must have rubbed my bleeding hand across my face, hair wild. I have to get off the upper level—I can’t fit in here right now. I shove my stolen hat back onto my head, scrubbing my hand against my shirt.
I start retracing my steps toward the elevator but change my mind and head for the one in the opposite direction. It’s farther away, but it’s too much of a risk to use the one I used before, the one I took with Gideon. Too late I remember the burner palm pad he gave me, still in my pocket. Damn it, damn it, damn it. Even I could track someone on a GPS-enabled device like this. I’m not thinking. I need to think.
A messenger’s waiting for the crossing signal at the end of the sidewalk, checking his own palm pad, his electrobike humming underneath him. I force my shaking hands to still long enough for me to slip the burner phone into the side pocket of the bag slung round his body.
Let Gideon—the Knave—track the messenger all around the city while I run. While I disappear.
When the heat and smog of the undercity wrap around me again, it’s like the comforting arms of a friend welcoming me home. Suddenly I remember why I hid here my first month or two on Corinth. It wasn’t just lack of funds. Here, despite the blood on my face, the panic in my movements, nobody looks twice at me.
It’ll be getting dark up above, and down here the lanterns are being lit. It’s getting harder to keep moving. I have to find a place to stop.
I can’t pay for a room somewhere without accessing my accounts, which he’s got to be tracking—using the stolen jewelry to buy my way in would throw up red flags in a respectable place and paint a target on my back in the rest. There are a number of free hostels and shelters here that don’t require ident verification or retinal scans to access, but Gideon will be searching those. He’ll know I’m too smart to use either the Alexis ident chip or Bianca’s, and he’ll assume I’ll go somewhere I can be anonymous. So I head for one of the police-monitored stations. It’d be mad to go to a place where the identities of all residents and tenants immediately go into the government system—even more easily accessed by a skilled hacker than the privately owned hostel systems.
Normally I’d hang around until I found a likely target to sneak me in—someone just desperate enough to be taken in by big eyes and a smile—but I can’t remember how to do it, how to gauge people. The faces that I pass are alien, their expressions written in a language I don’t know how to read anymore. So instead I head around back and wait until the fire exit opens a crack—a girl with a shaved head and fluorescent yellow earrings ducks out of it to smoke, wedging a platform boot in the doorway to keep herself from getting locked out.
I abandon everything and just shove a string of pearls into her hand. “I need to get in,” I rasp. “Quietly.” She stares at the pearls, then at me. She doesn’t know if they’re real. Any second she’s going to tell me to go screw myself and slam the door in my face.
But instead she licks the tip of the joint to extinguish it and stuffs both it and the pearls down the front of her shirt, then kicks the door open. She doesn’t say anything, though her eyes stick to me as I move past her. When I look over my shoulder, she’s already gone, shoulders hunched as she half jogs up the alley to vanish into the crowds beyond.
Inside, the gloom is as thick as in the alley outside. Steel-framed bunk beds line the room, topped by bare mattresses. A few heads lift when I come in, but if anyone notices I’m not the girl who left, they say nothing. That’s why I chose this place. Half of these people are felons checking in for parole, and the other half are headed that way in a few years. They don’t care who they sleep next to. The occupancy scans that sweep by every half hour or so don’t check IDs, as long as the number of people in the rooms matches the number of people who went through check-in.
I find a bottom bunk in the corner, vacant but for a few candy bar wrappers. I avoid the large stain toward the foot of the mattress, unidentifiable in the meager light, and crawl in against the wall until I’m hidden in the shadows.
I will my body to stop shaking. Tell myself I’m safe now. That he can’t find me. That out of sight of the security eye in the center of the ceiling, not even a thorough facial recognition scan through every security camera in the district could find me. But now that I’ve stopped, it’s not fear that’s making me shiver.
Eyes burning, I try to block out the smells, the noise, the scratchy mattress and the odor of mildew wafting up from the fabric.
Here at the bottom of the city, no one cares when you start to cry. Half the people in this room are suffering from some kind of withdrawal or another, and the rest know to leave well enough alone. You don’t come here seeking comfort. You come here to disappear.
The squalor should make me long for the penthouse. I should be imagining the cocktails the SmartWaiter can produce, remembering the feel of Kristina’s soft sheets, closing my eyes and seeing the false stars emerging on the windows in my mind’s eye.