She hears the men before she sees them move — boot heels on concrete, the wet click of someone working a toothpick, the low ripple of laughter that passes between them like a joint. Kara keeps her eyes on the ceiling seam. Counting. The seam splits the tiles from the far wall to the light fixture, twenty-three feet, and she has counted it eleven times since the shaved one left the room. The dead fly in the tube hasn't moved. The concert thuds through the ceiling, a bass line she can feel in her molars.
"She's still awake."
"Course she's awake. Look at her."
A shoe nudges her hip, not hard, testing — the way you'd nudge a dog to see if it's still breathing. She doesn't give them the flinch. Her breasts are bound so tight the cord has bitten past the first layer of skin, and every breath is a negotiation with the burning. She has stopped trying to breathe deep. Shallow is survivable. Shallow is what's left.
The gum one crouches beside her head. Sunburned face, wide and flat, the toothpick rolling from one corner of his mouth to the other. He studies her the way he might study a car he's thinking about buying.
"You're pretty when you're wrecked," he says. "That's a compliment. Take it."
She doesn't answer. Her throat still tastes like copper from the stocky man's chokehold hours ago, and the words would cost more than she has.
"Aw, she's shy now." He pulls the toothpick out, flicks it across the floor. It skitters under the leather chair, near the letter opener. She tracks it — the opener's steel glints dull in the green lamplight, three feet from her hand. Three feet. She files the distance away like a coin in her pocket. "You weren't shy in the corridor. I watched the tape. Six angles. You screamed a lot."
"Shut up, Mikey," one of the others says, from the couch. "Just get on with it. Vic wants her walking tomorrow."
"Vic wants her walking. He didn't say how far." Mikey's grin is a long pale seam in his face. He reaches down and takes a fistful of her hair — she has a lot of it, blond and tangled now with sweat and worse — and drags her up off the floor by it. Her scalp screams. She comes up on her knees because the alternative is her hair tearing out at the root, and the cord around her breasts pulls tight and she makes a sound, small, involuntary, that she hates the second it leaves her mouth.
"There it is," he says. "That's the sound."
She looks past him. The office is unchanged — the desk, the green lamp, the framed photograph she refuses to look at directly, the whiskey dark in its bottle. The door is closed. There are four of them now, she counts without moving her eyes: Mikey, the gray-templed one who stands with his arms crossed and says nothing, a heavyset man she hasn't seen before leaning against the desk with his belt already unbuckled, and Dave, flat-eyed Dave, sitting on the arm of the leather chair with his hands hanging between his knees.
Four. And the letter opener three feet behind her, under the chair, where the toothpick went.
"On your back," Mikey says. "Or I drag you by the hair. Your call, sunshine."
She goes down on her back. The floor is cold and the dust grits against her shoulder blades. The green lamp is directly above her, and she fixes on it — the way it hums, the small dark spot inside the glass where a fly got in years ago and never got out. She can hear the crowd above like weather. Forty thousand people. None of them know this room exists.
Mikey kneels between her legs and shoves her thighs apart with both hands, hard enough that her knees crack against the concrete. He spits — a wet gob that lands on her stomach and slides toward her navel — and works it down with two fingers, spreading her open. She is dry and raw from hours of this, and the first push of his fingers burns like a scrape on sunburn.
"Tight," he says, almost admiring. "They always say the strong ones are tight."
"Just fuck her," the heavyset one says. "Stop narrating."
Mikey laughs and drives three fingers in at once, no warning, and Kara's back arches off the floor before she can stop it. The cord bites. The lamp swings in her vision. He works his fingers in and out with a wet, deliberate sound, curling them up hard against the wall of her, and her body does what bodies do — it floods, it loosens, it betrays her — and she can feel the slick of it against his knuckles, and she can hear him hear it.
"There she goes," he says. "She likes it. Look at that."
"I don't," she says. Her voice is a rasp, torn at the edges. "I don't."
"Sure you don't." He pulls his fingers out and holds them up, glistening, and shows them to the others like a man showing a fish he caught. Then he wipes them on her thigh, a long smearing stripe, and unzips.
He's thick and short and already hard, and he doesn't look at her face when he lines himself up — he looks down at where he's about to go, the way a man looks at a hole he's about to fill. Kara shuts her eyes. The first thrust splits her open with a burn that travels all the way up her spine, and she bites down on the inside of her cheek until she tastes iron, because the alternative is the sound, and she has decided she will not give them the sound.
He fucks like he's punishing the floor. Fast, no rhythm, his balls slapping wet against her ass, the sweat of him dripping off his jaw onto her chest. The heavyset one comes around and watches from above her head, upside down in her vision, his unbuckled belt hanging. The gray-templed one hasn't moved. Dave hasn't moved.
She counts the hum of the lamp. She counts the bass line. She counts Mikey's thrusts, and she loses the count at forty-something because he angles up and hits something that makes her whole pelvis clench around him against her will, and a moan comes out of her — low, animal, not hers — and Mikey groans in triumph.
"Hear that?" he says. "That's the sound. That's the one I wanted."
He comes with his hand fisted in the cord around her breasts, using it like a handle, hauling her up off the floor by the bindings while he empties into her — and the pain of that, the sheer white flare of it, is worse than anything he's done with his cock. She sees spots. She hears her own voice break on a sob she can't hold back. He pulls out and lets her drop, and the wet of him runs out of her and down the inside of her thigh, warm, and she lies there with her chest heaving and the cord still cutting.
"My turn," the heavyset one says, and he's already moving, knee-walking over her, and there is no pause, no breath, no moment where anyone asks her anything at all.
He is bigger, and he does not hurry. He pushes in slow, an inch at a time, watching her face the whole way, and Kara learns in that slow entry that there is a worse thing than fast. He bottoms out and stays there, seated, his pubic bone grinding against her clit with every shallow roll of his hips, and it builds something in her she does not want and cannot stop — a pressure coiling low and hot behind her navel, her cunt clenching around him in little pulses she can't control, the slick of her own body making a wet sound every time he moves.
"She's doing it," he says, conversational, to the room. "She's gripping me. Feel that?"
"Hurry up," Dave says, from the chair.
"She's close. Look at her face."
She is not close. She is not. But her body is doing the thing it did with Mikey's hand, the thing it did with the gum one's fist, and she can feel it climbing anyway, a wave she can't hold back with any muscle she has. He presses his thumb down on her clit and rubs in circles while he fucks her, and the wave breaks. Her heels skid on the concrete. Her back bows. She comes around a stranger's cock with her teeth clenched and her eyes squeezed shut and a sound in her throat that is half a sob and half something worse, and the men laugh, all of them, even the gray-templed one makes a soft sound through his nose.
"Good girl," the heavyset one says, and finishes himself with three hard strokes, pulling out at the last second to paint her stomach and the underside of her bound breasts with it. It lands warm and starts to cool immediately. He pats her hip, twice, like a man patting a dog that fetched, and gets up.
Kara lies still. Her legs are open and she does not close them. There is cum cooling on her belly and running out of her and the cord is cutting into her ribs with every breath and the lamp hums and the crowd above roars for a song she used to like.
Then Dave stands up.
He crosses the room without hurrying. He picks up the whiskey bottle off the desk, takes a pull, sets it down. Then he looks at her — really looks, the flat eyes traveling down her body and back up to her face — and something in his jaw shifts.
"Roll her over," he says. "I want the other one."
"Vic said—" the gray-templed one starts.
"Vic said no marks above the collar. Her ass isn't above her collar." Dave unbuckles his belt, slowly, and pulls it free of the loops with a sound like a zipper. "Roll her over."
Hands grab her hips and her shoulder and she is flipped, the concrete scraping her nipples and the cord digging in from the new angle, and she gets her forearms under her and lifts her head — and there it is, three feet away, the letter opener, dull steel under the black leather chair, next to the toothpick Mikey flicked away. Three feet. Her hand is on the floor. Her hand could be there in one lunge, if her legs would hold her, if nobody was watching, if —
Behind her, Dave folds the belt in half and brings it down across her ass.
The crack is louder than the music. A line of fire opens across both cheeks, and Kara's whole body jerks forward and her forehead hits the floor, and before she can process the pain he does it again, and again, laying them down in a rhythm — lower, across the backs of her thighs, up higher across her lower back — until she is shaking and her skin is raised and hot and she can feel the welts rising under his aim. She does not count the strokes. She counts the lamp. She counts the three feet between her hand and the steel. She counts the crowd.
He drops the belt. His weight comes down on the backs of her thighs, pinning her, and one hand fists in her hair and pulls her head back until her throat is a straight line and she is staring up at the ceiling seam upside down. His other hand spreads her ass and his cock pushes against the tight ring of muscle there, blunt and insistent, and she understands what he means to do a half-second before he does it.
"No," she says, the first clear word she's spoken in an hour. "No — not there —"
He pushes in.
The pain is a white sheet across her vision. It tears something, she feels it tear, a hot wet line, and she screams — really screams, the scream she has been holding back all night, and it comes out ragged and raw and echoing off the parquet, and she hears the men behind her react, someone says Jesus, someone laughs, and Dave fucks into her ass with slow grinding strokes while her tears run sideways down her temples and into her hair and her bound breasts grind against the floor with each push, the cord sawing into her ribs.
She keeps her eyes open. Three feet. The steel. The toothpick. Her hand is flat on the floor, and her fingers are curled, and she is measuring — the distance, the angle, the weight of Dave on the backs of her thighs — and she is not thinking about the pain anymore, she is thinking about the lunge, about the second it would take, about whether the gray-templed one is watching her hands or her face.
He is watching her face.
She knows it because his eyes are the only ones in her line of sight, and they do not blink, and they do not look away, and when she moves her hand — one inch, two, a slow crawl across the dusty parquet toward the chair — his crossed arms come uncrossed.
"Dave," he says.
"What."
"Her hand."
Dave stops mid-stroke. He looks down past his own hip, and he sees her arm stretched out across the floor, fingers reaching, three inches from the letter opener now, and Kara lunges.
She gets her fingers around the handle. She has it. For one full second the cold steel is in her fist and she is rolling, twisting under Dave's weight, swinging the blade up toward the soft of his throat —
And Dave catches her wrist.
Dave's grip closes on her wrist like a vice, and Kara feels the small bones grind against each other under his thumb. She has the opener. She has it, the handle cold and real in her fist, the point an inch from the tendon in his neck — and then his other hand comes down on her forearm, and he twists.
The snap is small and wet, and it happens inside her, and for half a second there is no pain at all, only the wrongness of a thing that should not bend bending. Then the pain arrives, and it is not like the cord or the belt or the tearing in her ass. It is a bright white animal that lives in her arm now, and it screams up her shoulder and into her teeth, and her hand opens on its own, the fingers splaying, the opener dropping.
It hits the concrete with a flat clink and skids. Dave lets go of her wrist and it falls limp, flopping against the floor at an angle no arm makes, and Kara looks at it — her own arm, her own hand, the thumb turned inward — and something in her chest goes quiet. That quiet is worse than the scream.
"There," Dave says. He is breathing hard. He picks up the opener, weighs it in his palm, and looks down at her the way a man looks at a tool he has just fixed. "That's better."
"Dave." The gray-templed one has moved. He is standing at the edge of the leather chair now, arms still crossed, and his voice is the same flat nothing it has been all night. "Vic said no marks above the collar."
"It's her arm."
"It's a broken arm."
"She swung a blade at my throat." Dave turns the opener over, catching the green lamplight on the flat of the steel. "You want to explain to Vic why I let her open me up?"
The gray-templed one says nothing. That is his answer, and Kara, lying on her side with her dead arm under her, understands that no one in this room is going to stop what is coming. She understands it the way she understood the red light in the pit — too late, and all at once.
Dave kneels behind her. His knee comes down on her hip, pinning her to the floor, and his hand finds the back of her neck and presses her cheek flat against the concrete. Dust in her mouth. The hum of the lamp. The bass line two floors up, still going, still playing the song she used to like.
"You had your chance," he says, close to her ear. "You had the whole night to be smart."
She feels the point of the opener against her back. It is a small cold dot, just below her shoulder blades, right of her spine, and it rests there for a moment while Dave finds his angle. She knows what it is. She knows, and she cannot move, and the knowing is the worst part — she has spent her whole life being the one who moves first, and now she is the one who waits.
He pushes it in.
It does not go in the way a blade goes into a body in the movies. It goes in the way a nail goes into wood — slow, resistant, and then all at once, and Kara feels the steel travel through muscle and fat and something deeper, and then there is a sound in her own throat that she has never made before. Not a scream. A note. A single long note, rising, that she cannot stop, and it goes on while Dave drives the opener in to the hilt and leaves it there, standing out of her back like a pin in a map.
Then he stands up. He does not pull it out. He just stands, and looks down at her, and wipes his hands on his thighs.
Kara's legs are gone.
Not numb. Gone. There is a line across her back, and below the line there is nothing — no floor, no cold, no ache, no weight. Her feet are somewhere. She cannot find them. She tries to move her toes and gets back a silence like a room with the power cut, and the note in her throat keeps rising until it runs out of air and breaks into a sob, and then another, and then she is crying the way a child cries, without dignity, without stopping.
"Get the doctor," the gray-templed one says.
"No." Dave is buckling his belt. "Vic said no marks above the collar. She's got a blade in her back and a busted arm. You want to call the doctor and explain that?"
"She's going to bleed out."
"She's Supergirl." Dave says it like it's an insult. "She heals. That's the whole point of her. Leave it in, take it out, doesn't matter — she'll knit. That's what Vic's counting on." He looks at the others. "We're done. Get her dressed and get her out of here before somebody upstairs starts asking why the office smells like a butcher shop."
Someone finds her clothes. She does not see who. The band tee is bunched somewhere under the desk and they pull it over her head, and the movement jostles the opener and the note comes back into her throat, thin and high. The shirt hangs on her wet, and they do not bother with anything else. No underwear. No shoes. Just the shirt and the cord still cutting into her breasts and the steel standing out of her spine.
Hands lift her. Two men, one at her shoulders and one at her ankles, and her legs swing like rope between them. Her head lolls back and she sees the ceiling seam one last time, twenty-three feet, and the dead fly in the tube, and then the door, and then the corridor with its long fluorescent tubes buzzing overhead.
They carry her past the service corridor. She recognizes the smell — the wet concrete, the bleach, the ghost of everything that happened there — and she turns her face into the shoulder of the man carrying her shoulders, and the shoulder is Paul's. She knows it is Paul because he is the only one who holds her like she might break, and because his breathing is wrong, fast and shallow, like a man carrying something he is not supposed to be carrying.
"Easy," Paul whispers. "Easy, easy."
She wants to tell him she is not easy. She wants to tell him she is Supergirl. But her mouth will not make the words, and her legs will not make the steps, and the only thing she can do is be carried.
They take her through a fire door and the night air hits her like a wall — cold, and huge, and full of sound. The concert is still going. Forty thousand people are still inside, and the parking lot is a black sea of trucks and buses and rental vans, and the sky above is orange from the stadium lights, and somewhere a roadie is rolling a cable and a girl is laughing at something on her phone, and none of it knows she exists.
They carry her between two semis. The gap is narrow and dark and smells of diesel and old rubber, and they set her down on the asphalt there, on her side, because her back has a blade in it and she cannot lie on it. Her cheek is on the ground. Gravel presses into her skin. Her arm lies where it fell, bent wrong, and her legs lie behind her like they belong to someone else.
"Vic's going to be pissed," someone says.
"Vic's going to be fine," Dave says. "She's alive. That's what he wanted."
Footsteps. The fire door closes with a boom that echoes off the trucks. And then there is only the diesel smell and the distant thud of the music and the sound of her own breath, shallow, wet, and the small bright fact of the opener still in her back, keeping her pinned to the world.
She lies in the dark between the trucks and waits for her body to remember what it is.
It does not.
She tries to move her hand — the good one, the one Dave did not break — and it moves. She tries to move her foot and there is nothing there to try with. She tries again, and again, and each time the answer is the same, and after a while she stops trying and just lies there with her palm flat on the asphalt, feeling the cold come up through it, the way she used to feel the sun come up through her skin when she could fly.
She cannot fly now. She cannot walk. She cannot even crawl.
Above her, the stadium lights throw their orange onto the underside of the clouds, and the bass line goes on, and somewhere in the dark a truck engine turns over and settles into idle, and Kara Danvers, who has never in her life been unable to get up, lies in the gravel between two trucks and does not get up.
Her fingers find a seam in the asphalt, a crack, a small line of grit and tar. She presses the pad of her thumb into it, hard, until it hurts, because the pain in her thumb is the only pain she can still locate, and she holds onto it the way she held onto the ceiling seam, the way she held onto the three feet between her hand and the steel — as a thing to count, as a thing that is real, as proof that some part of her is still here.
The fire door opens again.
Footsteps on the asphalt, slow, unhurried. A shadow falls across her — a shape in the orange light, standing at the mouth of the gap between the trucks, looking down at her.
"Well," the shape says. "Look at you."
Kara turns her face up off the gravel, and the light behind him makes him a black cutout, but she knows the voice. She has known it since the corridor. It is the limpy one. Tommy. The one she scratched.
He comes closer and crouches, and his face resolves out of the dark — the smile, the long look he gives her mouth, the scratch she left on his cheek still scabbed and red. He reaches out and touches the handle of the letter opener where it stands in her back, and he wiggles it, gently, the way you would test a loose tooth.
Kara's whole body convulses around the blade, and she makes the note again, and Tommy watches her make it with his head tilted, like a man listening to a song he likes.
"There it is," he says. "I was hoping you'd still be awake."
Tommy pulls the handle toward himself, just a fraction, and lets it settle back. The steel grinds against something inside her that is not bone and not muscle, and the sound arrives in her ear before the pain does, a wet click like a knuckle cracking underwater. Her heel drags across the asphalt — she cannot feel it, but she sees the leg move, sees the knee bend, and the seeing is a lie her eyes are telling her body.
"Huh," Tommy says. He takes his hand off the handle and looks at his palm, then at her, and there is no cruelty in his face right then, only the mild curiosity of a man who has found a new tool and is working out what it does. "Vic's gonna want to know about that."
She tries to say his name. What comes out is air and grit.
"Easy, easy." He pats her shoulder, the good one, the way you'd settle a spooked horse. "I'm not gonna do anything. Dave already did the interesting part." He rocks back on his heels and stands, and his shadow leaves her face, and the orange light comes back into her eyes, and she can see the underside of the clouds again, moving slow, indifferent. "You know what's funny? I been waiting all night for my turn. Scratched me, you did. Right here." He touches his own cheek. "I figure I earned it."
She closes her eyes. The asphalt is cold against her cheek and the cold is the only thing that is still honest, and she presses her thumb into the seam again and counts the gravel under her palm, one, two, three, the way she used to count the seconds between a lightning flash and the thunder, back when she was small and the world was still a place where things made sense.
"But you can't." Tommy's voice has gone flat. "Can you. Look at you." He crouches again, and this time he does not touch the blade. He takes a fistful of her hair and lifts her head off the ground, and the movement pulls at the wound and the note comes back into her throat, and he studies her face in the orange light the way a man studies a receipt. "Nah. You're done." He lets go, and her cheek hits the asphalt, and the gravel bites, and it is almost a relief, the bite, because it is a thing she can still feel.
He stands up and walks to the mouth of the gap between the trucks. He stands there with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the parking lot, and she can hear the concert through the open fire door, the bass line, the crowd, the far-off roar of forty thousand people who do not know her name. She used to love that sound. She used to stand at the edge of stadiums and listen to it and think, that's for me, that's mine, that's what I keep safe.
"Hey." Tommy raises his voice. "Dave. Get out here."
The fire door opens and Dave comes out, and behind him the gray-templed one, and Paul, and the heavyset one, and the gum one with the toothpick still in his mouth, and they arrange themselves at the mouth of the gap in a loose half-circle, and the orange light catches the tops of their heads and leaves their faces in the dark. Kara watches them from the ground. They are enormous from down here. She has never in her life seen a man from this angle, looking up, and it occurs to her, with a clarity that feels almost like her old self, that this is how the girls in the corridor saw them. This is the angle. This is what the world looks like when you are on the ground and the men are standing.
"What," Dave says.
"She's still awake." Tommy tilts his head at her. "And she can't feel her legs. I tested it."
Dave looks down at her for a long moment. He has the opener's twin somewhere — no, he has nothing in his hands, they are empty, and he wipes them on his thighs again, an unconscious gesture, like a man who has touched something he cannot get off. "So?"
"So Vic said no marks above the collar." Tommy's smile is thin. "Nothing about below."
Dave looks at her for a long moment. The orange light catches the flat of his face, and she can see him thinking about it, the way she has seen men think about a thing they want to do and are deciding whether the wanting is worth the cost. His hands hang at his sides. He wipes them on his thighs again, that unconscious gesture, and then he takes a step toward her.
"Tommy," he says. "You checked her legs?"
"I wiggled the blade. She didn't move nothing below the waist." Tommy's voice is easy, almost lazy. "That's what I said. I tested it."
"That's not what I asked." Dave's shadow falls across her. "I asked if you checked her legs. Like, touched them. Pinched them."
Tommy's smile thins. He doesn't like being questioned. Kara watches him weigh it — the scratch on his cheek is still scabbed, and she can see the memory of it in the way his jaw works. "No. I didn't pinch her."
"So you don't know." Dave crouches beside her, close enough that she can smell him — sweat and whiskey and the metal smell of the opener that's still in her back. His hand comes down on her thigh, heavy, and he squeezes. She watches her own leg take the pressure. She feels nothing. The hand is on her, she can see it, the fingers pressing into the meat of her thigh, and there is no signal coming back from that skin, no pressure, no heat, no cold, nothing at all.
Dave sees it too. His face doesn't change, but his hand does — he digs his thumb in harder, a deep bruising press, and her leg just lies there, a thing that belongs to her the way the asphalt belongs to the parking lot.
"Huh," he says, and it's the same sound Tommy made, the same flat note of a man finding a new fact.
He stands up. His hand stays on her thigh for a moment longer, then lifts, and she watches him look at his palm, the way he looked at his hands after the belt, and she knows he is thinking about the same thing Tommy was thinking about. The order. The no-marks-above-the-collar, and what it does and does not cover.
"Vic said no marks above the collar," Dave says, to no one in particular. "He didn't say nothing about how she feels it."
The heavyset one laughs. It's a short, wet sound, like a dog barking once. The gum one rolls the toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other and says, "She can't feel it, that's the point. She can't feel nothing. It's like—" he gestures vaguely with the toothpick, "—like fucking a corpse that's still warm."
Kara's stomach turns. The word corpse lands somewhere in her chest and sits there, cold. She is not a corpse. She can feel the asphalt under her cheek, the gravel biting her palm, the seam of the crack under her thumb. She can feel the cord around her breasts, the blade in her back, the wet of her own body cooling on her thighs. She can feel all of it. Just not her legs. Just not her feet. Just not the place where they are doing the looking.
"Do it," Tommy says. "Dave, do it. I wanna see."
Dave looks at him, then back at her. His eyes travel down her body the way they traveled down her body in the office, and she knows that look. She has seen it on every one of them tonight. It is the look of a man deciding that a thing is his to take.
He unbuckles his belt.
Kara watches him do it. She watches him pull the leather free of the loops, and she does not close her eyes, because closing her eyes is something she did earlier tonight, something she did in the office, and she has decided, lying here in the gravel between the trucks, that she is done with that. She watches him unzip. She watches him push his jeans down over his hips, and she sees him, hard, the way he was hard in the office, the way they are all hard, and she thinks about how strange it is that this is what they all want, this is the thing they all come to take, and she has never once understood it, not really, not the way they do.
He kneels between her legs.
Her legs are dead. They lie where they were dropped, one straight, one bent at the knee, and he has to move the bent one himself, his hand on her ankle, repositioning her like a man moving a piece of furniture. He spreads her and she watches it happen — the way her thighs part, the way the orange light catches the wet on her skin, the way he looks down at her like a man looking at a map.
"Look at that," he says. "She's still wet."
"Yeah?" Tommy says, from somewhere behind her head.
"From before. From the office." Dave's hand finds her, two fingers, spreading her open, and she feels nothing, nothing at all, and that is the worst part — she can see his hand on her, she can see the fingers working, but the body between her legs is a country she no longer has a passport to. "She's gonna be loose. She took a lot tonight."
"She took you," the gum one says. "In the office. She took all of us."
Dave's jaw shifts. He doesn't like being reminded that he was one of many. He lines himself up and pushes in, and Kara watches her body receive him, the way the flesh gives, the way her hips shift on the asphalt with the pressure of it, and she feels none of it. Not the stretch. Not the burn. Not the invasion. Just the sight of it, the fact of it, the knowledge that he is inside her and she cannot feel a single inch of him.
Dave grunts. He pushes deeper, seating himself fully, and then he stops and looks down at her face, and she looks back at him, and there is something in his eyes that she has not seen before. Not cruelty. Not triumph. Something closer to unease.
"You feel that?" he asks.
She doesn't answer.
"Answer me." His hand comes down on her hip, hard, a slap that would have made her flinch an hour ago. "You feel that?"
"No," she says. Her voice is a scrape, a thing with no breath behind it. "I don't feel anything."
He holds her gaze for a long moment. Then he starts to move.
It is the strangest thing she has ever watched. Her body moves with his — her hips rocking, her thighs shifting, the wet sound of him sliding in and out of her, a sound she can hear even though she cannot feel it. Her cunt is slick and open and he fucks her the way he fucked her in the office, with a slow, grinding rhythm, his hands on her hips, pulling her onto him, and she watches it the way she watched the ceiling seam, the way she watched the dead fly in the tube, as a thing that is happening, a thing she is present for, a thing she cannot stop.
"She's not moving," the gum one says. "Look at her. She's just—lying there."
"She can't move," Tommy says. "I told you. The blade. It cut something."
"Is she gonna be like this forever?"
"I don't know. Vic's gonna have opinions."
Dave fucks her and they talk about her like she is not there, like she is a piece of equipment that has malfunctioned, and Kara lies on the asphalt and watches the orange light move across the underside of the clouds and thinks about how strange it is that she can still feel her fingers. Her good hand is flat on the gravel, and the seam is under her thumb, and she presses her thumb into it and counts, one, two, three, and the counting is the only thing that is still hers.
Dave's rhythm changes. He speeds up, his breath coming faster, and his hands tighten on her hips, and she watches his face — the way his eyes go unfocused, the way his jaw drops open a fraction — and she knows what is coming, she has seen it on every one of them tonight, and she does not close her eyes. She watches him come. He makes a sound, a low groan, and he drives himself deep and holds there, and she feels nothing, not the heat of him, not the pulse of him, not the wet that she knows is spreading inside her. She just watches his face go slack, and then he pulls out and sits back on his heels, breathing hard.
"Jesus," he says. "That's—that's weird."
"What's weird?" Tommy says.
"She didn't do nothing. She just—" Dave gestures at her. "She just lay there. Like a doll."
Tommy laughs. It's a short, ugly sound. "You wanted her to fight you? You broke her arm and put a knife in her back. What'd you expect?"
"I don't know." Dave stands up, tucks himself back in, zips. He doesn't look at her. "I don't know what I expected."
He steps away, out of the gap between the trucks, and the orange light takes him, and she hears him spit on the asphalt, a wet sound that carries. The heavyset one is looking at her now. The gum one is looking at her. Paul is not looking at her — Paul is looking at the ground, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders curved like a man trying to make himself small.
The heavyset one steps forward, and she hears the gravel shift under his boots before she sees him. His shadow joins Dave's shadow, then replaces it, a wider darkness that cuts off the orange light. He doesn't crouch. He stands over her, looking down, and she watches his face the way she has watched all their faces tonight, looking for the thing that makes a man decide, and finding it in the way his tongue moves across his lower lip.
"You done?" he asks, but he's not asking Dave. He's asking the air, the space between the trucks, the night itself. He's already unbuttoning his jeans, and the sound of the zipper is loud in the silence that follows Dave's footsteps.
Kara's thumb finds the seam again. One. Two. Three. The gravel under her palm is warm from the day's heat, still holding the sun the way the asphalt holds it, and she presses her weight into that warmth because it is the only thing she can feel that is not the cord around her breasts or the blade in her back. The heavyset one drops to his knees between her legs, and the impact sends a tremor through the ground that she feels through her hip, through the dead weight of her thigh, a vibration that stops at the place where the feeling stops.
"Look at me," he says.
She looks at him. His face is broad, his eyes small and dark, and there is a scar through his left eyebrow that she has not noticed before, a pale line that cuts the hair in two. He holds her gaze while he takes himself in hand, and she watches him stroke himself once, twice, a man preparing a tool, and then he pushes into her in a single motion, hard enough that her body shifts on the asphalt, her shoulders scraping, the blade in her back twisting.
She feels the shift. She feels the scrape. She does not feel him.
"She's looking at me," he says, and there is something in his voice she has not heard tonight, not from any of them. Not triumph. Not cruelty. Something closer to wonder. "She's looking right at me."
"So?" the gum one says.
"So she's in there." The heavyset one begins to move, a slow, heavy rhythm that rocks her whole body with each thrust. "She's in there and she's watching."
The gum one moves, and she hears the toothpick click against his teeth. "You sound like you're gonna write her a poem."
"Fuck you." But he doesn't speed up. He keeps the slow rhythm, and he keeps looking at her face, and she keeps looking back, and she thinks about how strange it is that this is the closest she has felt to any of them all night — this man who is inside her, this man she cannot feel, looking at her like she is a person and not a thing. She does not know what to do with that. She does not know what it means. She only knows that her thumb is on the seam and she is counting, and the counting is the only thing that is still hers.
His hand comes up, and for a moment she thinks he is going to hit her, the way Dave did, the way the others did. But his hand lands on the side of her face, heavy and warm, and he turns her head gently, tilting it so the orange light falls across her eyes, and he looks at her like he is trying to see something in them.
"You really can't feel it," he says. Not a question. A fact he is turning over, the way a man turns over a coin he has found in the road.
"No," she says. The word costs her something she does not have a name for.
He holds her gaze for a long moment. Then he closes his eyes and he fucks her harder, faster, his breath coming in short bursts, and she watches his face the way she has watched all their faces, and when he comes he makes a sound that is almost a word, almost a name, and she does not know whose name it is, and she does not ask.
He pulls out and stands up without looking at her. He zips his jeans and walks away, into the orange light, and she hears him say something to Dave, something low that she cannot make out, and then there is a laugh, short and flat, and then nothing.
The gum one is next. She knows it before he moves, before he takes the toothpick out of his mouth and tucks it behind his ear, the way she has seen men tuck a pencil before they sit down to work. He walks over and looks down at her, and his face is the same face it has been all night, the same flat, sunburned face, the same wide mouth, and he is already hard, she can see it through his jeans, and he does not bother to take them off.
"You know what I keep thinking about?" he says. He unzips, frees himself, and kneels between her legs. "From the office. When you came. You were fighting it, and then you weren't."
She watches him push into her. She feels nothing. She watches her body receive him the way it received all of them, the flesh giving, the hips shifting, and she thinks about the word he used. Came. She came in the office. She came against her will, her body betraying her, and he is thinking about it now, she can see it in his face, the memory of it, the way her body clenched around his fist and she screamed.
"I wanna see that again," he says. "I wanna see if you can still do that. With your legs dead."
His hand finds her, his fingers working between them, and she watches his face while he works, the concentration in it, the way his tongue moves across his lower lip, and she feels nothing, nothing at all, and she thinks about how strange it is that this is what he wants, this is the thing he is reaching for, and she cannot give it to him because the body between her legs is a country she no longer has a passport to.
"Come on," he mutters. "Come on. You did it before."
His fingers work faster, harder, and she watches his face go through its changes — the concentration, the frustration, the beginning of something like anger — and then his hand stops and he looks down at her, and there is something in his eyes she has not seen before. Not the flatness. Not the hunger. Something closer to a question.
"You really can't feel it," he says. The same words the heavyset one said. The same flat note of a man finding a new fact.
"No," she says.
He pulls out of her and sits back on his heels, and he looks at her for a long moment, and then he says, "That's got to be the weirdest fuck I've ever had. And I've had some weird fucks."
He stands up, tucks himself back in, zips, and takes the toothpick from behind his ear and puts it back in his mouth. He walks away, into the orange light, and she hears him say something to the others, something she cannot make out, and there is another laugh, and then the silence comes back, the silence that is not really silence because the bass line is still thudding through the asphalt, the stadium still breathing above them.
She is alone with Paul now. She can hear him breathing, a short, shallow sound, and she turns her head — the movement costs her, the blade in her back shifting — and she sees him standing at the edge of the orange light, his hands still in his pockets, his shoulders still curved, and he is looking at her. Not at the ground. At her.
"You should go," she says. Her voice is a scrape, a thing with no breath behind it. "While you still can."
Paul flinches. It is a small movement, a tightening of his shoulders, but she sees it, and she sees the way his hands come out of his pockets and hang at his sides, the way he takes a half-step toward her and then stops.
"I can't," he says. His voice is young. She had forgotten how young he is, how soft his face is in the orange light. "He'd—" He stops. Swallows. "He'd find me."
"Who?" she asks. But she knows. She knows before he says it, knows the way she knows the sound of the bass line, the way she knows the feel of the seam under her thumb.
"Vic." Paul's voice is barely a whisper. "He'd find me. He finds everyone."
She looks at him, this soft-faced boy who put his hands on her, who did what the others did, and she thinks about how strange it is that she feels something for him now, something that is not hate and not fear, something closer to a wound she does not have a name for.
"He's going to find me anyway," she says. "He's going to find all of us. That's what he does."
Paul's jaw works. He looks at her, and then he looks away, and then he looks back, and she watches him make a decision, the way she has watched all of them make decisions tonight, but this one is different. This one is a man choosing something.
He takes a step toward her. Then another. He crouches beside her, close enough that she can smell him — soap and sweat and something sweet, gum or candy — and he reaches out, and his hand lands on her shoulder, light, tentative, a touch that is not a taking.
"I'm sorry," he says. The words are small, and they land somewhere in her chest and sit there, heavy. "I'm sorry. I didn't—" He stops. Swallows. "I didn't know what else to do."
She looks at him. She looks at his soft face, his young eyes, the way his hand trembles on her shoulder, and she thinks about how strange it is that this is the first apology she has received all night, and it comes from a man who put his hands on her, who did what the others did, who is still standing here, still breathing, still a part of the thing that happened to her.
"Help me," she says. The words come out before she can stop them, a thing she did not know she was going to say until she heard it in the air. "Please. Help me get out of here."