The word hangs there, and Paul's hand goes still on her shoulder. For a long moment he doesn't move at all — just crouches in the gravel beside her, breathing through his mouth, his soft face doing something complicated in the orange light. He looks at the letter opener standing out of her back. He looks at her face. He looks at the gap between the two trailers, maybe forty feet of gravel and shadow, and then at the lot beyond it, where men are moving between the rigs with flashlights and clipboards and the low, bored voices of people who work nights.

"I can't," he says. Not I won't. I can't. Like the two words are different animals and he's only ever been able to hold the second one.

"You can," she says. Her voice comes out in pieces, wet at the edges. "You're the only one who—" She stops. The bass from the stage comes up through the concrete in a slow pulse, and she feels it in her sternum and in the wound at the same time, a double knock, like something knocking on a door from both sides. "You already did the hard part. You said sorry."

He flinches at that. His hand comes off her shoulder and he sits back on his heels, and she watches him decide, and she watches him decide wrong — watches it happen in his face before it happens in his body, the way his eyes go to the light at the far end of the lot, the way his jaw sets. He's going to stand up. He's going to walk away and tell someone, or not tell someone, and either way she'll be here, face-down in the gravel, with a blade in her spine and legs that don't answer.

"Paul."

He stops halfway up.

"You don't have to get me out." She keeps her voice low. Flat. The way you talk to a spooked animal, which is what he is — a spooked animal in a man's body, twenty years old, standing in the dark between two trucks with his hands still smelling like her. "Just pull it out. The thing in my back. Pull it out and walk away and I was never here."

"They said—" He swallows. "They said don't touch it. They said leave it, it's—"

"It's keeping me from healing." She says it like a fact, because it is a fact, and because facts are the only thing she has left that doesn't hurt. "There's something on the blade. I can feel it. It's why I can't—" She stops again. She was going to say fly. She was going to say stand. She was going to say anything at all that would make him understand that the difference between her living and dying is the six inches of steel sitting in her spinal column, and that he is the only person in this entire lot who might be willing to take it out.

The sun is going orange and low between the trailer gaps, and the light lands on her back and does almost nothing. She can feel how little it's giving her. On a normal day — a normal day, a day with her powers, a day when she is not lying in a truck yard with her spine cut and her arm broken and her breasts bound so tight she can barely draw a full breath — sunlight is a battery. It pours into her and she fills up. Today it lands on her skin like water on glass, and rolls off, and she is still empty.

Paul looks at the handle of the letter opener. It's a cheap thing, the kind that comes in a desk set, brass-colored with a little faux-marble grip, and it stands out of her back at a slight angle, and it is trembling faintly with each breath she takes. She can feel that. She can feel the tremor of it against the inside of her own body, a tiny tick, tick, tick, synchronized with her lungs. The metal is cold where the rest of her is fever-hot.

"I don't want to hurt you," he says.

"It's already in me."

"I know, but—"

"Paul." She turns her head in the gravel, grit grinding against her cheek, and looks up at him. Her hair is stuck to her face with blood and sweat, and she knows what she looks like right now, and she doesn't care, because the only currency she has left is the truth. "If you leave it in, I die here. Tonight. Between these trucks. And you'll know that. You'll know it every time you close your eyes for the rest of your life."

He is quiet for a long time. Somewhere near the trailers, someone laughs — a real laugh, a beer laugh, the kind that belongs to a man who has never in his life had to choose anything harder than which rig to drive. The sweetish rot of spilled beer drifts over on the diesel air. The bass keeps knocking. And Paul crouches back down beside her, and his hands hover over the handle of the letter opener, and they shake.

"Okay," he says. "Okay. Okay."

"Slow," she says. "Straight out. Don't twist it."

"I've never—"

"Straight out."

His fingers close around the grip. She feels the pressure change — feels the blade shift a fraction of a millimeter inside her, a small wrong movement that sends a white flare up her spine and into the base of her skull, and her whole body convulses against the gravel, her broken arm jerking uselessly, her bound breasts dragging against the ground. She bites down on her own lip and tastes copper and does not scream, because if she screams the men with the flashlights will come, and then it's over, and she has not come this far to be finished by a sound.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry—" Paul is whispering, a steady stream of it, and his hand is shaking so badly the blade is moving in tiny circles inside her, and she can feel the kryptonite residue on the steel burning every nerve it touches, a cold green ache that radiates out from the wound like frost spreading across a window.

"Stop." She gets the word out through her teeth. "Stop. Breathe. Then pull."

He breathes. She hears it — a wet, hitching inhale, the breath of a boy who is about to do the first genuinely brave thing of his life and hates every second of it. Then his wrist sets, and his arm goes rigid, and he pulls.

The blade comes out of her back in one long, sliding, terrible second, and the world goes white. Not the good white — not the flare of heat vision or the bloom of a sun — the bad white, the white that lives behind your eyes when your body has been pushed past the point where it can make sense of itself. She hears herself make a sound. It's not a scream. It's lower than that, and shorter, a single note that comes up out of the base of her throat and dies there. Gravel presses into her palms. Her fingers curl, nails scraping, grit grinding into the soft of her hands, and she holds onto the ground like it's the only thing keeping her from falling up into the sky.

Then the blade is out, and the cold goes with it — mostly. Not all. There's a residue, a green ghost of it, still working its way out through her blood, and she can feel it moving, a slow poison tide receding. Paul is holding the letter opener in both hands like it's a snake. There's blood on it — her blood, dark and thick — and a faint green sheen along the edge that he probably can't see in the dying light, but she can. She can see it perfectly.

"Go," she says.

"Is it— did I—"

"You did it. Go."

He stands up. He looks down at her one more time, and there's something in his face she can't read — guilt, or relief, or the specific blankness of a person who has just done a thing they will spend years not thinking about. Then he turns and walks toward the light at the end of the lot, and the letter opener goes with him, and she is alone.

The sun keeps dropping. The orange light between the trailers goes red, then rust, then the deep bruised color that comes just before dark. The bass from the stage keeps knocking, but it's slower now, or maybe she's slower, and the two things are getting harder to tell apart. Her breathing is wet and uneven. She can hear it in her own ears, a sound like a faucet left running in another room.

And then — under all of it, under the bass and the breathing and the diesel — something begins to happen in her back.

It starts as heat. A low, spreading warmth at the base of her spine, exactly where the blade went in, and it is not the cold green ache of kryptonite and it is not the hot throb of a wound. It is the other thing. The thing her body does when it is finally, finally allowed to do what it was built to do. She has felt it a thousand times — the itch of a cut closing, the deep pull of bone knitting, the strange electric tingle of skin remembering its own shape. She has felt it after every fight, every fall, every time she has been stupid enough to get hurt and lucky enough to survive it.

She has never felt it like this.

Because this is not a cut. This is a spinal cord. This is the deepest, most protected channel of her body, the trunk line, the thing that carries every command from her brain to her legs and every sensation back again. And it is severed, and it is trying to grow back, and growing back is not a smooth process. It is a process of a million tiny connections reaching for each other across a gap and missing, and reaching again, and finding, and firing, and the firing is what she feels — a wave of sharp, bright, wrong signals that run down her legs and up into her hips and back into her spine and arrive nowhere, because the line isn't finished yet.

Her legs jerk. Both of them, at once, a hard involuntary spasm that drags her knees a few inches across the gravel. She gasps — not from pain, from shock, because she hasn't felt her legs in hours, she had started to think of them as two dead things attached to her, and now they are moving, and the movement is hers, and it hurts like fire and it is the best thing she has ever felt.

"Okay," she whispers into the gravel. "Okay. Okay."

The healing comes in waves, and the waves are ugly. There's no grace to it. Her back arches off the ground and her hands claw at the gravel and her teeth grind together, and the sun slides down behind the trailers and the light on her skin goes from orange to gray, and she can feel how much slower this is without the sun, how much of her energy is going into the work of rebuilding a thing that was never supposed to be broken. The warmth in her spine spreads up and down in equal measure — up into her shoulders, down into her hips — and where it goes, sensation comes back in patches, like lights coming on in a building at dusk, one window at a time.

Her toes. She feels her toes. All ten of them, cold in the gravel, and she curls them and wants to cry and doesn't.

Her left leg. The whole length of it, from hip to ankle, comes back in a rush that leaves her shaking, and she drags the knee up under her body and the gravel bites into it and the bite is beautiful.

Her right leg is slower. There's damage there the healing has to work around — something in the hip, something the letter opener's path disturbed — and she lies in the dirt and breathes through it and waits, and the bass from the stage keeps knocking, and the lot keeps getting darker, and somewhere a truck engine turns over and idles and turns off again.

Her broken arm is the last thing. She feels the bones in her forearm shift, a grinding, wrong-feeling slide as they find each other again, and she has to press her forehead into the gravel and count the pulses of the bass to keep from making noise. One. Two. Three. Four. The bone settles. The pain drops from a scream to a throb to a dull ache to a memory. Her fingers flex. Her wrist turns. It holds.

She lifts her head.

The gap between the trailers is a long gray corridor of gravel and shadow, and at the far end, the lot is coming alive with lights — headlights, work lights, the red and white of a truck pulling out. She can hear men's voices, low and easy, the sound of a shift ending. Somewhere close, a radio is playing something with a steel guitar in it, tinny and small. The smell of diesel is thicker now, and under it the sweetish rot of spilled beer, and under that her own blood, drying on the gravel in a dark patch that is already starting to look like something that happened to someone else.

She gets her hands under her. Her palms press flat into the grit, and her arms take her weight, and it holds — arms that work, shoulders that work, a back that is knitting itself shut around a wound that should have killed her. She pushes. Her knees come up under her, one at a time, slow, and the gravel digs in and she lets it. Her bound breasts drag against the ground and the cord bites and she ignores it, files it away, one more thing to deal with when she is standing.

She is on her knees. The trailers rise on either side of her, tall as buildings, and the strip of sky between them has gone the deep blue of full dusk, and the first stars are coming out, and she looks up at them and thinks, absurdly, that she has flown through that sky a thousand times and never once thought about how it looks from down here.

She plants one foot. Then the other. The gravel shifts under her boots — no, under her bare feet, she has no boots, she has nothing, she is naked except for a torn band tee bunched around her neck and black cord wrapped around her chest — and the grit presses into her soles and she feels every grain of it, and the feeling is so good she almost laughs.

She pushes up off the gravel. Her legs take her weight. They hold. She is standing.

For a moment she just stands there, swaying slightly, one hand out to brace against the side of the trailer. The metal is cold and gritty under her palm. The world tilts a little and then steadies. She can feel her heart working — a real heartbeat, strong and slow, the kind she hasn't felt since the red light took her — and she can feel the blood moving in her veins, and she can feel the faint, faint trickle of power coming back into her cells, thin as a thread, but there. The sun is gone. The light is gone. But she is standing, and that is more than she had ten minutes ago, and she will take it.

Behind her, at the mouth of the gap, a boot scuffs gravel.

"Hey," a man's voice says — not to her, to someone else, easy and conversational, the voice of a man who has just noticed something and hasn't decided yet whether it matters. "Hey, Ray. Come look at this."

The scuff comes again. Closer.

She doesn't run. There's nowhere to run to — the gap between the trailers is a dead end behind her, the lot is a wall of work lights ahead, and her legs, newly knitted, are still learning what weight is. So she turns. Slow. One hand on the trailer's cold flank to keep herself upright, the other hanging loose at her side, and she lets the two men coming up the gap see exactly what they're walking toward: a woman standing in the gravel in nothing but a torn band tee bunched at her collarbones and black cord wrapped around her chest, bare feet, blood drying down her back in a long dark line, hair stuck to her face.

The first one stops. He's got a clipboard under his arm and a hi-vis vest open over a T-shirt with a trucking company logo on it, and he's maybe fifty, with a sun-ruined face and reading glasses pushed up into his hair. He looks at her the way a man looks at a deer that has wandered onto the interstate — sorry for it, and already deciding what to do about it.

"Ray," he says. "Ray, come here."

The second one comes up beside him. Younger, heavier, a beard that hasn't decided what shape it wants, arms thick from hauling straps. He's holding a thermos. He looks at her and doesn't look away, and she watches his face do the thing she has watched a dozen faces do tonight — the flicker of confusion, then the slow settling of understanding, then the other thing underneath, the thing that comes after understanding and doesn't bother with confusion at all.

"What the hell," Ray says. Not a question.

"I need a phone," she says. Her voice comes out low and steady, which surprises her, because nothing else about her is steady. "Or a ride. Either one. I'll take either one."

The older man — the one with the clipboard — takes his glasses down out of his hair and puts them on, and looks at her through them, and then looks past her at the dark patch on the gravel where she was lying, and then at the trailers, and then at the light at the mouth of the gap, where the lot is. She can see him assembling it. She can see him deciding that whatever this is, it isn't his. That's the look. She's seen it on Paul's face. She's seen it on every face tonight. The look of a man doing arithmetic and getting the same answer every time.

"You're one of Vic's," he says.

She doesn't answer that. Answering it either way is a mistake.

"She's one of Vic's," he says to Ray, like she isn't standing there. "You know what that means. You know what that means."

"I know what it means," Ray says. He hasn't stopped looking at her. He sets the thermos down on the gravel, slow, deliberate, the way a man sets something down when he wants both hands free. "Means nobody's coming for her. Means she's already off the books."

"Ray."

"I'm just saying what it means."

Two more sets of boots on the gravel behind them. She hears them before she sees them — the heavier tread of men who have been on their feet all day and have stopped caring where they put them. The gap between the trailers is filling up. A third man comes around the corner of the far trailer, tall and stooped, in a sleeveless shirt despite the cold, with a cigarette going and a phone in his other hand. A fourth trails him, younger than the rest, with a duffel bag over one shoulder and the flat, patient face of a man who has been waiting all day for something to happen and has just been told it's happening.

"What's this," the tall one says. He takes the cigarette out of his mouth and looks at her, up and down, unhurried, the way you look at a truck you're thinking about buying.

"One of Vic's," the clipboard man says.

"Vic's." The tall one rolls the word around. He takes a drag. "Vic's got a whole operation and he leaves one of his on the ground in my yard. That's sloppy."

"She's not supposed to be here," Ray says.

"No," the tall one agrees. "She's not." He flicks the cigarette into the gravel and grinds it out with his heel, and then he looks at her the way the others have been looking at her, and the looking has a weight to it now, four men's worth, and she feels it land on her skin like a hand.

She takes a step back. Her heel finds the trailer and stops. There's nowhere behind her. She knew that. She steps back anyway, because the body does what it does, and the four of them watch her do it, and the tall one smiles a little, the way a man smiles when the math has already come out in his favor.

"Okay," she says. She keeps her voice flat. She keeps her hands where they can see them. "Okay. You've got a choice to make here, and I want you to make it slow, because you're only going to get to make it once." She looks at each of them in turn, the way she'd look at a crowd before a rescue, picking out the ones who might move first. "You put me in a truck and drive me out of here, and every one of you spends the rest of his life in a cell. Or you walk away right now and you never saw me, and that's the end of it. Those are the two doors. Pick one."

The tall one laughs. It's not a cruel laugh — it's worse than that. It's a genuine one, the laugh of a man who has just heard something funny at the end of a long shift.

"Listen to her," he says. "Listen to this." He looks at the others. "She's giving us doors."

"I'm not kidding."

"I know you're not." He steps closer. She can smell him now — diesel, cigarettes, the sour tang of a man who has been in a cab all day. "That's what makes it funny."

Ray picks the thermos back up. The clipboard man takes his glasses off and folds them and puts them in his vest pocket, and doesn't look at her again. The young one with the duffel bag sets the bag down and unzips it, and starts pulling out straps — ratchet straps, the kind you use to tie down a load — and the sound of the zipper going is the loudest thing in the gap.

She moves first. That's the only thing she has left — the first move. She drops her shoulder and drives it into the tall one's chest, hard, the way she'd drive through a door, and she feels the air go out of him and his feet leave the gravel, and for half a second she's winning, she's through the gap and into the open and the lot is right there. Then the clipboard man's arm comes around her throat from behind — he was faster than he looked, they always are — and Ray's hand closes on her broken arm, right on the healed bone, and squeezes, and the pain is so bright and so sudden that her knees go out from under her and she goes down onto the gravel with two men on top of her and the third one already reaching for the straps.

"Get her arms," the tall one wheezes, still doubled over, still trying to get his breath back. "Get her goddamn arms."

They get her arms. It takes three of them and it takes a while, and she gets an elbow into someone's mouth and feels a tooth give, and she gets her heel into the young one's knee and he swears and drops, and then Ray gets a knee between her shoulder blades and the clipboard man has her wrists and the straps go around them, ratcheted tight, the plastic teeth biting into the skin, and once her wrists are behind her back the rest of it is just work.

They roll her onto her back. The gravel grinds into her spine and into the raw line of the wound, and she arches against it and can't get away from it. Ray is kneeling on one of her ankles. The clipboard man has the other. The tall one is standing over her now, breathing hard, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and there's blood on his lip where her elbow landed, and he looks down at her with an expression she can't quite name — not anger, exactly. Something more like appreciation. Like a man who has just found out the thing he bought is worth more than he paid.

"Vic's gonna want her back," the clipboard man says.

"Vic can wait," the tall one says.

He kneels down. He puts one hand flat on her sternum, over the band tee, and presses her into the gravel, and with the other hand he works the cord loose from where it's wrapped around her chest — not untying it, just hooking a finger under it and dragging it down, and the cord bites across her breasts as it goes and she hisses through her teeth and he watches her face while he does it. Then he gets the tee up and over her head, one-handed, and she's naked in the gravel with her arms strapped behind her and four men standing over her, and the work lights from the lot throw their shadows up the sides of the trailers, four long shapes leaning in.

"Hold her legs," he says.

Ray takes her ankles, one in each hand, and spreads them, and holds them down against the gravel, and the tall one unzips his jeans and takes himself out and kneels between her knees, and she can see him — thick, half-hard, the head of his cock wet already — and she turns her face away into the gravel and closes her eyes and counts the pulses of the bass from the stage, which is still going, still knocking, one, two, three, four.

He pushes into her. She's dry — dry from the cold and the fear and the blood loss — and he doesn't care, and the first thrust is a long tearing burn that goes all the way up into her stomach, and she grunts and bites down on her own lip and tastes copper again, and he groans like a man settling into a hot bath. He's heavy. He's got both hands planted on the gravel on either side of her shoulders and he's fucking her with his whole weight, slow and deep, and every thrust grinds her spine into the gravel and grinds the raw wound against the grit and sends a bright wrong flare up her back, and she can feel him inside her, all of him, the drag of him, the way her body is trying to make room for something it doesn't want.

"There it is," he says. "There it is."

The others are watching. She can hear them — the clipboard man's breathing, the young one's boots shifting, Ray's grip tightening on her ankles. The tall one fucks her for a long time without saying anything else, just breathing, just the slap of his hips against the inside of her thighs and the wet sound of it and the gravel crunching under his knees, and she keeps her eyes closed and counts the bass and tries to go somewhere else, and can't, because her body is hers again now, all of it, every nerve reporting in, and there's nowhere in her left to hide.

He comes with a long shudder and a sound like he's been holding his breath for a year, and he stays inside her while it finishes, and then he pulls out and sits back on his heels and looks down at her, and she feels it start to leak out of her and run down between her legs into the gravel.

"Ray," he says. "Your turn."

Ray lets go of her ankles. He's already unbuckling his belt

Ray is slower than the tall one was. He takes his time with the belt — leather hissing through the loops, the buckle clinking against the gravel when he lets it drop — and the sound of it is somehow worse than the tall one's zipper, because Ray is in no hurry and everyone in the gap knows it. He kneels down between her spread legs and just looks at her for a while. He's got a face like a man who has spent his whole life being the second one through every door, and he is taking his time now because there is no one ahead of him.

"You scratched Tommy," he says. "Heard about that. He's still talking about it."

She doesn't answer. Her cheek is flat against the gravel and she is counting, one, two, three, four, the bass coming up through the ground into her jaw and her sternum and the raw line of her back, and the count is the only thing in her that is still hers.

"That's what I thought," Ray says.

He puts one hand on her hip and the other flat on the gravel beside her shoulder, and he pushes into her without ceremony, and it is different from the tall one — shorter, thicker, a blunt pressure that goes in deep and then deeper, and she feels her whole body close around him the way a fist closes, involuntary, a reflex with nothing behind it. He grunts and holds still for a second, all the way in, and she can feel him twitching inside her, and the wet sound of it is loud in the narrow gap between the trailers.

"She's tight," Ray says, to no one, or to everyone. "Tall guy didn't loosen her up at all."

"She heals," the clipboard man says. He's standing somewhere above her head, and she can see the toe of his boot in the corner of her eye, and he hasn't moved it. "That's the thing about her. She heals."

Ray starts to move. Slow at first — long, dragging strokes that pull almost all the way out and then shove back in, and every one of them grinds her spine down into the gravel and drags the raw wound across the grit, and she can feel the grit going into it, small hard pieces of the lot working their way into a place that should never have been open to the air. Her bound breasts are pressed flat under her chest and the cord has been dragged down by the tall one so it cuts across the underside of them now, and every thrust pushes her forward against it, and the cord bites and the gravel bites and the bass counts and she keeps her eyes closed and her teeth together and makes no sound at all.

"Look at her," Ray says. "She's not even—"

"She's in there," the clipboard man says. "Don't worry about it. She's in there."

The young one with the duffel bag has moved. She can hear his boots — a different weight from Ray's, lighter, and he's pacing, back and forth at the mouth of the gap, and every time he turns the gravel scuffs and every time he scuffs she hears it and knows where he is. The tall one is standing over her, off to the side, and his shadow falls across her back and cools the skin where the work lights were hitting it. His jeans are still open. She can see the shape of him in the corner of her vision, soft now, hanging out of his fly, and he isn't putting himself away. He's just standing there watching, and she can feel the weight of the watching more than she can feel Ray inside her.

Ray speeds up. His hand comes off the gravel and lands on her hip and grips, hard, fingers digging into the soft of her, and he pulls her back onto him with every thrust now, and the slap of his hips against her ass is a flat wet sound that echoes off the trailer walls and comes back at her doubled. The gravel crunches under his knees. The cord saws across her breasts. The wound in her back is a long line of fire now, and under the fire there is something else, something low and warm and wrong, and she doesn't want to name it, and she names it anyway, because she has never been able to lie to herself for long: her body is starting to respond. Not to Ray. To the friction, to the pressure, to the sheer mechanical insistence of being filled over and over, and she hates it, and it happens anyway, and she feels herself getting wet around him, a slow slick heat that has nothing to do with wanting and everything to do with a body that was built to survive.

Ray feels it too.

"There she is," he says. "There she is. Knew it."

He fucks her harder. The strokes go short and fast and brutal, all depth and no drag, and her forehead knocks against the gravel with each one and she tastes grit between her teeth and her bound breasts drag back and forth across the ground and the cord burns and the wound burns and somewhere far above the stage the bass is still going, one, two, three, four, and she has lost count of the bars and started over twice and it doesn't matter, nothing matters except the count, and the count is the only door out of this gap and she is holding it open with both hands.

"Ray." The tall one's voice, flat. "Don't leave marks."

"I'm not leaving marks."

"Vic's rule. Above the collar."

"I heard you the first time." Ray's hand comes up off her hip and lands flat between her shoulder blades, and he presses her down into the gravel with his whole weight, and the pressure on the wound is so sudden and so total that her vision goes white at the edges and she hears herself make a sound — a short, low, involuntary one, not a scream, something smaller than a scream, something that comes out of her before she can catch it. The tall one hears it. She can tell, because he shifts his weight, and the shadow on her back moves.

"There," Ray says. "There it is. That's what I wanted."

He keeps his hand there, pressing her down, and he finishes fast now, short hard strokes, and she can feel him swelling inside her and she knows what's coming and there is nothing she can do about it, and he comes with a grunt and a long shudder and stays deep, and she feels it — hot, pulsing, filling her, and then the slow seep of it starting to leak out around him while he's still inside, running down between her legs into the gravel, mixing with the tall one's and with her own wet and with the grit.

He stays in her for a moment longer than he needs to. Then he pulls out, and she feels the drag of it, the emptiness after, the wet cold air on skin that was full a second ago. He stands up and tucks himself away and buckles his belt, and the buckle clinks, and he steps back, and now there are three sets of boots in her field of vision instead of two, and the tall one's shadow has moved to the side.

"Okay," the clipboard man says. "Okay. Young one."

The pacing stops.

"You're up."

She turns her face in the gravel, just enough to see. The young one has stopped at the mouth of the gap with the duffel bag still open at his feet, and he is looking at her the way a man looks at a job he has been assigned and doesn't particularly want, and the clipboard man is looking at him, and the tall one is looking at her, and Ray is already walking away toward the light at the end of the lot with his hands in his pockets like a man leaving a bar. The young one bends down and picks something out of the duffel bag — she can't see what, her eyes are full of grit and the light is behind him — and he straightens up, and he starts walking toward her across the gravel, and his boots are the only sound in the gap now, one step, then another, and the bass from the stage keeps knocking under it all, one, two, three, four, and somewhere deep in her back, under the wound, under the pain, under everything the men can see, the warmth has already started again.

The young one stops a yard short of her. He's younger than she thought from the mouth of the gap — maybe twenty-two, with a soft chin and a bad haircut and a silver chain that swings when he moves. The thing he took from the duffel bag is a folded moving blanket, gray, the kind you buy at a gas station for eight dollars, and he stands there holding it against his chest with both hands like a kid holding a permission slip.

"Clipboard," he says. "She's got grit in the wound."

"So?"

"So it's a spinal thing. You saw the blade. If it gets infected—"

"She heals," the clipboard man says, for the second time tonight, and this time he says it slower, like he's explaining it to a child. "Put her on the blanket if it makes you feel better. Just don't take all night. We're on the clock."

The young one kneels. The gravel crunches under his knees the way it crunched under Ray's, and he unfolds the blanket and works it under her — under her shoulder, under her hip, under the dead weight of her legs — and he has to lift her to do it, and the lifting is worse than the gravel, because when he lifts her the blade in her back shifts, a quarter-inch, a fraction, and the fire goes all the way up her spine and into the roots of her teeth and she bites down on her own tongue until she tastes copper.

"Sorry," he says. "Sorry. I'm trying to—"

He gets the blanket under her. The gravel stops biting. That's the first thing — the grit stops grinding into the wound with every breath, and her body, which has been braced against the ground for so long it forgot there was anything else, lets go of a tension she didn't know she was holding, and the relief is so disproportionate to the size of it that her eyes sting.

Then he's on top of her.

He's careful. That's the thing she'll remember — he's careful. He braces his weight on his forearms on either side of her shoulders so he isn't pressing down on the wound, and he goes in slow, slower than either of the others, watching her face the whole time, and his cock is average and unremarkable and it slides into her with almost no resistance now because of what the first two left behind, and the wet sound of it is quieter, and he holds still when he's all the way in and breathes out through his nose.

"Okay," he says. To himself. "Okay."

The tall one, off to the side, makes a sound low in his throat. Not a laugh. Something closer to contempt.

"You gonna ask her out after?" he says.

"Shut up."

"You gonna buy her dinner? Take her to a movie?"

The young one doesn't answer. He starts to move, and it's a different rhythm than the others — not the tall one's long punishing strokes, not Ray's short brutal grind, but something almost tentative, a shallow rocking that never pulls all the way out, and she can feel every inch of him and every inch of the mess the other two left inside her, and the wetness between her legs is theirs and hers and his, and the smell of it is thick in the cold air of the gap.

She keeps her eyes open. She doesn't know why. Maybe because the blanket changed something. Maybe because the young one keeps looking at her face like he's waiting for her to do something, and there's a part of her — the part that is still Kara, the part that has never once in her life let a bully have the last word — that wants to give him nothing to look at.

So she looks back.

His eyes are brown. There's a pimple healing on his jaw. He's got a tattoo on his forearm she can't read upside down, and his chain swings and clicks against his collarbone with every rock of his hips, and he is watching her the whole time, and she is watching him, and neither of them blinks, and it goes on like that for longer than either of them expected, and his rhythm starts to falter, and his face starts to do something complicated.

"Don't," he says. Quiet. Just to her.

She doesn't know what he means. She doesn't stop.

And under the wound, under the fire, under the grit and the cord and the wet, the warmth she noticed before has spread — a low humming heat along the length of the severed thing in her back, slow and steady and patient, the way a kettle sounds just before it starts to sing. Her body is doing something the men can't see. It's working. It's knitting. Somewhere in the dark under the blade, cells are dividing, axons are reaching for each other, and the effort of it is drawing on everything she has left, and she can feel the drain of it in her fingertips and her toes and the roots of her hair, and she can also feel — faintly, impossibly — a single nerve firing in her left thigh.

One nerve. One signal. A spark in a dead line.

She holds onto it the way she held onto the count.

The young one finishes. He doesn't last long — the eye contact did it, she thinks, something about the eye contact got under his skin — and he pulls out fast and sits back on his heels and doesn't look at her anymore, and he wipes himself on the corner of the blanket, the same blanket he put under her, and the gesture is so small and so petty and so human that she almost laughs, and the almost-laugh comes out as a wet cough and a mouthful of grit.

"Clean up," the clipboard man says. "Roll her back onto the gravel. We're not leaving the blanket."

"Why not?"

"Because it's evidence, and you're not smart enough to know that."

The young one gets to his feet. He looks down at her for a second — at the cord across her breasts, at the blade standing out of her back, at her face — and then he bends and takes the corners of the blanket and rolls her, and the roll drags the wound across the gravel again, one last time, and the one nerve in her thigh fires again, and then goes quiet, and the warmth keeps working anyway, patient, invisible, hers.

She is face-down on the gravel again. The blanket is gone. The young one's boots walk away, and the duffel bag zips, and the clipboard man's boot comes back into the corner of her eye, and the tall one's shadow is still there, still standing, still open, still watching, and the bass from the stage is still knocking through the ground into her jaw, one, two, three, four, and her left thigh is still dark, and the warmth under the wound is still humming, and she counts anyway.

The tall one doesn't move for a long time. That's the first thing — the stillness. After the young one's boots fade toward the mouth of the gap and the duffel bag zips shut and the clipboard man's boot settles back into the corner of her eye, the tall one just stands there. His shadow lies across her back, long and wrong-angled from the work lights, and it doesn't shift. He's breathing through his nose. She can hear it, slow and even, the breath of a man who has decided to wait and see.

She counts. One, two, three, four. The bass keeps knocking up through the ground into her jaw and her cheekbone and the raw line of her back, and the count is still the only door, and she holds it open.

Then the warmth under the blade does something new.

It was a hum before. Now it spreads — not up and down her spine the way it did when the blade came out, but out, sideways, into the muscle on either side of the wound. A slow crawl of heat that moves through her like water finding the low places in a floor. Her shoulders tighten without her asking them to. Her spine arches — a fraction of an inch, a small involuntary lift of her lower back off the gravel — and she feels the grit shift under her skin and the wound pull and the warmth keep working, patient, indifferent to what the men can see.

The arch doesn't stop. It ripples. A tremor runs up her spine from the base of her skull to her tailbone, and then another, and then a third, and they are not hers. She is not doing this. Her body is doing it, the way a muscle does when a current runs through it, and she can feel each one start and end and start again, and she can't stop them, and she can't hide them, because her back is bare to the work lights and the tall one is standing directly over her with his jeans still open and his eyes on her back.

She hears him stop breathing.

Then the gravel crunches. Slow. One knee, then the other, and the shadow on her back folds in on itself and gets smaller and darker and closer, and his weight comes down beside her — not on her, beside her, his knee planted in the grit an inch from her ribs — and he doesn't say anything. He just looks. She can feel the looking. It has a temperature, the way a hand does when it hovers before it lands.

"What's it doing," he says. Not to her. To the clipboard man, maybe, or to the air. His voice has changed. It's quieter than it was when he was fucking her. It has an edge of something in it that wasn't there before, and she can't tell what it is, and not knowing is worse than the fucking was.

"Healing," the clipboard man says. "I told you. She heals."

"That's not healing. That's—" He stops. She hears him swallow. "Look at her back."

She can't see her own back. But she can feel it — the wound that the blade left, the long split down her spine, is closing. Not all at once. In pulses. Each tremor pulls the edges a little closer, and the skin knits, and the warmth floods in behind it, and the whole process is visible from the outside, she realizes, because the tall one is watching it happen with his mouth slightly open, and she can hear the change in his breath the way you hear a change in weather.

"Holy shit," he says.

His hand comes down.

She braces for the grab — for the palm flat on her back, for the press, for the weight. It doesn't come. His fingers land at the edge of the wound, feather-light, and they don't press. They trace. They follow the line of the split from the top of her spine down toward her hips, slow, unhurried, the way you'd trace a seam on a piece of cloth you were thinking about buying. His fingertips are rough — callused, gritty with gravel dust — and where they touch, the warmth under her skin surges toward them, and she feels the wound close a fraction faster under the contact, as if her body is reaching for the hand, and she hates it, and it happens anyway.

"It's warm," he says. "It's hot. Feel that."

"I'm not touching her."

"Feel it."

The clipboard man doesn't move. His boot stays where it is, in the corner of her eye, planted on the gravel like it grew there. The tall one's fingers keep tracing, up and down the line of the closing wound, and each pass is lighter than the last, and each pass makes the tremor in her spine jump, and she can feel the two things fighting in her body — the healing that wants to finish and the hand that keeps interrupting it, drawing the warmth up to the surface, pulling her nerves toward the skin.

She turns her face in the gravel. Grit grinds against her cheek. She gets one eye clear of the dirt and looks up at him, and he's close — closer than she expected, his face maybe a foot above hers, and she can see the blood on his lip where her elbow landed and the stubble on his jaw and the way his pupils have gone wide in the orange light, and he is not looking at her face. He's looking at her back. He's watching his own fingers move on her skin, and his lips are parted, and there's something in his expression she has seen before tonight, on other faces, in the corridor and in the office and in the parking lot, but never quite like this. It's not hunger. It's closer to wonder. A man watching a thing he has never seen and doesn't have a word for.

"You're not supposed to be real," he says.

She doesn't answer.

"They said Vic had something. Something big. I thought it was a joke." His fingers stop at the base of her spine, at the very bottom of the wound, and rest there. "You're not a joke."

"No," she says. Her voice is low and steady, and it surprises her again, because nothing else about her is steady. "I'm not."

He looks at her face then. Finally. His eyes come up off her back and find hers, and they stay there, and the tremor in her spine runs again, and this time she can't tell whether it's the healing or the looking.

"What are you," he says.

She holds his eyes. The gravel is cold against her cheek and the cord is cutting across her breasts and the wound is still knitting itself shut under his hand and the bass is still knocking through the ground, one, two, three, four, and she does not look away, because looking away is the only thing left that would cost her anything.

"Ask Vic," she says.

Something moves across his face — a flicker, quick, there and gone. He doesn't like the name. She files that. She files it the way she used to file the small things at a rescue, the way a cop files a twitch at a traffic stop, and she keeps it, and she doesn't let it show.

His hand comes off her back. He sits back on his heels and looks at her for a long moment, and then his hand comes down again — not to her back this time. To her jaw. Two fingers and a thumb, and he takes her chin and turns her face toward the work lights, and the light hits her eyes and she blinks, and he holds her there, turning her head slowly one way and then the other, studying her like a man studying a horse's teeth.

"Vic's gonna want to know about this," the clipboard man says.

"Vic can want whatever he wants." The tall one's thumb is on her jaw, light, not hurting, and his eyes don't leave hers. "I found her. I get to look first."

The gravel crunches. The clipboard man's boot steps forward — one step, deliberate, the sole grinding down into the grit — and stops.

"Marchetti's not a man you keep things from," he says.

The tall one doesn't answer. His thumb stays on her jaw. His eyes stay on hers. And under his hand, under the gravel, under the bass, the warmth in her back keeps humming, patient, invisible, hers.

The tall one lets go of her jaw the way you let go of a tool you're done using — no ceremony, no shove. His fingers just lift and the cold air comes in where his hand was, and her face stays turned toward the lights because she doesn't give him the satisfaction of turning it back. He rocks his weight onto his heels. Gravel shifts under him. He doesn't stand. He stays crouched there beside her ribs, close enough that she can smell him — diesel, sweat, the flat mineral smell of the parking lot on his clothes — and he looks at her the way a man looks at a locked door he's just found in a house he thought he knew.

"Cargo," he says. "That's what he's calling her."

"That's what she is." The clipboard man's voice has gone flat and careful, the voice of a man who has decided to be the adult in the room. "Vic's got plans. You know Vic's got plans. The kind that don't work if the merchandise is used up in a parking lot."

"I'm not using her up."

"You're doing something."

"I'm looking."

The clipboard man doesn't answer that. His boot stays planted. She can see the toe of it in the corner of her eye, the leather scuffed gray, and beyond it the long dark shape of the semi's tire, and beyond that the chain-link fence with the stadium lights bleeding through it in vertical bars. Somewhere up there, past the fence and the lights and the concourse and the stairs, Axl Rose is still singing about a jungle and the crowd is still answering him back, and the sound arrives down here flattened and patient, a pulse in the ground more than a sound in the air.

The warmth in her back spikes.

It comes in a wave this time, not a hum — a hot bloom that starts at the base of her skull and rolls down her spine and out through her shoulders and up into her throat, and she feels it happen the way you feel a blush happen, the heat arriving before you can do anything about it, and she knows without being able to see it that it's showing. On her neck. In her cheeks. The skin going pink under the work lights.

The tall one sees it. Of course he sees it. He's been watching her the whole time, and now his eyes narrow and he leans in a half-inch and his head tilts, and she can feel the weight of his attention land on the side of her face like a hand.

"She's burning up," he says. "Not like a fever."

"What does that mean."

"Look at her." He doesn't point. He doesn't need to. "Like something under the skin."

She keeps her eyes on the tire and the fence and the bars of light. The heat keeps moving through her, slow and thorough, and she can feel the wound in her back drawing itself together behind it, the split closing from the bottom up now, the skin pulling tight over the place where the blade went in. She can feel the muscles on either side of her spine unknot one by one, the way a fist opens when it finally decides to. Her shoulders drop a fraction of an inch into the gravel. She didn't tell them to.

"How long does it take," the tall one says.

"How should I know."

"You said you knew things."

"I said she heals. I didn't say I wrote the manual."

The tall one makes a sound in his throat — not quite a laugh, not quite anything. He shifts, and gravel grinds, and then there's a different weight in the air beside her, lower down, and she realizes he's sat back onto the ground. Cross-legged. She can see his knee in the corner of her vision now, denim and grit, and his hand resting on it, and he's settled in like a man at a campfire. Like he's going to be here a while.

Something cold lands on her shoulders.

She flinches before she can stop herself — a full-body twitch that runs down into the gravel and back up, and the tall one sees that too, she knows he does, because he goes very still. But the thing on her shoulders isn't a hand. It's fabric. Heavy and rough and smelling of exhaust and old cigarettes, and it's draped across her back and over both shoulders and down to her elbows, and it covers the wound and the bound cord and the bare skin all at once.

"What are you doing," the clipboard man says.

"She's cold."

"She's cargo."

"She's cold," the tall one says again, and this time the words come out slow and flat, one at a time, like he's spelling something for a child. "Cargo doesn't shake like that. Look at her. She's shaking."

She is. She can feel it now that he's said it — the fine tremor in her arms, in her jaw, in the small of her back where the wound is still working. It's not the cold. Or it's not only the cold. It's everything, all of it arriving at once now that the adrenaline has somewhere to go, and the blanket — because that's what it is, she realizes, a blanket, wool and scratchy and probably pulled from the cab of one of these trucks — is heavy on her shoulders and warm in a way that makes the shaking worse instead of better.

The tall one watches her breathe.

She can feel him doing it. That's the strange part. He's not touching her and he's not talking and he's just sitting there cross-legged in the gravel with his eyes on the rise and fall of her ribs under the blanket, and she can feel each of her own breaths being counted by someone else, and it's worse than the hand on her jaw was, and she doesn't know why.

"You ever see anything like this," he says.

"No."

"Me neither." He's quiet for a second. "My old man used to tell me about the war. The one in the desert. He said there was things out there nobody put in the papers. Things that didn't make sense." He shifts his weight. "I always figured he was full of shit."

"Maybe he was."

"Maybe." His eyes don't move off her back. "Or maybe the papers just don't print everything."

The warmth under her skin keeps working. She can feel it in her fingertips now — a faint tingle, like a limb coming back to life after it's been asleep, and that's new, that's different, that's not the wound, that's something else. She flexes her right hand in the gravel, slow, careful, where nobody can see it under the blanket, and her fingers move. They move. Her arm is still broken — she can feel the wrongness of it, the grind of the bone — but her fingers move, and the tingle runs up her wrist, and she closes her hand around a fistful of gravel and holds on.

She doesn't let her face change.

The tall one reaches out. Not to her back this time. To the edge of the blanket, where it's slipped off her shoulder, and he tucks it back up, two fingers and a thumb, careful, the way you'd fix a blanket on a sleeping kid. The wool scratches against her neck. His knuckles brush her skin and the warmth surges toward the contact again, greedy, and she hates that too, and she hates that she's starting to get used to hating it.

"Minutes," the clipboard man says. "It's been minutes. Vic's gonna send somebody."

"Let him."

"You don't get to just—"

"I found her," the tall one says. "In the gravel. In the dark. I put my hands on her first. That makes her mine to look at until somebody with more stripes than you tells me different." He settles his weight. "So go get somebody with more stripes."

The clipboard man's boot shifts. Grinds. Stays.

The bass keeps knocking up through the ground. One, two, three, four. She holds her fistful of gravel and counts with it, and under the blanket, under the wool, under the tall one's eyes, the warmth in her back keeps humming, and her fingers keep moving, and the flush on her neck doesn't fade.

Minutes pass. Her breathing steadies. The tremor in her arms slows to something almost like stillness, and the tall one sits cross-legged in the gravel and watches her the whole time, and the clipboard man stands with his arms crossed and his boot planted, and nobody says anything, and the stadium sings on above them.

Then, from somewhere in the dark between the trucks, a phone camera shutter clicks.

Once. Close.

The tall one's head snaps up.

The blanket is still around her shoulders. She is still face-down in the gravel. The warmth is still moving under her skin.

The shutter clicks again.

The tall one is already moving. He comes up off the gravel in one motion — no push, no stagger, just up, the way a man gets up when he's been waiting all night for a reason to — and his boots hit the ground twice and then he's gone into the dark between the trailers, past the tire, past the chain-link, toward the sound.

"Hey!" His voice comes back flat and hard off the trailer walls. "Hey — you. Stop."

The clipboard man turns. She can see the shift in his boots, the way his weight rocks toward the noise and then stops, caught between two things, and she can hear him deciding. His arms are still crossed. His boot is still planted in the gravel an inch from her ribs. But his eyes are gone — turned away, up the gap, following the tall one into the dark.

"Ray," the clipboard man says. "Ray, get back here."

No answer. Ray's already at the mouth of the lot with his hands in his pockets and the light on his back, and he isn't coming back for anything.

The shutter clicks a third time.

This one is closer. It comes from the other side — behind her, past the trailer's rear wheels, in the black strip between the trailer and the fence — and it's followed by a scuff, a small one, the sound of a shoe finding gravel and not liking it. The clipboard man hears it too. She watches his head turn the wrong way, toward the trailer, and his arms come uncrossed and his hand goes to his vest pocket, and that's when the tall one's voice comes back out of the dark, not a word this time, just a sound — a grunt and a thud, the sound of two bodies meeting something solid.

"Get off me — get off—"

A girl's voice. Young. Furious.

The clipboard man's boot lifts off the gravel and comes down two feet to the left, and then he's moving, and then he's gone — around the corner of the trailer, into the dark, his flashlight coming on and swinging, a white blade of light cutting across the trailer's flank and the fence and the weeds and then whipping away.

She is alone in the gap.

She doesn't think about it. That's the thing she'll remember later, when she has time to remember — that there was no decision in it. There was a moment when the gap was empty and the blanket was on her shoulders and the gravel was in her fist, and then there was no moment at all, because her body had already started without her.

Her arms come down. Her palms flatten into the grit and the grit bites and she pushes, and her shoulders take the weight and her back takes the weight and the wound takes the weight, and it holds. All of it holds. The warmth that has been humming under her skin for the last ten minutes stops being a hum and becomes a hand — a broad flat hand under her sternum, lifting — and she comes up off the gravel in one long pull, knees under her, feet under her, and she is standing in the gap between the trailers with the blanket sliding off her shoulders into the dirt behind her.

Her legs answer.

Both of them. Not the tentative thing from before, not the single nerve firing in her left thigh — this is the whole line, hip to knee to ankle to the soles of her bare feet, every nerve reporting in at once, and the gravel is cold and sharp and specific under her, and she can feel each separate grain of it, and she has never in her life been so glad to feel anything.

She takes a step. It's ugly. Her right knee buckles a quarter-inch and catches, and her hip grinds on something that isn't finished healing, and she has to put a hand out and catch the trailer's cold flank to keep from going down. The metal shudders under her palm. Somewhere inside the trailer, something metal shifts and rings.

She doesn't stop.

Second step. Third. The gap is forty feet of gravel and shadow and she takes it at a dead run that is only half a run, one hand trailing along the trailer's flank for balance, her bare feet slapping the grit, the cord still wrapped around her chest and cutting with every stride, her broken arm swinging at her side and screaming, and she does not slow down for any of it.

Behind her, past the trailer, the flashlight beam swings back. She sees it hit the wall of the far trailer and slide, and she hears the clipboard man's voice, raised now, not flat — "She's up, she's up, she's—" — and then the beam snaps toward the gap and finds the empty gravel where she was lying and the blanket crumpled in the dirt, and the light holds there for a half-second, the way a man's eye holds on a thing that shouldn't be true.

That half-second is the whole race.

She reaches the end of the gap. The last trailer's rear corner comes up on her right and the chain-link fence comes up on her left — ten feet of rusted diamond mesh with a top rail and a barbed overhang, and beyond it the weeds and the dark and the back of the lot where the stadium lights don't reach. She doesn't slow. She plants her left foot on the trailer's rear bumper and pushes off it and her right hand catches the top rail and the broken arm takes her whole weight.

The bone grinds. The pain is white and total and comes up through her shoulder and into her teeth, and she hangs there for a moment with her feet off the ground and the fence shaking under her hand and the barbed wire raking across her forearm, opening a line from wrist to elbow, and she does not let go.

Her left hand comes up. Fingers through the mesh, boot — no boot, bare foot — finding the rail, and she pulls, and the fence leans toward her like it wants to fall and then springs back, and she is up, and over, and the barbed overhang catches her hip and tears and lets her go, and then there is nothing under her at all.

She falls four feet into the weeds.

The ground comes up hard — dirt and dry grass and a broken pallet half-buried in it — and she lands on her side and her shoulder and her hip all at once, and the breath goes out of her and doesn't come back for a second, and the fence is above her and behind her and the gap is on the other side of it, and she can hear the tall one's voice through the mesh, close, coming back around the trailer, cutting off in the middle of a word.

"—the fuck—"

She rolls onto her hands and knees in the weeds. The barbed wire has left a line of fire down her forearm and the wound in her back has opened a fraction under the fall and the cord is still biting and she is naked except for the cord and the dirt and the blood, and none of it matters, because the fence is behind her and the dark is in front of her and her legs are under her and they are holding.

She gets up.

The weeds are waist-high and dry and they rasp against her thighs as she moves, and the ground under them is uneven — dirt and gravel and the rusted rails of an old spur line that runs along the back of the lot, and beyond the weeds there's a drainage ditch and beyond that a service road and beyond that the dark. She doesn't look back. Looking back costs time and she has none. She keeps her head down and her feet moving and the fence at her back, and behind her the flashlight beam comes up over the top rail and sweeps the weeds and doesn't find her, because she's already past the ditch, already into the shadow of the embankment where the lot's lights die.

The tall one is still talking. She can hear him through the mesh, and the sound of his voice is different now — not the campfire voice, not the wonder, something harder and faster, a man doing arithmetic and not liking the answer.

"She went over. She went over the fence. How the hell did she go over the fence?"

"I don't know." The clipboard man. "I don't know, I told you, she heals—"

"She was paralyzed."

"I know what she was."

"She was paralyzed and she went over a ten-foot fence. You saw her. You saw her."

"I saw her."

A pause. She keeps moving through it, up the embankment, the dry grass sawing at her shins, one hand out ahead of her for the dark.

"Where's the girl," the tall one says.

"Gone. She ran when I came around the trailer. Little thing. Camera."

"Camera."

"Camera. Yeah. She got a picture, I think. Before I got to her."

The tall one doesn't say anything for a second. She can picture him standing there in the gap with the flashlight on the empty gravel and the blanket in the dirt and the fence still shaking, and she can picture his face while he works it out, and she doesn't need to see it to know what it looks like.

"Call Vic," he says.

"I'm calling Vic."

"Call him now."

She crests the embankment. Below her, the service road runs flat and gray between two lines of dark, and past it there's a fence — a different fence, a low one, chain-link with no barbed wire — and past that the backs of houses, and past that a streetlight and a strip of asphalt and the ordinary dark of a city at night, and she stands at the top of the embankment for a moment with the dry grass around her knees and the stadium lights behind her and the road below, and she breathes.

Her back doesn't hurt.

She notices it the way you notice a sound stopping — the absence arriving before the fact. The wound is closed. The long split down her spine is gone, knitted and sealed and covered over with new skin, and the warmth that has been working in her for the last half hour has gone quiet, its job done, and in its place there's only the ordinary tired ache of a body that has been used hard and is still standing. She rolls her shoulders. The cord across her chest pulls and bites. She reaches back and finds the knot at the base of her neck and works it with her fingers, one-handed, and it doesn't come, and she doesn't stop walking.

Down the embankment. The dirt slides under her bare feet and she lets it, half-running, half-falling, and she hits the service road at the bottom and crosses it in six strides and her feet find asphalt and the asphalt is warm from the day and rough and real, and she is on a road, she is on a road in the open with the sky above her and the fence behind her and no one in front of her at all.

The low fence comes up on her left. She doesn't go over it. She follows it — east, away from the stadium, away from the light, keeping the chain-link between her and the lot, and the road runs along beside it, and after a hundred yards the fence turns a corner and the road turns with it and the stadium is behind her and the backs of the houses are on her right, dark windows, sleeping people, a dog barking somewhere two streets over.

She hears the radio behind her.

Not words. Just the squelch of it — a burst of static, flat and clipped, and then a voice too far away to make out, and then another burst. The clipboard man, on his radio, calling it in. She knows what he's saying. She can hear the shape of it even without the words: she's out, she's over the fence, she's on foot, she's heading — and she knows what comes after that, too, the men with flashlights spreading out along the perimeter, the trucks starting up, the headlights sweeping the service road.

She runs faster.

The road bends. There's a culvert ahead where it passes under a cross-street, a low concrete mouth half-choked with dead leaves, and she drops into it without slowing — bare feet in the cold water at the bottom, the concrete walls coming up on either side, the road passing overhead with a rumble of tires — and she crouches there in the dark under the bridge and lets the water run over her feet and listens.

An engine. Then another. Headlights sweep the road above her, slow, and pause, and sweep on. A man's voice, close, calling something to someone else, and the words don't reach her. Then the engine fades. Then the second one fades. Then there's only the water and the dark and the dog barking two streets over and, far behind it all, the bass from the stage, still knocking, still going, one, two, three, four.

She stays in the culvert until the count runs past a hundred and then past two hundred and then she loses it, and the water is cold and the concrete smells of rot and the cord is still wrapped around her chest and she is still naked and she is still shaking, and none of it is the point. The point is that her legs work. The point is that she is out. The point is that somewhere above her, in the ordinary dark of an ordinary city, there is a street with houses on it and a phone in one of those houses and a door she can knock on.

She stands up in the culvert. The water runs off her ankles. She puts a hand on the concrete wall and it's cold and rough and holds her weight, and she looks up at the underside of the bridge and the strip of night sky beyond it, and then she climbs out the far side and starts walking east.

Behind her, in the gap between the trailers, the tall one is standing over the empty gravel with his phone in his hand. The screen is lit. On it, small and bright and unmistakable, is a photograph — a woman on her knees in the grit with a blanket half off her shoulders and her hair stuck to her face and a long dark line down her back that is closing while the camera watches.

He looks at it for a long time. Then he thumbs the screen and sends it.