We’re standing on the high point of an open staircase that drops fifty feet.
It looks like an oil painting in here, the way the antique light falls on a row of dormant generators below and the latticework of I-beams overhead.
It’s as quiet as a cathedral.
“We’re going down,” he says. “Watch your step.”
We descend.
Two steps up from the second-to-highest landing, I spin with the flashlight death-gripped in my right hand, aiming for his head…
…and hitting nothing, the momentum carrying me right back to where I started and then some.
I’m off balance, falling.
I hit the landing hard, and the flashlight jars out of my hand and disappears over the edge.
A second later, I hear it explode on the floor forty feet below.
My captor stares down at me behind that expressionless mask, head cocked, gun pointed at my face.
Thumbing back the hammer, he steps toward me.
I groan as his knee drives into my sternum, pinning me to the landing.
The gun touches my head.
He says, “I have to admit, I’m proud you tried. It was pathetic. I saw it coming a mile away, but at least you went down swinging.”
I recoil against a sharp sting in the side of my neck.
“Don’t fight it,” he says.
“What did you give me?”
Before he can answer, something plows through my blood-brain barrier like an eighteen-wheeler. I feel impossibly heavy and weightless all at once, the world spinning and turning itself inside out.
And then, as fast as it hit me, it passes.
Another needle stabs into my leg.
As I cry out, he tosses both syringes over the edge. “Let’s go.”
“What did you give me?”
“Get up!”
I use the railing to pull myself up. My knee is bleeding from the fall. My head is still bleeding. I’m cold, dirty, and wet, my teeth chattering so hard it feels like they might break.
We go down, the flimsy steelwork trembling with our weight. At the bottom, we move off the last step and walk down a row of old generators.
From the floor, this room seems even more immense.
At the midpoint, he stops and shines his flashlight on a duffel bag nestled against one of the generators.
“New clothes. Hurry up.”
“New clothes? I don’t—”
“You don’t have to understand. You just have to get dressed.”
Through all the fear, I register a tremor of hope. Is he going to spare me? Why else would he be making me get dressed? Do I have a shot at surviving this?
“Who are you?” I ask.
“Hurry up. You don’t have much time left.”
I squat by the duffel bag.
“Clean yourself up first.”
There’s a towel on top, which I use to wipe the mud off my feet, the blood off my knee and face. I pull on a pair of boxer shorts and jeans that fit perfectly. Whatever he injected me with, I think I can feel it in my fingers now—a loss of dexterity as I fumble with the buttons on a plaid shirt. My feet slide effortlessly into a pair of expensive leather slip-ons. They fit as comfortably as the jeans.
I’m not cold anymore. It’s like there’s a core of heat in the center of my chest, radiating out through my arms and legs.
“The jacket too.”
I lift a black leather jacket from the bottom of the bag, push my arms through the sleeves.
“Perfect,” he says. “Now, have a seat.”
I ease down against the iron base of the generator. It’s a massive piece of machinery the size of a locomotive engine.
He sits across from me, the gun trained casually in my direction.
Moonlight is filling this place, refracting off the broken windows high above and sending a scatter of light that strikes— Tangles of cable.
Gears.
Pipes.
Levers and pulleys.
Instrumentation panels covered with cracked gauges and controls.
Technology from another age.
I ask, “What happens now?”
“We wait.”
“For what?”
He waves my question away.
A weird calm settles over me. A misplaced sense of peace.
“Did you bring me here to kill me?” I ask.
“I did not.”
I feel so comfortable leaning against the old machine, like I’m sinking into it.
“But you let me believe it.”
“There was no other way.”
“No other way to what?”
“To get you here.”
“And why are we here?”
But he just shakes his head as he snakes his left hand up under the geisha mask and scratches.
I feel strange.
Like I’m simultaneously watching a movie and acting in it.
An irresistible drowsiness lowers onto my shoulders.
My head dips.
“Just let it take you,” he says.
But I don’t. I fight it, thinking how unsettlingly fast his tenor has changed. He’s like a different man, and the disconnect between who he is in this moment and the violence he showed just minutes ago should terrify me. I shouldn’t be this calm, but my body is humming too peacefully.
I feel intensely serene and deep and distant.
He says to me, almost like a confession, “It’s been a long road. I can’t quite believe I’m sitting here actually looking at you. Talking to you. I know you don’t understand, but there’s so much I want to ask.”