She turned the knob and stepped into the hallway.
The small woman with her weight forward on the balls of her feet was unquestionably the woman from the woods. The smile, the small teeth. Natalie would have recognized them anywhere, even though without the dazzle paint, the woman’s face was transformed into a forgettable, statistically average mask of mid-Slavic nondescriptness. The teeth, though.
Natalie looked her in the eye. There was no tough-guy stare-down, just a mild interest. Natalie stepped forward to the side, to go around the woman, but she was right there, moving faster than Natalie had ever seen anyone move. That might be the drug hangover. She stepped to the other side, the woman was already there.
Staring, she said, “Excuse me,” and tried to step past. The woman blinked.
“I said excuse me.” She put a hand on the woman’s shoulder, gently pushing her to one side. She didn’t push.
“Get out of my fucking way.” Natalie regretted the fuck as she said it, nothing to be done about it.
From behind her, Cordelia: “Natalie, come back in here, okay?”
“Get out of my way, please.” Her eyes locked on the mild, disinterested gaze of the small woman. “Please.” She sounded so weak. She remembered how she’d faked out the woman, broken her grasp before. Strong and fast, but not invincible. Let her think Natalie was weak.
Cordelia’s hand on her shoulder. “Come on, Natalie. She’s not going to let you past, and if she did, you wouldn’t be able to leave the house.”
Still looking into the woman’s mild eyes. “What if I had you as a hostage?”
“I’d incapacitate both of you.” The woman spoke for the first time. She had a sweet voice, girlish, the voice that went with Cordelia’s face (Cordelia had spent a lifetime cultivating a husky voice because it was too much otherwise), and a bit of an accent that Natalie thought might be Quebecois or possibly, weirdly, Texan.
“Natalie, please?” Cordelia said.
“They murdered people,” Natalie said. “In front of me. I helped the wounded. I carried the dead.” Tears on her cheeks, but her voice was steady. “Keep your fucking ‘please.’” There was that fuck again. Fuck it. “Get out of my way, killer, or get ready to incapacitate me, whatever that little asshole euphemism means.”
The woman didn’t speak. Cordelia’s grip tightened on her shoulder, would not be shrugged away. The woman wore stuff that was almost walkaway: seamless, printed as a single piece, a bitmap woven into it: conservative dark stripes on a darker background. The stripes did something to her perception of the woman’s stance and movement, made it harder to predict where she’d go and when she’d get there. More dazzle.
Without windup, without letting the thought percolate to her forebrain, she took a rough step, bulling into the woman, bodies colliding, and she was already ready to take another step.
Then she was lying on her back, winded, the woman standing back a step. Her expression was unchanged. Small teeth.
“Natalie,” Cordelia said. “This isn’t going to get anywhere. You can’t solve this with force. You’re outgunned.”
Walkaways walk away. But what if you’re confined? Natalie considered another staring contest with the woman, spitting in her face. Doing it over and over. She had a deep intuition the woman would take it. The vivid image of the woman with Natalie’s spit spattered across her face was entertaining in a way she identified as a Jacob Redwaterish feeling.
She got to her feet, back to the woman, like she was furniture, and refused Cordelia’s help. She went back into the room. The cell. Her shoulder hurt.
*
They fed her by dumbwaiter, her favorite girlhood foods. It was worse than slop or moldy bread. The dumbwaiters ran through the house, a way to fulfill desire without the bothersome politesse of dealing with human servants. She and Cordelia called it Redwater Prime, after the Amazon service, because they knew somewhere in the chain were people earning nowhere near enough to buy the things they dispatched.
Cordelia visited the next two days. The house—her father—listened to them. Natalie knew this because when she asked for things they’d sometimes arrive in the dumbwaiter. But she couldn’t directly access interfaces.
Her father didn’t visit.
The meals and the fulfilled wishes came at irregular intervals. She knew it was intermittent reinforcement. Give a rat a pellet every time it presses a lever, it will press the lever whenever it’s hungry. Give the rat a pellet on random lever-presses, it will press and press, past satiety, as the pattern-matching part of its brain tried to find the pattern in the randomness. You could produce superstitious rats, it was one of Limpopo’s favorite epithets for people who were specifically stupid in the superstitious rattish way. Superstitious rats noticed a certain combination of actions prior to a lever-press produced a pellet a few times, decided this needed to be done every time, and though it didn’t change the pellet distribution frequency, every pellet was accompanied by the superstitious dance, reinforcing the ritual.
The woman outside her door never seemed to sleep. Maybe she was twins, or a robot. She was always there, neutral, small teeth bared, blocking the hall. Natalie had explicit, violent torture-fantasies about the woman, what she’d do if she had a gun or a taser or the power to move things with her mind.
Her mind. The room had: a chair, a bed, remains of her meals—whatever she hadn’t put into the dumbwaiter—dirty laundry, and four walls, two doors, one window. The bathroom: toilet roll, toothbrush—self-pasting—the earthy-smelling probiotic cleanser that put her in mind of her mom, though she didn’t really know if her mom ever used it, and lethally strong peppermint soap she thought of as her father’s, in silicone squeeze bottles that felt like the skin of a sex toy.
The door wasn’t locked. But the woman wouldn’t let her out, and, as Cordelia reminded her during their increasingly infrequent visits, even if she got down the stairs, the door wouldn’t let her out into the wider world.
“Have you spent a lot of time in zottaland?” she asked the woman. She’d taken to sitting in the corridor, studying her. Before that, she’d been talking to herself in the room/cell as a performance for the hidden watchers or algorithms. That made her so selfconscious that she’d come to conduct her monologue with the woman, who might have been a statue.