RISK & REWARD

20 | 𝘪𝘵'𝘴 𝘰𝘬𝘢𝘺, 𝘪𝘵'𝘴 𝘰𝘬𝘢𝘺

SLADE'S surrender to my half-and-half plan takes the biggest weight off of my shoulders. She's not running, at least yet — she's staying for a little, just for a little.

We have some time to figure this out. I hope for a miracle; maybe Hawk doesn't ever get free, or he gets transported far, far away. Maybe Pierce spontaneously loses his voice and breaks both legs beyond repair, rendering him silent against Slade's whereabouts. Maybe they give up and maybe I'll wake up to Slade hovering over me telling me to wake up and that it was all just a really bad, really wild dream.

None of that will happen, of course. Slade makes that much obvious.

I've spent the past few days raiding the Doghouse kitchen. Reheated burgers are certainly not going to be great but they'll get Slade by; she's stopped coming in nightly by my request, and so when it's time to close up I've adopted a new routine.

I wish the last customer goodnight, I flip our sign to closed, I turn off the seating area lights, and then I start cooking. All four fryers, the stovetop, the grill; it all goes on. I start pulling things out of my bag: frozen patties, frozen ham, whatever else I've picked up from the store or what I grab from storage. Leftovers for the day? I use them. We've only got a few patties left in a box? Using them too. Someone ordered food and had to go before they paid or collected their meal? To the back it goes.

I leave the Doghouse each night with a bag or two the size of a small car, and I head out. I take the bus over to some bridge that apparently splits the "normal" side of the city and the, as Slade calls it, the "dark side" of the city. It's got one street lamp flickering away at its "normal" end, and the other end is...dark. There's a lamp that's long since gone out, more or less lit only by the occasional moonlight and sometimes the little trios of moths and fireflies that have nested in the corroded metal.

Slade meets me on that end. I start across the bridge and I can't usually see her till I cross over the arch of it, when some of the light from the streetlight ebbs and I can make out shapes in the shadows. Most often, she hangs around the looming buildings flanking the "dark side" end of the bridge; I reach the gone-out lamp and then I'll see someone coming towards me, hood pulled up, hands stuffed in her pockets and eyes sharp in the night.

We're quiet until we get to her apartment. Then we're "safe", so Slade says; her neighbors apparently make mine look like an angel, though I have yet to see or hear anyone living around her. Most places seem abandoned — when I question her about it enough, Slade dumbs it down enough for me to understand that her "neighbors" aren't consistent but rather people who stop at the abandoned houses to do who-knows-what, hide under the radar for a bit before they continue on. Some of them are like her, Slade says — not really looking for trouble — but some of them see it as competition, see the need to rip down anyone near them to hide whatever secret or relationship or crime they may be harboring.

Pleasant place.

Speaking of places, I've taken some time to explore Slade's apartment. Explore, I say, as if there's much to explore.

It's a simple, small one-story; wooden floors, I think, off-white walls stained with the products of who-knows-what, white-ish popcorn ceiling. You enter through the main door (so Slade calls it, though I have yet to find any other door in the whole place) to a corner of her quote-on-quote living room. There's a closet on your left behind the wall, and to the left of that is a TV that I don't think has ever actually been used. There's a dingy old couch across from it, plus the coffee table, both of which seem to be consistently covered in trash and cigarettes and what I think might be the shattered remnants of vials and bottles and who-knows-what-else-s. Her lighting is limited to a fan that doesn't work with a bulb hanging out the middle of it, no cover or anything.