The less said about my trip up the filthy, rusty, incredibly cold length of chain, the better, except that the whole experience left me with a lot of respect for Antimony’s trapeze classes. Not that she was usually into climbing chains—ropes were more her thing—but my arms were aching by the time I reached the rafters, and my shoulders felt like they’d been scooped out and replaced with mashed potatoes.
Once I was at the top of the chain, I had to actually pull myself up onto the main support beam, another task that was easier said than done. It was bigger around than the span of my arms, the sort of old, solid construction that was supposed to outlive the city itself. I finally managed to hook my foot into the loop that secured the chain to the beam, scrabbling up the side of the wood and collapsing, facedown, onto it. What were a few splinters in sensitive places after everything I’d already been through?
Answer: damn uncomfortable. I stayed where I was for longer than was probably a good idea, wincing as the feeling came slowly back into my arms. Once I was sure that I could move without sending myself plummeting to the floor, I sat up and looked around me.
The beam where I was seated was covered in a thick layer of grime, cobwebs, and rat droppings. I was naked in the middle of a major health hazard. The filth was at least reassuring, confirming that no one else had been up here in years, if ever. The Covenant wasn’t likely to start looking for me in the rafters until they got really desperate, and by that point, I would hopefully be long gone. There was less than seven feet of space between me and the ceiling; if I stood on my tiptoes, I could have brushed my fingers against it. Assuming I would have wantedto. The cobwebs were even worse up there, creating a hanging shroud of grime.
The big beams, like the one I was starting to think of as mine, were spaced evenly down the length of the warehouse. Smaller beams connected them, creating almost a network of catwalks that someone without a fear of heights could use to traverse the building easily. Best of all, they connected to the windows that were set high into the walls. All I had to do was get there, get the windows open, and get out. Emboldened by what looked like the nearness of my escape, I stood.
Only years of hard training and harder discipline kept me from screaming as I put my weight back on my bruised feet and promptly fell down again. I managed to grab the edge of the beam before I could roll off into space. I clung for dear life, curling into a ball and sobbing into the dirt. This moment had been coming since I escaped; I’d known it was coming, had seen and cataloged the signs. You can only keep running on a bruise for so long. Still, I had refused to believe that my body would betray me like this while I was still in danger. Like the idiot I sometimes was, I’d allowed myself to believe that I could just keep running, and fall down when it was safe.
It wasn’t safe. It was a long damn way from safe. But I was still falling down.
My tears turned the grime against my cheek into a horrible, foul-smelling mud that smeared on my face. I struggled into a sitting position and tried to wipe it away, but only succeeded in smearing it down my chin and all over my hand. That just made me cry more. I was dirty, I was alone, and I was hurt too badly to be doing this by myself.
It was funny, really. I’d always known that I wasn’t going to have a long and peaceful life; that sort of thing is reserved for people who think the monster under the bed is just a story, and who run away from the sound of screaming, not toward it. Somehow I’d always expected to die so fast that I wouldn’t even realize it was happening—a broken neck, like my great-grandmother, or a swarm of Apraxis wasps, like my great-grandfather. Maybe even sucked into a portal to another dimension, like Grandpa. But no, my choices had to be “tortured to death by the Covenant” or “starved to death in the rafters of an old warehouse.” Talk about a rock and a hard place.
My tears gradually ran out, replaced by a hollow feeling in my chest. My parents would never know what happened to me. My mice wouldn’t even be able to give a full accounting. I’d be one more branch lopped off the family tree, with nothing to show that I’d ever been alive.
Well. Almost nothing. I’d managed to sway a Covenant agent over to our side, and that was something we hadn’t done for a couple of generations. Grandma Alice was the last one to accomplish it, and she’d used similar tactics: being cute and blonde and persistent. It was weird to think that she would probably outlive me.
Unbidden, the image of my grandmother rose in my mind’s eye, hair spiked with some unnamable goo from some equally unnamable hell-thing that she’d just killed, a sour expression on her face. “You call yourself a Price girl? Get up. Fight. Don’t you give up like this. That’s something a Covenant trainee would do, and you’re better than them.”
When all else fails, talk to yourself. “My feet hurt,” I informed her.
“I carried my father’s dead body out of the woods when I was bleeding out from Apraxis stings,” she countered. “If you can’t walk, you crawl. Show me what you’re made of, girl, or I’ll start thinking you’re a cuckoo left in place of my real granddaughter.”
It wasn’t really Grandma, but my imagination definitely talked like her. “Yes, ma’am,” I said, and shifted to my hands and knees. My imaginary grandmother smiled before she disappeared. I smiled back.
And then I started crawling.
The beam was rough and splintery in addition to everything else; I’d barely gone five feet before my knees were bleeding. I was going to need more than a tetanus shot when this was all over. Still, I was moving, and that was better than I’d been managing a few minutes before. Infection was something to worry about after everything else was taken care of, like the three Covenant agents who knew my name and face.
I was going to have to kill them. I couldn’t see any way around it. Maybe not right now—right now, escape was a bit more of an immediate priority—but there was no way I could let them live. I’d never be safe again if they were out there, and if I wasn’t safe, I couldn’t go home. I might be able to go and hide with Grandma Baker in Ohio, but the rest of my family would be lost to me. The Covenant has taken too much away from us since the day that we decided we had to leave. I wasn’t going to let them add me to the list.
Maybe it was a flimsy justification for murder, but we’ve always argued that cryptids deserved equal treatment with humans, and I was raised to believe that a cryptid who represented a clear and present danger to another sapient species had to die. Predators don’t get a free pass just because it’s in their natures. The Covenant agents were predators. I was their prey. Fighting back didn’t make me a bad person. It made me someone who was willing to practice what I preached, and treat them like any other dangerous creature. If they lived, I, and a lot of innocent cryptids, would die. So they had to die. End of story.
The beam terminated where it met the wall, joining with the rest of the building’s support structure. I stood again, gritting my teeth against the pain in my feet, and pressed my hands against the wall as I leaned sideways to examine the window. My heart sank as I realized that there were no latches, no hinges, no way to open it at all. The windows were made to let in light, not fresh air. It made sense; who would be climbing up here to open them? I mean besides a naked girl with bruised feet and a stolen knife, of course
I looked up to where the window frame met the ceiling. The Covenant was up there, searching for me. Somewhere above them, the roof was up there, too.
I only had one shot at getting out of here, and that meant finding a way up. Assuming I could manage it. That was a big assumption: I knew nothing about the warehouse where I was being kept, other than that it had a large downstairs, and a second floor . . . I paused, suddenly feeling like an absolute idiot.
I knew nothing about the warehouse, except that it was a warehouse, and it was built before they had cheap and dependable elevator technology. That meant all the floors would need to be connected by some sort of hatch system, to enable them to move things from one floor to another. I turned and started scanning the ceiling, looking for the telltale outlines of a removable panel. I found what I was looking for about halfway across the room: a square where the cobwebs didn’t quite match the ones around them, maybe due to drafts blowing down through the ceiling/floor. More tellingly, that was one of the only patches not used to anchor anything at all, and there were no beams crossing in the space below it. That had to be one of the transportation hatches.