The New Society chose their location headquarters cleverly. Not only did the Michiana House give them a place to retreat to, away from Chicago’s urban battleground, but the lakeside backstreets are also some of the most topographically complicated matrices of roads to be found in the tri-state area. In comparison to Chicago’s grid of streets, the Michiana residential avenues are something out of Alice in Wonderland. Some curve like snakes, some zigzag. Dozens of cul-de-sacs, dead end streets, and crescents twist through the landscape. Occasionally, one of the crescents meets the same street twice and creates two crossroads with the same name — for example, there are two different intersections of Hillside Trail and Birchmont Trail. These lakeside streets form an asphalt labyrinth, and the New Society had a house in the middle of the maze.
Driving the Escalade, Ali navigated the labyrinthine streets expertly. She turned down a small trail-like street, half a block east of the beach. The asphalt was dusted with a fine layer of icy sand that crunched under the SUV’s tires. She approached a house that nearly straddled the border between Michigan and Indiana and pulled into the driveway. The dancers each grabbed one of Nix’s arms and carefully walked her up the house’s small, cracked staircase.*
Like many lakefront homes, the value of the property was in the location, not the building itself. The flooring was warped. To Nix, it smelled like unwashed laundry, mildew, mold, and dirty dishes. The house was cluttered with knick-knacks, some kitschy and cheap, others expensive and delicate.
They removed Nix’s blindfold and led her through the first floor; Nix saw the dining room and living room, both crowded with overstuffed bookshelves. Ten or fifteen women and men in their early twenties sat at the dining room table or on the couches in the living room. Some worked on laptops, some of them examined the maps on the table, some of them crowded around a big iMac. Some of them greeted Ali and Peaches with little waves. They had left their half-empty coffee mugs and teacups everywhere. Platters of fruit, vegetables, cheese, salami, and pastries balanced on top of stacks of books. They stared blankly at Nix when she asked them for help, and covered their papers with their arms so she couldn’t see what they were working on.
Stacks of newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets lined the walls. Between the piles and above them, the fading wallpaper was speckled with water stains. The thick carpet curled up in the corners of the room. The huge table was missing a leg; concrete blocks kept the thing upright and shouldered the weight of the table’s contents: a massive collection of maps and blueprints, as well as the iMac’s twenty-seven-inch screen and two external hard drives. The living room was equally stuffed with books, newspapers, and maps.
Ali and Peaches hurried Nix to the staircase and led her up to the second floor. The wooden flooring was so warped from years of humid summers and damp winters that it actually sloped under Nix’s feet. She tripped over the top stair and, with her hands still tied behind her back, couldn’t catch herself. She banged her chin on the warped wood and began to bleed, then cry from the shock of the pain. “Embarrassing,” Nix recalled to me. “But I was very scared.”
As Ali and Peaches marched Nix deeper into the dark house, Nix began to feel as afraid of the house itself as of the people in it. “The floors were creaking and, I swear to god, a light bulb was flickering, like something was haunting it,” Nix said. “Not like, the ghost of a murdered child or something, but like there was this ephemeral rotting horrible thing in there. And I wanted to leave, I wanted to leave so badly. I’ve never wanted something as much as I wanted that. It is a strange, almost psychic feeling when you realize something life-changing and terrible is happening to you while it’s happening.”
Ali and Peaches walked Nix to the end of the hallway, through a bedroom with someone asleep, though faintly stirring, in the bed. They led her into the adjoining bathroom, which had no windows and only the one door. Crowding the doorway so that she couldn’t slip past, they untied her hands and locked her inside.
Nix spent three and a half hours alone in the bathroom. For the first half hour, she tried to escape by breaking through the door, succeeding only in bruising her left arm, shoulder, and foot; breaking off two fingernails; and badly scraping the palms of her hands. Teeming with energy and adrenaline, she ran in place for the next twenty minutes trying to come up with an escape plan. She couldn’t think of anything. Then, for a little while, she gave up.
The next two and a half hours felt unimaginably long. She recalled Taer’s preferred method for curbing anxiety, a hot bath and a glass (or two) of wine. Nix couldn’t drink the wine, but she could take a bath. She stripped down, filled the bathtub with hot water, and got in. She soaked until the water went cold. Exacting the only kind of revenge she could on her captors, she emptied and refilled the bathtub until she had used all the hot water in the entire house.†
As the hot water lulled Nix’s exhausted body into a state of semi-consciousness, she knew she was making herself even more vulnerable, but she fell asleep in the pool of cooling water. That was how Ali and Peaches found her. Nix woke up when she heard the door open.
Once Nix was dressed, Ali questioned her. Unfortunately for Ali, she had made a critical mistake. Ali had assumed that Nix was the one encouraging Taer to look for Molly, that Nix was in charge of their search. Ali had also assumed Molly had told Nix her secrets and given Nix essential information about Berliner and The Ghost Network. Peaches distrusted Molly so much she thought Molly had told Nix things that Molly had refused to tell her. But the dancers were wrong. Nix knew nothing that Ali and Peaches didn’t know. She couldn’t remember the combination to the lock on the Urban Planning Committee’s steel door.
Ali asked Nix to confess Molly’s endgame. If she didn’t, Ali warned, something violent would happen to her. Nix told Ali she didn’t know what Ali was talking about. Ali asked Nix to tell her where she had hidden Molly Metropolis’s notebook. Nix refused to answer. So, Peaches pulled a Swiss Army knife out of her pocket and cut Nix’s left pinkie and ring finger at the root, nearly severing the digits from her hand.
“For a second, I didn’t feel anything. Then it hurt so much I couldn’t stop screaming,” Nix said. “I could feel my heartbeat in my hand and with every pulse more blood came out. I was so scared, and Peaches, she was laughing at me.”
Casares had been an EMT before interning at SDFC and joining the New Society. He crudely anaesthetized Nix and sewed her fingers back together. He bandaged the cut on her chin. He gave her a Vicodin and made her a bed with pillows and couch cushions in the bathtub. Nix fell asleep or passed out. Casares spent several hours in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, reading The Clash of Kings, making sure Nix didn’t start bleeding again, while Peaches slept in the bed in the next room.
In the early morning, around 5 a.m., Peaches walked into the bathroom, waking Nix in the process. She took Casares into the bedroom. Nix heard the two of them have sex. They didn’t make an effort to keep quiet and at one point, Peaches moved them from the bed to the wall the bedroom and bathroom shared. She made sure Nix could hear the sound of each and every thrust.
I saw Nix happy once during our interviews, while she was describing her escape.
“Can you tell me what happened that afternoon?” I asked.