No Lights

You texted with him earlier tonight, sitting on your kitchen floor with the deadbolt locked, until your battery was nearly dead. You've read the thread so many times since then that the words have stopped looking like words.

Now it's 11:58 p.m., and you're standing at the north service door of the Fairbrook Planetarium in a black hoodie and running shoes, and every part of your body is telling you to go home.

The planetarium has been closed for renovation for two years. It squats on its little peninsula at the edge of the lake like a giant stone acorn, its copper dome gone green, chain-link fencing around the parking lot and a banner that says REOPENING SOON faded almost white. Behind you the lake is black and loud, waves slapping the breakwater. The skyline glitters a mile away like it belongs to some other, safer city.

Greer is parked on the far side of the lot with her lights off. You can't see her. You know she's there, because she texted I'M HERE. GLORIA IS HERE. WE ARE BOTH PREPARED TO COMMIT CRIMES eleven minutes ago.

Your phone buzzes.

Unknown Number: The door's open. Forty steps straight ahead, then stop. I'll be there.

You push the door. It swings inward without a sound.

The dark on the other side is total.

Not city dark, not bedroom dark with a phone charger glowing somewhere. This is the dark of the inside of a closed eye. You step in and the door sighs shut behind you and the lake noise vanishes, and you're standing in a silence so deep you can hear your own pulse in your ears.

You count. One. Two. Your shoes squeak faintly on smooth floor. The air smells like dust and cold stone and, faintly, oddly, cedar. Twenty. Thirty. You put one hand out in front of you like a child playing blind man's bluff. Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine.

Forty.

You stop.

"You came alone."

The voice comes from your left, maybe six feet away, low and even and close enough to touch the back of your neck without touching it at all. You'd built it in your head all day. Sharp, maybe. Cold. Some movie villain rasp.

It's not that. It's deep and quiet and a little rough at the edges, like a voice that doesn't get used much, and it moves through you like warm water through ice.

"You said I could set terms," you say. Your own voice sounds too high. You clear your throat. "I'm holding you to every one."

"I know." A pause. You can feel him there, the way you can feel heat from a stove with your eyes closed. "So tell me again. Out loud this time."

You breathe in. You've rehearsed this in the shower. "You stay where you are unless I say otherwise. I can leave whenever I want and you don't follow me inside my building. You answer three questions tonight, truthfully. And Greer gets a text from me every ten minutes or she calls the police and every news station in Chicago."

"Seven minutes," he says.

"What?"

"Make it seven. Ten is too long if something goes wrong." Something that might be the ghost of a smile moves through his voice. "And yes. To all of it. Ask your first question, Ava."

You hadn't expected him to agree so fast. It knocks you off balance. You fumble your phone out, text Greer ok. alive. he's... polite, and put it back in your pocket with the screen against your hip so the light doesn't show.

"Why does Alistair Sallow want me dead?"

"Because of what you read on air." He doesn't hesitate. "The Amberline Foundation runs about forty million dollars a year through its accounts. Most of it is real. Hospitals, scholarships, pictures with the mayor. Some of it isn't. Some of it is money from a network called the Tideline, washed clean through charity galas and art auctions and paid out to a shipping company called Northgate Freight."

"And the Tideline is?"

He's quiet for a long moment. When he speaks again, the warmth is gone from his voice, and what's left underneath is cold enough to burn.

"The Tideline moves people," he says. "Across borders. Against their will. It's been doing it for twelve years in Europe and six here. I've spent all of those six years trying to end it."

You feel sick. You think of your own voice reading numbers into a microphone like they were trivia. I don't know what this is.

"Emory Ebbing knew," you whisper.

"Emory Ebbing knew. That's why he's dead. And three weeks ago, a podcaster with half a million listeners read his evidence out loud. Sallow's partners are not people who leave loose threads, and you named your show after one."

You'd laugh if you weren't shaking. "Second question. Why won't you let me see you?"

"Because there are people who would pay a great deal of money to know my face." His voice gentles. "If they take you, and they ask you what I look like, I want you to be able to say I don't know and have it be true. What you don't know can't be taken from you."

"That's very noble."

"It's very practical."

"Is it also because you're hideous?" you say, because you're terrified and your mouth does this when you're terrified, and your listeners love it and your mother hates it.

Silence. Then, in the dark, low and startled, he laughs.

It's the best sound you've heard in three days. Short and rough and real, like it surprised him as much as you. Your stomach does something complicated.

"Use your third question better than that," he says. "You're running out."

You check your phone. Send Greer still alive. Four minutes until the next one.

"Third question," you say. "Why do you care? Why me?"

This time the pause goes on so long you think he might not answer at all. You can hear him breathe. You can smell the cedar more strongly now, and something under it, clean and warm, soap and wool and skin. He's closer than six feet. You don't know when he moved. You realize you don't mind, and that scares you more than anything else tonight.

"Because you asked the right question," he says finally, very quietly, "and nobody should die for that."

Something in your chest twists.

"That's not the whole answer," you say.

"No." His voice is right there now, maybe three feet away, low enough that you feel it more than hear it. "It's the one I can give you tonight."

Then, high above you, the dome lights up.

Not the stars. Headlights. Two pairs, then three, sweeping across the high windows at the base of the dome, gold beams slicing through the dark and throwing the room into sudden jagged shapes: rows of tilted seats, the hulking insect silhouette of the old star projector in the center, the curve of the walls.

And for one half second, a figure beside you. Tall. Dark. The edge of a shoulder, the line of a jaw. Gone.

Outside, car doors slam. Many of them.

You hear his breath change.

"Did you text anyone else about tonight?" he says. Calm. Very calm. Too calm.

"No. Just Greer. I swear."

Your phone buzzes in your pocket. Not him. Greer.

Greer: 3 SUVs. men getting out. Ava they have GUNS

The beams sweep again. Voices outside, low and quick, spreading out around the building.

In the dark, a warm hand finds yours. Big, calloused, sure. His fingers lace through yours like he has done it a thousand times, and he pulls you close against the hard line of his body, and his mouth is beside your ear.

"Run," he says.