The Man with No Face

He doesn't run toward the doors. He runs toward the dark.

You stumble after him, your hand locked in his, and he pulls you down a sloping aisle between the rows of seats, past the giant shadow of the star projector, toward the far curve of the wall. Behind you, the north service door bangs open. A flashlight beam stabs through the room and swings wild across the dome.

"Down," he breathes, and his hand on the back of your head guides you low, and then you're crouched behind something cold and metal while the beam passes over your heads.

Men's voices. Two, three. Spreading out.

"Breathe through your nose," he murmurs against your hair. "Slow. They can't see in here any better than you can."

"You can," you whisper.

"I've been here before."

The beam swings away. His hand tightens. You're moving again, bent double, along the wall until his fingers find a seam you never would have seen and a narrow door clicks open into an even deeper black. He pulls you through. Shuts it. The voices go muffled.

Stairs, going down. Concrete. Cold air that smells like lake water and rust. You go down them blind, one hand in his and the other on his shoulder, and every step he says something low and steady, step, step, landing, turn left, like he's reading you the world.

At the bottom, a tunnel. You can tell by the echo, by the dripping somewhere ahead, by the way the cold wraps around your ankles. He doesn't let go of you once.

"Service tunnel," he says. "Runs under the lot to the old boathouse. The architects in 1931 didn't want visitors to see the coal deliveries."

"How do you know that?"

"I read."

"Who are you?" It comes out of you like a sob, and you hate it. "Please. Who are you?"

He stops walking. In the black you can't see anything, but you feel him turn toward you. His free hand comes up and finds your cheek, very lightly, the backs of his knuckles barely brushing your skin. It's the first time he's touched you anywhere but your hand, and your whole body goes still under it.

"Someone who isn't going to let anything happen to you tonight," he says. "Can you keep going?"

You nod. Then you remember he can't see you nod.

He can, apparently. "Good," he says, and you're moving again.

Behind you, a door bangs somewhere high up the stairs. Then boots on concrete.

He swears under his breath, one short word, and suddenly he's not leading you anymore. He swings you around in front of him and puts himself between you and the noise, one arm braced across your back, his body a wall behind you, pushing you forward fast. You trip on something in the dark and pitch toward the floor, and you grab blindly at whatever's in reach.

Your fingers close on his collar. Soft wool, and under it, his throat. Warm skin. And a ridge, raised and smooth, running across the left side of his neck like a seam.

A scar. A long one.

He goes very still under your hand for half a breath. Then he lifts you back onto your feet like you weigh nothing.

"Keep going," he says, and his voice is rougher than before. "Thirty more feet. There's a ladder."

There's a ladder. He puts your hands on the rungs and you climb, and above you a hatch opens onto cold wind and the smell of the lake and a sky the color of a bruise. You come up inside a ruined boathouse with half its roof gone, the water slopping under the floorboards. He comes up behind you and closes the hatch and slides something heavy across it.

Through the gaps in the boathouse wall, a black car is idling on the access road with its lights off.

"That's mine," he says behind you. "Get in the back. Don't look at me."

You don't look at him. You walk out of the boathouse with your heart in your mouth and your back to him and every nerve in your skin screaming turn around, and you don't. You don't know why you obey. Maybe because he asked like it mattered.

The car's rear door swings open from inside. A woman in the driver's seat glances back at you. Long platinum braid. Cheekbones that could cut glass, moss-green eyes, a face so striking you actually blink. She looks at you the way you'd look at a parcel that's been dropped on your doorstep in the rain.

"Seatbelt," she says, in a faint accent you can't place. "I drive fast."

"Greer," you say. "My friend, she's in the lot, she has a Corolla and a baseball bat..."

"Your friend is already on Lake Shore Drive doing ninety. My people are behind her." The woman pulls away from the curb so hard you're shoved back into the seat. "She called me a very creative word when we waved her out. I liked her."

"Who are you?"

"Vashti." That's all. She takes a corner like it insulted her.

You twist around in your seat before you can stop yourself. The boathouse is already shrinking behind you. There's nobody standing in its doorway. He's gone, like he was never there.

Your phone buzzes.

Unknown Number: You looked back.

You: you said don't look at YOU. you weren't there

Unknown Number: Fair.

You: are you okay?

The dots appear and disappear three times.

Unknown Number: Nobody's asked me that in a long time.

Unknown Number: I'm fine. Listen. Vashti can take you to an apartment we keep downtown. Doorman, steel door, nobody knows it exists. And there's a phone in the seat pocket. Clean. Nobody can get into it.

You find it. A plain black phone, still in the plastic.

You think about it. You really do. A steel door. A doorman. A phone with no history.

Then you think about your apartment with its flickering hall light and its leaking radiator and the plant on your windowsill you've kept alive for four years out of spite. Your number, the one your mother calls on Sundays, the one your sources have, the one Emory Ebbing's sister texted at two in the morning to say thank you.

You: no

Unknown Number: Ava.

You: i'm not hiding in your apartment. i'm not giving up my number. my sources use it. my mom uses it. if i disappear, they win. i want my own bed

There's a long, long pause. Vashti's eyes flick to you in the mirror, then back to the road.

Unknown Number: Okay.

You blink at the screen.

You: okay?

Unknown Number: It's your life. I don't get to take it from you to save it. Vashti will drive you home. I'll watch the street. Not you. The street.

Something unclenches in your chest that you didn't know was clenched.

"He said yes," you tell Vashti, a little stunned.

"He usually doesn't," Vashti says. She doesn't sound happy about it. She doesn't sound unhappy either. She sounds like someone recalculating.

It's after two when you finally lock your own door behind you. Greer has texted you thirty-one times from her sister's couch in Berwyn, ending with I LOVE YOU I'M GOING TO KILL YOU. You text her back a heart and a skull.

You sit on your bed in your clothes with your laptop on your knees because you can't sleep and you won't, and you open your podcast dashboard out of pure habit, the way some people open the fridge.

The page is white.

No episodes found.

You refresh. White. You click into your account. Two hundred and six episodes, six years of your life. Every one of them is gone. And at the top of the activity log, in neat gray letters, timestamped forty minutes ago:

All episodes deleted by account owner.

By you.

You haven't touched your laptop all night.

Your phone buzzes on the comforter beside you, and for the first time since the cab, you're afraid to look.