Hidden Steel

by Doranna Durgin

  And then there were no photos of his brother at all.

  “So that’s your story,” Mickey told the monitor. His brother had gotten sick. It wasn’t a huge leap to suppose it had been mental illness, that which Steve now so easily saw in Mickey—and that he lived with every day, trying to help those who’d fallen out of the system and through the cracks of polite society. He’d lost his brother, it seemed, and now he spent his days with those who still remained. Understanding them, comfortable with them … perhaps a little lost right along with them.

  “That’s not me,” she told him as he looked out at her, the most recent photo she’d seen yet. Balloons in the background made her think of a graduation party, or a birthday … maybe an anniversary. His badly aged parents sat with him, but the picture centered on Steve, one arm around each parent as though now he held them up, too.

  Mickey had seen enough. She thumbed the space bar, kicking off the screensaver and firing up the browser. She hunted up the local paper, and then searched the recent archives. Missing, lost, kidnapped … nothing. She supposed it would have been too easy if she’d managed to find an image of herself staring back like a face on a milk carton.

  They would have done it quietly, her inner voice whispered to her. The one that seemed to know what was going on, even if she didn’t. They would have avoided suspicion. So many options … grabbing her on the way out of town, leaving notes and messages to her loved ones … if she had them.

  Tucked at the front of the monitor she found a letter opener. It drew her fidgety fingers; she played with it, assessing heft and balance and running her fingers along the sleek silver edge. Expensive. Maybe Steve, too, had lived a different life before coming to this place.

  On a whim, Mickey searched on Naia. Why not Naya, or even Naiya? But no, her fingers said Naia and she left it at that, hitting the enter key to unexpected results: National Association of Independent Artists. National Animal Interest Alliance. National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics.

  What if Naia wasn’t a person at all? What if it was an industry, or an organization?

  Mickey closed her eyes, and in her mind saw again those beautiful, exotic features. Saw again the fear. Nope. Naia … a person. A young woman. Mickey just needed a last name to get anywhere with this search.

  Aurgh. She needed a cup of—

  Tea. I like tea.

  I have a cat. Somewhere, I have a home. I like tea. I know how to punch … and how to hide in small corners behind dumpsters.

  Fatigue rapidly crept up on her, reminding her that she’d gone who knows how many days without food while drugged, and that her body still struggled to rid itself of its reactions to that drug. Much as she needed to find out who she was, much as she needed to know who’d grabbed her and why—much as she needed to protect Naia …

  There. I can’t be all bad if I’m so driven to protect this woman.

  “Unless,” she murmured out loud, “it’s just because you want something from her.” After all, her captives had fought to keep Mickey alive, too, after her bad reaction to the super knock-out drug.

  And so she lost herself in the tangle of those thoughts a moment, fingering the letter opener until the monitor shifted back into the screensaver slide show and mesmerized her, images of Steve and his family jumping across their years together and then just a few pictures of Steve and a dog, Steve in front of a lake, Steve beside a mountain bike …

  Steve alone.

  The door to the office flung open with sudden violence, hard enough to slam against the wall and bounce back again. Mickey, startled from drifting thoughts, leaped to her feet, bringing her arm back, the letter opener suddenly familiar in her grip, its balance and weight assessed, the distance to the door assessed—

  Only at the last instant, as the young man in the doorway stopped short in astonishment, did she angle her body. The letter opener slipped through her fingers and drove end over end to bury itself in the wall just beside the door, brushing a shirt sleeve on the way by.

  “Shee-it,” said the young man, his warm complexion paling.

  Steve’s alarmed voice came from down the hall. “Hey, Tajo, don’t—”

  “Too late,” said Tajo, his voice a little hoarse. He cleared his throat, took a step back. “Sorry. Didn’t know you had company, man.” By then Steve had reached his shoulder—and could follow Tajo’s gaze to the letter opener, now drooping in the wall.

  After a long silence, he said, “Do I even want to know?”

  And Mickey couldn’t do anything but whisper, “No.”

  * * * * *

  Steve thought his voice sounded admirably calm. “I told you to knock,” he reminded Tajo, a young man already decorated with tats and yet struggling to grow that wispy soul patch. Tajo—street tough, well-schooled in kickboxing, cut with muscles—was still wide-eyed and pale. Steve put a hand on his shoulder, turned him around. “I’ll get it,” he said. “Go on back and lead the class in some timing drills.”

  “Yeah,” Tajo said, not taking his eyes from Mickey. “Sure.” Not until he was actually out the door did he tear his gaze away from her, heading down the hallway with unusual haste.

  Mickey looked very small as she sat behind his desk, fingers twined together and somewhat clenched. She said nothing.

  She probably had a pretty good idea that there wasn’t much to say.

  She probably had a pretty good idea that Steve was already second-guessing his decision to let her crash at the gym. He knew the number of the local precinct by heart; he knew the closest shelter and the closest clinic, and he had contact and location information for everything beyond right there on his computer.

  What was she doing at his computer, anyway?

  He reached out to pluck the letter opener from his wall, and hefted it. “Not exactly balanced for throwing.”

  “You know knife throwing?” she asked, somewhat weakly, but he saw the interest spark in her eyes.

  “I know enough.” He dropped the letter opener on the desk and picked up the newspaper that Tajo had come for in the first place—it held a small feature on one of the neighborhood kids who’d earned a scholarship. I did tell him to knock, dammit.

  But who reacts by throwing a letter opener like the finest throwing knife? Who knows how?

  “Earlier I saw you dancing with the broom,” he said, perching one hip on the edge of the desk—knowing he’d taken an intimidating stance, and watching her for reaction. “What was that you were singing?”

  “Cher,” Mickey said, looking down at her clenched hands. “One of her songs.”

  He tipped the computer monitor far enough to see the browser she’d been using—to recognize the search engine page. “Hunting for something?”

  She snorted, a little of her natural spirit coming through. “Yeah,” she said. “Me.”

  And he shifted closer on the desk, watching her—saw her acknowledgment of his proximity, the faint draw of her forehead and the shift of those small, damned cute smile lines at the very corners of her mouth. She said, “You’re pushing.”

  “What if I am?” he said. “What if another of my kids comes in here like a macho idiot? What happens to him?”

  “Dunno,” she said. “You’re the one who said I knew what I was doing. That I had control.”

  Convincing words. Almost as if she hadn’t been caught unawares both times, in some fugue state that made her vulnerable to over-reaction.

  That made everyone around her vulnerable, too.

  He waited for her to look up at him, bright eyes open and honest and even beseeching in her search for understanding. But a muscle flickered at her jaw, giving away her game. “I might have bought that just now,” he said, “if I thought you bought it.”

  She looked away, muttering. “Well, damn.” A deep breath, and she said, “Nothing’s changed. I just need a place, okay? Just a couple days. I can’t … sort things out if I’m busy hopping park benches and underpasses.”

  “What makes you think you can
sort things out anyway?” Steve shook his head. He wasn’t that kind of enabler. He couldn’t pretend the problem would just go away. Someone wanted to stay off their meds? Fine. But acknowledge the results. Deal with them honestly.

  “I don’t know if I can,” she said, surprising him with an equal dose of that honesty. She stretched her fingers, freeing them from their entwining prison. “I just know I have a better chance.” She looked wistful; he would have given anything—almost anything—to know what she was thinking in that moment.

  He would have given that much again if he wouldn’t keep forgetting to look at her as though she were one of his street clients, and instead looked at her as though—

  He closed his eyes. Tightly. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He forced himself to say, “I don’t know what’s going on with you. But maybe it would be best for all of us if we called the—”

  “No,” she said, startling him with her intensity. She seemed to take herself by surprise, too. She inhaled audibly, let it go, and added in a much calmer voice, “You may be right. I just don’t want to get tangled up in the system. Not yet.”

  The mighty system. He really couldn’t blame her for that. The system shuffled people around …took away their choices.

  She must have seen his assent on his face, for she relaxed. “You know,” she said. “I’m not what you assume.”

  “What do I assume?”

  She said matter-of-factly, “The mental illness.”

  She hadn’t taken on that overly earnest look that generally presaged this particular conversation. But it didn’t change what he’d seen of her over the course of the day. The confusion, the obvious disorientation, the apparent hallucinations. “Tell me, then.”

  She laughed. There was no humor in it—none of the lightness he’d seen in her that afternoon, or shared with her over pizza. “The story of me?” She shook her head, regretful—and where sometimes he felt she didn’t have answers, this time he saw them going unsaid. “I can’t do that.”

  Unexpected anger surged through him, tightening his throat. It caught him unaware, and it caught him just as unaware when his hand slammed down on the desk. Dammit, how can I help if—

  She jumped, startled but not frightened. Then she just watched him.

  I can’t. That’s the damned answer. The only answer. He understood the anger, then—the realization that he wanted this time to be different. He wanted a happy ending, and he wanted to be part of it.

  The anger was because he knew better.

  Neither of them spoke for a long moment, while Steve realized he’d really gotten too close, almost trapping her behind the desk—and that the loudest sound in the room was his own breathing.

  She was the one who gave him space, watching him but not making any move, not reaching to reassure him or shrinking back in retreat. She did, he thought, look at him with empathetic understanding—and still a touch of that wistfulness, tinged with sadness as though she, too, realized they’d gotten a glimpse of something that neither of them could have.

  When she finally looked away, her expression shifted, became something surprised. “I miss my cat,” she said, quite nonsensically. There was wonder in her voice, as though this were somehow an important discovery.

  Happy endings. Right.

  Those were for someone else.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 5

  Mickey should have been sleeping. Or at the least, plotting out just how she’d make this situation better—how she’d find Naia. How she’d find herself.

  Instead …

  The woman in her memory looked like Mickey.

  She sat cross-legged on the cot and stared into the darkness, wishing her mind’s eye would take a rest. Wishing it hadn’t painted such vivid images across her dreams and into the small hours of the morning.

  The woman looked like Mickey. Except she was dying.

  Mickey couldn’t say how she knew it. Seeing the woman against the dark rich green of the couch, propped by pillows, a cool cloth slipping off her forehead … she might have had the flu. She might have had a headache. She might have simply taken a few moments of private time from her children.

  But Mickey knew better, just as she knew there were children. One of them responsible, trying to make it all better; one of them withdrawn and in denial, acting out at school and taking hits—literal hits from schoolchildren who knew how to flock around the weak one in the pack.

  Trying to make it all better.

  She felt that little girl’s desperation—the refusal to believe she couldn’t stop the inevitable. Another cool washcloth, another dinner made, another perfect grade. If she was good enough, if she tried hard enough …

  And she felt the guilt of the woman’s death. If she’d been good enough, if she’d tried hard enough …

  And is that really me? Is that really some part of my life?

  Or just hallucinations?

  Stop that. Just because it was the middle of the night, without so much as the glow of the monitor to break the blanketing darkness of Steve’s office. Just because it was so easy to doubt herself when the only person she even began to trust—she did trust—also doubted her.

  Well, not quite true. He didn’t doubt her at all. He just believed things of her that conflicted with what she needed to believe of herself.

  She wished she could run her hand down short, sleek fur, feel the rumble of a deep purr. No point in that. So she turned her thoughts toward action. Not for the moment, but for the morrow. She’d had her freedom less than a day, and already it seemed that time was running out. Naia was still out there, still somehow tied to Mickey—somehow depending on her. Partners in crime, partners in business … Mickey didn’t know. But she was younger, and she evoked in Mickey all those feelings—

  Younger sister, acting out at school … surrounded by bullies, coming home with bruises and tears.

  Mickey had done something about that. She was sure of it. Slingshot.

  The image swam up from her thoughts with surprising assertiveness and would have sunk back down just as quickly if she hadn’t grabbed at it—learning to recognize those things of herself that were true.

  She’d best learn fast.

  Tomorrow she had to leave this place. She hadn’t wanted to face it, but in that, Steve was right. She couldn’t chance another encounter, one in which she wouldn’t pull her punches. And that car … those men. If they were looking for her as her instincts insisted, she couldn’t bring them here. She wasn’t the only troubled soul who considered this a safe place, and none of the others deserved her trouble raining down on them.

  But she wouldn’t go out there without more advantage than she had now. Steve …

  Steve had known about throwing knives. He’d known. He’d handled that letter opener as though he wanted to try his own mettle on it, seeing if he, too, could compensate for its weaknesses, assessing its turn speed and distance to bury the point in the wall.

  Tomorrow he had a woman’s self-defense class. Tomorrow, Mickey would see if his upstairs apartment held the bladed weapons she thought it would. And then it was time to leave this place so its people would be safe, time to find herself, time to find—and protect—Naia.

  It had been a luxury, thinking she might stay here until she could get some kind of a foothold in this maze that was apparently her life.

  It had been a mistake.

  * * * * *

  Morning at the pottery co-op came early—kilns firing up, people checking on projects—and Naia was only one of several to climb the narrow stairs to the second-floor warehouse before most people were brewing their first cup of coffee.

  None of the others had a chaperone, of course.

  An unhappy chaperone, not understanding why Naia had to make this trip into San Jose at this time of day.

  “This is my schedule,” Naia told her, walking briskly up those stairs and drawing from the early days of her rebellion to get the convincing tone in her voice—to hide her concerns and uncertaint
y. “If you prefer to stay on your own schedule, that would suit me perfectly.”

  Badra obviously preferred just that. But she had little recourse other than to say, “That isn’t an option.”

  “If it seemed you were imposing significant restrictions on me, it wouldn’t present the image of Irhaddan that my father is trying to portray,” Naia reminded her, turning around the narrow landing to take the final flight of stairs. Badra wasn’t a young woman and she wasn’t physically fit, and Naia in no way accommodated her. So it was natural that she reached the pottery co-op before Badra … not surprising that her firm stride took her straight to the shelves with their assigned project space, or that she’d managed to palm her short, concise note—need help/advice—blown?—between her fingers, slipping it into the dead-drop behind her own current project even as Badra entered the huge, open area. Naia kept her composure, pushing the hollowed brick back into place.

  Because Anna’s people had prepared it, had smoothed it top and bottom and inserted a slick Teflon base, the brick slid easily. Silently. And when Naia turned around to Badra, she had a hand-formed vase in her careful grip, examining its newly fired glaze with a critical eye.

  Badra gave it a dubious look. “It’s lopsided.”

  Naia considered telling her it had been a firing accident, but, flush with her success with the dead-drop, told the truth instead. “I made it that way.”

  “Flawed? On purpose?”

  “No,” Naia said, quite distinctly. “Individual.”

  Badra was silent a moment. Then she said, “The color is pretty.”

  As close to victory as Naia would ever get. “Thank you.” She returned the vase to her project space and hovered over the class schedule and kiln sign-up sheet, then spent a few moments admiring the other projects in process.