“Little Miss Monster”
by Marz Workman
ACT ONE
Scene 1: On the Road
A flat stretch of highway cuts through the hill country under a wide afternoon sky. An SUV rolls down the two-lane blacktop at a comfortable clip. There is not another car in either direction for as far as the eye can see. Inside, the radio fills the cabin with steel guitar and a man singing mournfully about woman who left him and hound dog she took with her.
Everett drives with one wrist draped easy over the wheel. His window is cracked two inches. He has the particular look of man who is exactly where he wants to be.
Ana sits in the passenger seat with arms crossed, staring at the dashboard like it owes her apology.
“How long this has been on?” she asks, without looking at him.
“About forty miles.”
“And before that?”
“Different song. Same station.”
Ana closes her eyes. “You do this on purpose.”
“Doing what?”
“Torture me.”
Everett turns to look at her, genuinely puzzled. “Girl, that right there is Hank Williams. That is national treasure.”
“In Russia, we have saying.” Ana holds up one finger. “‘Man who sings about his sorrows has too many sorrows and not enough to do.’”
Everett nods slowly. “Huh. That is terrible saying.”
“Bozhe moy.” She turns and presses her forehead to the passenger window. The land scrolls past her reflection. “Change it. Please. I beg you. As your partner. As your colleague. As woman who survive things that would make grown men cry — change station.”
Everett reaches for the dial.
Ana lifts her head.
He turns the volume up.
“Arrrrghh!”
He laughs, low and easy, the laugh of a man who has been genuinely delighted. “Calm down, Sweetheart. Little Hank never hurt anybody.”
“Tell that to my ears.”
They ride for a moment — or what passes for silence, with Hank Williams still going strong.
“So.” Everett shifts in his seat. “This experiment we’re tracking. How close are we?”
Ana straightens. The droll look settles into something more careful. She tilts her head slightly, the way she does when the diamond is working behind her eye, pulling signal from somewhere that is not here.
“She is close.” A pause. “Very close.”
“She?”
“She.” Ana’s voice drops. “Young. Alone.” She turns her head a fraction, like she is listening to something Everett cannot hear. “She is frightened. Very frightened.”
Everett says nothing for a moment. He watches the road.
“Well.” He reaches over and finally, mercifully, clicks the radio off. The cab goes quiet. Just the hum of the engine and wind through the cracked window. “Let’s go find her.”
Ana looks at him. Something passes across her face — not quite a smile, but near enough. She turns back to the window.
A water tower appears on the horizon, above the treeline. Below it, the faint shape of a town.
Ana’s head tilts again, almost without her knowing it.
“There,” she says.
Everett puts on the blinker.
Scene 2: The Diner
Patty’s Roadside Diner sits at the edge of town the way a lot of things sit at the edge of small towns — like it had always meant to move somewhere better and simply never got around to it. The sign out front is missing the second “i” in “Diner”. The parking lot is gravel. A hand-painted plywood board propped against the door reads: LUNCH SPECIAL — ASK INSIDE.
The SUV pulls in and parks close to the entrance. Everett cuts the engine. For a moment they just sit there, looking at the building.
“Not exactly the Ritz,” says Everett.
Ana considers it. “Ritz has worse coffee.”
He looks at her. “Have you been to the Ritz?”
“I have been to many places.” She opens her door. “Also, their coffee is terrible.”
Inside, the diner smells of fry oil and pie and the particular brand of industrial cleaner that every diner in America has smelled of since approximately 1954. A ceiling fan turns overhead, doing its best. Four of the six booths are occupied — a pair of farmers over coffee, a young mother wrestling a toddler into a high chair, a trucker at the counter working through a slice of pecan pie with the focus of a man doing important work.
Everett and Ana slide into the last booth by the window. Ana picks up the laminated menu and studies it with the expression of someone reading a document of moderate legal consequence. Everett doesn’t touch his.
The waitress is on them before they are fully settled.
“You folks ready to order?”
Everett looks at her name badge. “Good afternoon, Patty. What is your special today?”
Patty shifts her weight to one hip and points her pen at him. “Lunch special is fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, and a roll.”
“Perfect.” Everett closes a menu he never opened. “We’ll have that.”
Ana lowers her menu and looks at him.
He smiles at her pleasantly.
“Comin’ right up, Sugar!” Patty tucks her pen behind her ear and heads for the kitchen.
Ana sets the menu down with the careful precision of a woman who has decided not to say what she was going to say. “You ordered for me.”
“I did.”
“Without asking.”
“The special is always the right call in a place like this.” Everett leans back in the booth and crosses his arms. “Trust me. I have eaten in a thousand diners.”
“And that gives you right to decide what I eat?”
“It gives me confidence.”
Ana stares at him for a moment. Then she turns and looks out the window. Across the street and half a block down, past a hardware store and a shuttered laundromat, sits an abandoned gas station. The canopy over the pumps has caved on one side. The windows are boarded. A rusted sign still reads OPEN, which has not been true for a very long time.
Her expression changes. Not dramatically — just a degree of stillness that wasn’t there before, a quality of attention turned inward.
“So,” Everett says, watching her. “This experiment we’re looking for. How close?”
Ana does not answer right away. She tilts her head slightly — just a few degrees, the way she does when the diamond is working. Her eyes stay fixed on the middle distance, seeing something that has nothing to do with the parking lot.
“Close,” she says. “Very close.” She pauses. “She is alone. Has been alone for some time, I think.”
“She?”
“She.” Ana’s voice is quiet. Not sad exactly, but careful, the way you are careful with something fragile. “Young. And scared. Very scared.”
Everett unfolds his arms and leans forward on the table. “How young?”
Ana turns her head again, a slow half-rotation like an antenna finding signal. Her eyes go briefly, slightly unfocused. Then she comes back.
“Young,” she says again, and does not elaborate, because the word has weight enough on its own.
Everett sits with that for a moment.
“All right,” he says finally. “We eat. We figure out approach. We go in calm and careful and we—”
“Excuse me.” Ana is already sliding out of the booth. “I must use restroom.”
She walks toward the back of the diner without waiting for a response. Everett watches her go. He watches the door to the restroom. He watches the hallway past it, which leads to the back exit.
He sighs.
“Ana.”
But she is already gone.
Everett pulls out his phone, dials, and holds it to his ear. Outside, the ceiling fan turns. The toddler in the high chair throws a spoon onto the floor and laughs at it.
“Joe.” A pause. “Everett. How are things back at base?”
He nods a few times, listening.
“Good.” Another pause. “Yeah, we found another one. I hope this one is a little less aggressive than the last.” He glances toward the back of the diner. “Ana’s already moving. You know how she gets.”
He listens. Nods.
“Will do, General. Later.”
He sets the phone face-down on the table.
“Here ya go, Sweetie!”
Patty materializes at the table with two plates balanced on one arm and a coffee pot in the other hand, a feat of diner physics that Everett has always admired. She sets the plates down, tears a ticket from her pad, and lays it face-down on the edge of the table.
“Your friend comin’ back?” She nods at Ana’s empty seat.
“She stepped out.”
Patty eyes the untouched plate. “Food’ll get cold.”
“It’ll be all right.”
Patty gives him the look that diner waitresses reserve for men who say things will be all right when they clearly might not be. “If y’all need anything else, just give me a holler.”
She walks away. Everett looks at Ana’s plate. Then at the back door.
He picks up his fork, sets it down again, and looks out the window toward the abandoned gas station across the street.
He picks up the fork again.
“She’ll be fine,” he tells himself.
He is not entirely sure he believes it.
ACT TWO
Scene 3: The Abandoned Gas Station — First Contact
Ana pushes through the back door of the diner and pauses on the step.
The alley smells of grease and warm asphalt. A cat on top of a dumpster watches her with professional indifference. She scans left, right, left again — not anxious, just precise, the way she checks every space she enters. Old habit. Older training.
She steps down and turns right, moving along the back of the building until she reaches the street. Then she turns left.
The gas station is exactly where she knew it would be. Fifty feet. Maybe sixty. It sits back from the sidewalk behind a cracked concrete apron where the pumps used to be — the pumps are gone now, pulled years ago, leaving two rectangular scars in the ground that have slowly filled with weeds and old water. The canopy overhead lists badly to one side, its aluminum skin buckled and rust-streaked. The glass from the windows is long gone, replaced with sheets of plywood that have themselves begun to rot at the edges. A faded sign above the door still reads OPEN in red letters, sun-bleached to the color of old blood.
Ana stands on the sidewalk and looks at it for a moment.
The diamond behind her eye hums with a low, persistent warmth, like a compass needle that has finally found north. She is here. She is inside. She has been inside for a long time.
Ana crosses the apron, steps over a length of rusted chain someone looped across the entrance years ago and never bothered to remove, and pushes the door open.
Inside, the light is the gray-brown color of neglect. What comes through the gaps in the plywood does not so much illuminate the space as remind it that the outside world still exists. The station is one large room — the old service bay on the left, the former retail floor on the right, the dividing wall between them long since collapsed into a heap of drywall and broken shelving. The floor is concrete, cracked and heaved in places where tree roots have found their way underneath. Trash has drifted into the corners the way it always does in abandoned places: old fast-food bags, a child’s sneaker missing its lace, a tangle of wire hangers, a water-swollen paperback with no cover and no readable title. An old desk sits against the far wall, buried under decades of accumulated nothing. Everything smells of rust and dust and something faintly sweet, like motor oil mixed with rain.
Ana stops just inside the door and lets her eyes adjust.
“Hello?”
Her voice is quiet. Not a call. More like an acknowledgment — I know you are here, and I am not trying to startle you.
The silence holds for a moment. Then, from somewhere toward the back of the service bay, behind the collapsed wall and the junk and the dark:
“Go away.”
A girl’s voice. Young — very young. And ragged with something that is not quite fear and not quite exhaustion but lives in the territory between them, the place you get to when you have been afraid for so long that afraid starts to feel like your natural state. She has been in here for days. Maybe longer.
“I don’t want to hurt you.” A short pause, and then the voice again, quieter and worse somehow: “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
Ana does not leave. She moves instead — slowly, picking her way through the debris with the practiced quiet of someone who has learned to move without being heard. A board shifts under her boot and she stops, waits, and moves again.
“I know what was done to you,” she says, as she goes. “I know who did it. And I know what it feels like.” She pauses at the edge of the collapsed wall, stepping over a broken shelf bracket. “I am not here to take you anywhere you don’t want to go. I am here because you should not be alone.”
Silence from the back.
Then: “You don’t know what I am.”
“I know exactly what you are,” Ana says. “A person. Same as me.”
“You should go.” The voice is tighter now, strained at the edges. “Please. Please go. I can feel it — it knows you’re here. When it knows someone is here it—” The voice breaks and comes back smaller. “Please. I don’t want to hurt you.”
Ana steps through the gap in the collapsed wall and into the service bay.
It is darker here. The single boarded window lets in one thin blade of afternoon light that falls across the floor and illuminates nothing useful. She can make out the shape of an old hydraulic lift, long frozen in the lowered position, still cradling the rusted ghost of a wheel well. More junk. More debris. An overturned metal stool. A pegboard on the wall with the ghosts of tool outlines still visible, the tools themselves gone.
And in the far corner, huddled with her back against the cinder block wall and her knees drawn up to her chest, a little girl.
She looks eleven. Maybe twelve, small for her age. Her hair is dark and tangled and her clothes — jeans, a pink hoodie with a cartoon cat on the front — are dirty from days of living in this place. Her eyes are very wide and very green and fixed on Ana with an expression that is equal parts hope and horror. Her arms are wrapped tight around her own knees, holding herself together by main force.
On the back of each of her small hands, faint beneath the grime, there are markings — something between a vein and a circuit, tracing up toward her wrists. The Greys’ work. Ana has seen it before, on others, on herself in the early days. She does not look at it long.
She crouches down, putting herself at eye level, and stays there.
“My name is Ana,” she says. “What is yours?”
The girl stares at her. Her jaw is tight.
“Carol,” she says finally, in a voice like it costs her something to say it. Like she has not said her own name aloud in a long time and is not sure it still belongs to her.
“Carol.” Ana says it back to her, carefully, the way you repeat something you want to remember. “I also was taken by them. They did things to me I did not choose and could not stop. And then they let me go, because they thought I was still theirs.” She holds Carol’s gaze. “I was not theirs. And you are not theirs.”
Something moves across the girl’s face. A crack in it. The particular crack that appears when someone has been told something they desperately want to believe and cannot quite allow themselves to yet.
“You don’t understand,” Carol whispers. “It’s not like yours. It’s not — I can’t make it stop. I can’t control it. It does what it wants and I just — I’m just there. Inside it. Watching.” Her voice drops to almost nothing. “The things it’s done. While I was watching.”
Ana is quiet for a moment.
“I know,” she says. And she does. Not in theory. “But you are here now. It has not taken you completely. You are still talking to me. That means something, Carol. That means you are still fighting.”
Carol’s eyes fill.
“Please stop coming closer,” she says, and her voice is desperate in a new way now, raw and urgent. “Please. I can feel it waking up. It can hear you. It likes —” She squeezes her eyes shut. “It likes when there’s someone to — please. Go. Go now. Go and don’t come back. Tell them not to send anyone. Just leave me here, I’ll be okay, I’ll—”
“Carol.”
The girl opens her eyes.
“I am not going to leave you here.”
Carol’s face does something complicated then — grief and gratitude and pure animal terror all moving through it at once, none of them winning. Her hands tighten around her knees. The markings on the backs of them pulse once, faintly, like something underneath the skin has shifted its weight.
The air in the service bay changes.
It is a subtle thing at first — just a drop in temperature, a pressure shift, the particular quality of stillness that arrives before a storm. The blade of light from the boarded window seems to dim, as though something has moved between it and the sun. The dust motes that were drifting stop drifting.
Ana’s danger intuition does not so much fire as detonate.
She turns her head to the left.
“Oh, crap.”
Scene 4: The Battle — Garuko Unleashed
It does not come through the door.
It comes through the wall.
The cinder block on Ana’s left detonates inward in a single explosive burst — not crumbling, not collapsing, but blasting, as though something has been coiled behind it for a very long time and has finally decided it is done waiting. The concussive crack hits Ana’s chest before the debris does. She is already moving when the first chunk of block takes her left shoulder, spinning her half-around, and the thing comes through the settling cloud of gray dust and plaster and ancient insulation like it was born from all of it.
It wears Carol’s body the way a storm wears a house — occupying it fully, changing everything about it, using its shape while having nothing to do with its nature. The girl is still visible underneath: the pink hoodie, the small frame, the dark hair. But the aura that surrounds her now is black and deep violet, churning and alive, throwing light in reverse — not illuminating the space around it but drinking the light in, making the already-dim service bay feel like the inside of something buried. The aura shapes itself at the edges into something vast and wrong, something with too many angles to be a face and too much intention to be smoke. It crouches where Carol crouches, mimics where she moves, and it is enormous in the way that things with no body can afford to be enormous.
Carol’s eyes, when Ana catches them for one fractured second, are gone. In their place: two points of deep amber light, steady and ancient and entirely awake.
Garuko looks at Ana the way a man looks at something he left on the floor that he is about to step over.
Ana throws herself right.
Not fast enough.
Three claws — manifested from the aura, solid and black and curved like fishhooks — drag across her midsection before she clears the arc. She feels the bodysuit resist and then give, and feels the burn of it across her ribs, and lands hard against the old wooden desk in the far corner. The desk holds for a moment and then surrenders, collapsing under her weight and depositing her into the junk heap behind it — rusted cans, a coil of wire, a car jack with one leg broken, something wet she does not have time to identify.
She is on her feet in the same motion. Not graceful. Fast.
Her hand goes to her midsection. The suit has taken most of it. Three parallel lines across the fabric, shallow but hot. She pulls her hand away clean. Good enough.
She activates the camouflage.
The bodysuit responds instantly, its surface shifting to mirror the textures and colors around her — the gray wall, the dark floor, the layered shadow of the service bay — until she is not invisible so much as improbable, present but unconvincing, a suggestion of a person in a space full of junk.
Against most opponents, it would be enough.
Garuko turns its head.
Not toward where Ana is standing. Toward where Ana is standing. The amber eyes find her through the camouflage without hesitation, without searching, the way eyes find something they were already looking at. The aura pulses once — a slow, contemptuous throb of violet light — and Carol’s body drops into a crouch so low the knees nearly touch the floor, weight forward, arms loose at her sides, and then it leaps.
The distance between them covers itself in an instant.
Ana’s danger intuition does not fire so much as sustain — a continuous low-frequency scream at the base of her skull that does not stop because the danger does not stop. She uses her seismic sense to read the vibration of each footfall through the cracked concrete floor, turning before the attack arrives, letting the claws pass through the space she was just occupying. She goes up the wall when the floor is cut off, ceiling joists creaking under her hands and boots. She drops when the aura reaches for her from above. She rolls across the collapsed wall debris and uses the sudden level change to buy herself two seconds of distance and one second of breath.
She counters when she can. A heel strike to the side of Carol’s head that lands solidly and does nothing. An elbow to the shoulder that turns the small body half-around and achieves the same result. She tries twice to lock an arm, to take the fight to the ground where size stops mattering, and twice the aura simply lifts Carol free of it — not floating, not flying, just refusing the physics of the situation with the easy authority of something that has never had to respect physics.
Everything Ana is, Garuko is more. She is fast; it is faster. She is strong; it does not seem to register her strength as relevant. She can feel the battlefield with her whole body; it has been fighting since before she was born, and the ten thousand years of accumulated violence in it move through Carol’s small frame with a fluency that is almost graceful, almost beautiful, in the way that very old and very terrible things sometimes are.
She takes a hit along the jaw that turns her head and dims the room for a half-second. She takes another across her left forearm that leaves a burning stripe from wrist to elbow. She leaps a low swing that would have taken her legs out, lands on the remains of the hydraulic lift, and barely gets clear before the thing tears the lift from its housing and flings it into the wall hard enough to crack the cinder block.
She is not winning. She has not been winning. She has been surviving, and there is a difference, and the difference is shrinking.
The voice, when it comes, does not come from Carol’s throat so much as from the aura itself — a sound that seems to exist slightly behind the air, resonant and layered and very, very old, with the particular flatness of something that has said the same things so many times across so many centuries that the words have worn smooth.
“Why do you avoid the inevitable?”
It is not a taunt. It is a genuine question, delivered with the mild curiosity of someone watching an insect walk the long way around an obstacle.
Ana does not answer. She uses the pause to put the collapsed wall between them, buys herself a second to assess. Her ribs hurt. Her forearm hurts. The eye that took the hit along the jaw is swelling at the corner. She catalogs this the way she catalogs everything: quickly, without sentiment, filing it under things to deal with later.
“You cannot defeat me.” The amber eyes find her through the debris without effort. Carol’s body moves around the collapsed wall slowly now, patient, the urgency of the first assault replaced with something more unsettling — leisure. It is not hurrying because it does not need to hurry. “I have lived for thousands of years. I have fought warriors far greater than you and defeated them.”
It pauses. Considers her.
“A soldier,” it says. Not disparagingly. Just placing her in a category it has seen before. “Modified. Someone’s weapon, once. You have the smell of it.” The amber light pulses. “I know that smell. I have unmade things that carried it. More of them than you have had years.”
Ana keeps moving, keeps the distance, keeps her breathing even. The seismic sense tracks Carol’s weight through the floor — still approaching, still patient.
“I! Am! Forever!”
The leisure vanishes. The thing crosses the remaining distance in a single movement that is too fast to be tracked and too purposeful to be called a leap — it is simply there, where Ana is, and Ana is not there anymore, but only barely, rolling left and taking the glancing edge of it across her cheekbone hard enough to split the skin. She hits the floor on her side and the floor is concrete and her shoulder takes it and the pain is bright and specific and she notes it and does not stop.
She pushes herself onto one elbow.
Her face is bleeding — the cheek, the corner of her eye, the edge of her lip where her teeth found it on the way down. She can feel the eye beginning to close. The forearm underneath her is screaming. The ribs on her left side have something wrong with them, not broken, but a wrongness that makes each breath a deliberate act.
Carol’s body stands over her. The aura drifts at its edges, unhurried, the violet light casting everything in bruise tones. It does not move in for the end. It watches her try to hold herself up, with the expression — if expression is the word for what moves across that amber light — of something that has already decided how this finishes and is simply allowing it to arrive.
Which is its mistake.
And Ana knows it.
She has known it since the diner.
“I was waiting,” she says.
Her voice is steady. Not performance — just fact. The way she says most things that matter.
The amber eyes narrow. Something moves in the aura — not uncertainty exactly, but the early shadow of it, the first intimation that a variable has appeared that was not in the original calculation.
“Waiting,” Garuko repeats. The word comes out of the aura flat and careful, stripped of the certainty it usually carries. “For what?”
Ana does not answer.
She does not need to.
Scene 5: Everett Arrives
Garuko does not get one.
What it gets instead is a sound — a sharp, percussive crack from somewhere behind it and above, brief and precise as a period at the end of a sentence — and then the web hits it between the shoulder blades.
The ooze spreads on contact, black and fast, lashing across Carol’s back and arms in the half-second before the electrical charge follows it through. The ionized gel lights up like a circuit board, conducting the current across every point of contact simultaneously, and Garuko goes rigid in a way that Carol’s body was never designed to go rigid — every muscle seizing at once, the aura convulsing around her, the violet light stuttering and fracturing and throwing arcs of raw electricity outward in jagged spokes that scorch the concrete floor and char the nearest debris to black. The amber eyes go wide. Not with pain, exactly. With something rarer: surprise.
The aura collapses.
Not gradually. All at once, like a held breath released — the black and violet presence that has been filling the service bay simply folds back into nothing, leaving behind the ordinary dim light of a wrecked room in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, and Carol. Just Carol. A small girl in a dirty pink hoodie, falling.
She drops into the junk heap the way unconscious people drop — without any of the arrangements the body normally makes for itself, all at once and wrong, a ragdoll landing. She comes to rest on her side among the rusted cans and the broken things, one arm thrown out, and the faint curl of smoke that rises from the back of the hoodie is the only sound in the room for a moment.
She looks eleven again.
She looks very small.
“Me.”
Everett steps through the gap in the cinder block wall — the one Garuko made on the way in — and holsters the shooter at his hip in the same motion, easy and unhurried, the way a man holsters a tool he has used correctly. His eyes go to Carol first, a quick professional sweep: breathing, unconscious, no visible structural damage through the burn on the hoodie. Then to Ana.
He takes her in for a moment without saying anything. The closed eye. The split cheek. The arm held slightly wrong at her side. The three lines across her midsection where the suit gave way. He has seen her come out of bad situations before. This one qualifies.
He crosses the room to her.
“What took you so long?”
Her voice is level. Not quite steady — there is the faint rough edge of pain underneath it, the way a table sounds different when one leg is shorter than the others — but level. She is already pushing herself upright as she says it, getting her good arm under her, finding her feet with the particular determination of someone who has decided that staying on the floor is not an option and is not entertaining counterarguments.
Everett watches her do it without reaching for her. He knows better. He has learned, over the months they have worked together, that offering Ana a hand up when she is getting herself up is the fastest way to get the hand back with something attached to it. He waits until she is standing before he steps close enough to look at her face properly.
The eye is swollen nearly shut. The cheek is split and has been bleeding long enough to start drying at the edges. The lip has a cut at one corner that makes her look like she has been in a very serious conversation with the floor. She meets his gaze with the one eye that is fully operational and waits.
“I finished my fried chicken,” he says.
A beat.
“Patty wrapped yours to go.”
Something moves at the corner of Ana’s mouth. Not quite a smile. An acknowledgment that a smile could theoretically exist.
Then Everett’s face changes.
Not dramatically. He does not raise his voice. He does not step back or gesture or do any of the things that constitute anger in the theatrical sense. He simply goes still in a particular way — the stillness of a man who has been frightened for the past ten minutes and has now converted that fear, with long practice, into something quieter and more durable.
He puts one finger up between them.
“Do not ever do that again.”
Ana does not flinch and does not look away. She has been on the receiving end of dressing-downs delivered by people who could make Everett look like a children’s entertainer by comparison. She knows the difference between anger that wants to wound and anger that comes from somewhere a person cares about. She lets him have it.
“I made a judgment call,” she says. “She was close to edge. One wrong move and she run. Or something worse happen before we could—”
“You went in alone.” The finger comes down. His voice stays quiet. “With no backup. No communication. Into a situation we had zero intelligence on, against something we had zero profile on, and you—” He stops. Pulls a breath. Lets it out. “I am not going to tell the General about this.”
Ana says nothing.
“But if you ever go out on your own like this again—”
He does not finish the sentence.
Not because he does not know how it ends. Because Ana has crossed the distance between them and put her arms around him, and the hug is not the performance of a person trying to get out of trouble. It is direct and unguarded and has some weight behind it, and after a moment — after the moment it takes a man to decide that the rest of the sentence can wait — Everett puts one arm around her and holds it.
“Spasibo,” she says, into his shoulder. Thank you.
He stands there in the wrecked service bay, in the thin afternoon light coming through the holes in the walls, one arm around his partner, the other hand resting on the back of her head with a care he would probably deny if asked about it later. The smoke from Carol’s hoodie has thinned to almost nothing. Somewhere outside, a car passes on the street.
Everything is very quiet.
After a moment, they separate. Everett keeps a hand on Ana’s shoulder and turns to look at Carol.
She has not moved. She is still on her side in the junk, one arm thrown out, her dark hair across her face. The pink hoodie has a scorch mark across the back the size of a dinner plate, but underneath it her breathing is slow and even. Whatever Garuko is, it has receded far enough that what lies here now is simply a child who has been through something enormous and has finally, at the mercy of ten thousand volts of ionized web ooze, been allowed to sleep.
Everett looks at her for a long time.
“We need to call this in,” he says. “Get a transport. Containment protocol.” He says it gently. “She’s going to be all right, Ana.”
Ana is looking at Carol too. Her expression is not the one she wears in the field and not the one she wears in the diner. It is something quieter than either of those, something that lives underneath both of them, that she does not often let surface where someone can see it.
“Da,” she says softly. “I know.”
She does not look away from the child for a long time after that.
ACT THREE
Scene 6: The Holding Facility — The Sleeping Child
The corridor smells of nothing.
Not clean, exactly — clean has a smell, the sharp mineral bite of disinfectant or the dry neutrality of filtered air. This is something beyond clean. This is a space engineered to contain, and containment starts with removing everything a person might use to orient themselves: smell, echo, the subtle variation in temperature that tells a body where it is and how large the space around it is. The corridor is the same width and the same light from one end to the other, institutional white, the kind of white that is not a color so much as an absence of argument. The doors that line it are reinforced and numbered and have no handles on the inside.
Everett and Ana walk it in silence.
Ana has a field dressing on her cheek and a wrap on her left forearm and the careful posture of someone whose ribs are providing ongoing commentary on the events of the afternoon. The swollen eye has been iced down to the point where it is almost half open. Almost. The medical team at intake had done what they could and offered stronger painkillers than she accepted. She moves with the economical precision of a person directing energy away from what hurts and toward what is necessary.
Everett walks beside her with his hands in his pockets and says nothing. There will be a debrief. There will be paperwork. The General has already called twice. All of that is waiting for them on the other side of this hallway, patient as a weather system.
Right now there is only the corridor, and the door at the end of it, and what is behind the door.
The observation room is small and very quiet. Two chairs against the back wall that nobody has sat in. A panel of monitoring equipment — biometric readouts, environmental sensors, a low-resolution camera feed angled at the ceiling of the cell — blinking steadily in the dim. And the glass.
The glass takes up most of the near wall. It is thick enough to withstand considerable force and treated to be one-way from the observation side, though the room beyond it is lit and the room on this side is not, which means that in practice what you see when you stand at it is a lit stage and yourself reflected faintly over everything on it, ghost-like, watching.
Everett stops a few feet back from the glass and reads the room from there.
Ana goes all the way to it.
The cell on the other side is not a punishment cell. Someone — the General, probably, or someone acting on his instructions — has made sure of that. There is a cot along the far wall with a pillow and a blanket, both real, not the paper-thin institutional variety. There is a small table with a plastic chair. There is a cup of water on the table, a granola bar still in its wrapper beside it, placed there by someone who understood that whatever came through that door was going to wake up hungry and confused and very frightened, and wanted the first thing she saw to be something ordinary.
Carol is on the cot.
She is on her side, facing the wall, curled the way children curl when they sleep — knees drawn up, one hand tucked under the pillow, the other resting open on the blanket in front of her face. Someone has changed her out of the burned hoodie. She is wearing an oversized gray facility shirt that comes down past her knees and makes her look even smaller than she is. Her dark hair is spread across the pillow. Her breathing, readable in the slow rise and fall of her shoulders, is deep and even.
She looks like someone’s daughter.
She looks like someone’s little sister.
She looks, more than anything, like a child who has been awake for far too long and has finally, at some great cost, been allowed to stop.
Ana stands at the glass and does not say anything for a long moment. Her reflection hovers over the sleeping girl, transparent, present.
“She looks so sweet, doesn’t she.”
It is not quite a question. It does not have the inflection of one. It is the kind of statement that contains its own astonishment — the fact of Carol sleeping quietly on the other side of the glass, after what happened in that service bay, is something that requires acknowledgment before anything else can be said about it.
Everett, behind her and to one side, looks at the cot. At the small open hand on the blanket. At the gray shirt that is three sizes too large for the person wearing it.
“Hard to believe,” he says quietly, “that little girl can become a raging demon.”
Ana does not answer right away. She is looking at something specific — not Carol’s face, which is turned toward the wall, but the back of her hand. The small, upturned palm. The fingers slightly curled, relaxed in a way that the rest of Carol Banks has probably not been relaxed in a very long time.
“She did not become it,” Ana says. Her voice is careful. Not correcting him, exactly. Clarifying something that matters to her in a way she is still finding the words for. “She was never it. It was always something separate. Wearing her.” She pauses. “Carol was there the whole time. Trying to warn me. Trying to make me leave before it could—”
She stops.
Starts again.
“She was trying to protect me. Even while it was…” Ana lets that sentence go unfinished. What came after the warning is written on her face and her forearm and her rib cage, and does not need to be said.
Everett is quiet for a moment. He looks at Carol, and he looks at Ana, and he recalibrates something.
“Did she know your name?” he asks. “After. When you found her in the corner.”
“She told me hers.”
He nods slowly. That lands where it needs to land.
The biometric monitor on the panel ticks softly. Carol’s pulse, steady and slow, tracing itself across a small green screen. One hundred and four pounds and eleven years old and carrying something in her that has unmade civilizations and watched stars go cold. The number on the screen does not know any of that. It just counts.
Everett lets the silence run for a while, because Ana is in the middle of something and he has learned, with her, not to interrupt the middle of things. He has learned that she processes in layers, and the top layer is where she puts her competence and her dry commentary and her impeccable fieldwork, and the layers underneath that are her business, accessed on her own schedule, and the most useful thing he can do when she is accessing them is stand close enough that she knows he is there.
He does that now.
He stands close enough.
After a while he puts his hand on her arm — the good one, the right one, gently. “Ready to go?”
Ana does not move immediately. Her eyes stay on the cell, on the sleeping girl, on the small hand open on the blanket.
“I will need moment,” she says. “Please.” She turns her head slightly toward him, not quite far enough to meet his eyes. “I will meet you outside.”
Everett looks at her for a moment. At the set of her shoulders. At the hand she has not yet raised to the glass but is going to.
“Take your time.”
He means it. Both words.
He crosses to the door, opens it, and steps into the white corridor. The door swings shut behind him with the soft, heavy sound of something well-made and carefully sealed.
The observation room goes very quiet.
Just the tick of the monitor. Just Carol’s pulse, green and steady on the screen. Just the sound of Ana breathing, slowly and deliberately, the way she breathes when something hurts and she is managing it.
She looks at Carol for a long time.
Then she lifts her hand and places it flat against the glass.
The glass is cool under her palm. On the other side, the sleeping girl does not stir. The granola bar sits unopened on the table beside the cup of water. The pillow is real. The blanket is real. The cot is narrow but it holds her, and for the first time in — how long? Days. Weeks, maybe. Carol Banks is somewhere safe.
It is not enough. Ana knows it is not enough. Safe is not the same as free, and free is not the same as whole, and whole is a long way from here, and the road between here and there runs directly through whatever the Greys put inside this child, and everything waiting on the other side of that.
But it is a start.
Ana keeps her hand on the glass.
And whatever she is about to say, she holds it for one more moment — holds it the way you hold something before you make it real, before the words make it a promise and the promise makes it a debt and the debt becomes the shape of everything that comes next.
Scene 7: Ana’s Vow
The door closes.
The sound it makes is small and final, the soft compression of a seal engaging, and then the corridor beyond it is gone and Ana is alone with the hum of the monitor and the green tick of Carol’s pulse and the cool weight of the glass under her palm.
She does not move for a moment.
She breathes. In and out. Deliberately. The ribs on her left side register the effort with their ongoing commentary, and she listens to it the way she has learned to listen to pain — as information, not instruction. The pain tells her what happened today. It does not tell her what to do about it. That part is hers.
Through the glass, Carol sleeps.
She has shifted slightly since Everett was in the room — rolled a fraction further toward the wall, drawn her knees up tighter, tucked both hands under the pillow now the way children do when they are very deeply under. The oversized facility shirt has ridden up at the back, exposing a strip of her spine, and Ana looks at it for a moment and thinks of the ruby hourglass in her own back, the one she cannot see and does not fully understand, and wonders if the Greys put something in Carol too that no one has found yet. Wonders how many things they put in all of them that no one has found yet.
The granola bar is still on the table. Still unopened. Carol will wake up to it. She will be disoriented and afraid and the first thing she sees will be something ordinary — a granola bar, a cup of water, a room without junk and rust and the smell of old oil — and for a moment, before she remembers everything, maybe that will be enough. Maybe ordinary will be enough, just for a moment.
Ana hopes so.
She has not hoped for much, for a very long time. She is still learning how.
She thinks about the gas station. About Carol’s voice coming from the back of it — that first sound, raw and desperate, “go away, I don’t want to hurt you” — and how it was the voice of someone who had been alone with something terrible for so long that they had stopped expecting anything from the world except the continuation of it. How Carol had not asked to be saved. Had not asked for help. Had only asked, over and over, to be left alone to bear what she was bearing without also having to watch it hurt someone else.
Ana knows that particular arithmetic. She has done it herself, in the early weeks after the diamond went dark and the Greys’ hold broke and she came back to herself in a world full of things she had done. The calculation that says: I am dangerous, and the kindest thing I can do is keep the danger away from everyone I might care about. The logic that looks like selflessness and is really a way of deciding that your own redemption is not worth risking someone else’s safety for.
It is a lie. Ana knows that now. A lie the Greys built into all of them alongside everything else — the isolation, the shame, the certainty that what was done to you is the same as what you are. Carol believed it. She sat in that gas station and believed it so completely that she tried to protect a stranger from herself.
Ana had believed it too, once.
She is not going to let Carol keep believing it.
She presses her hand flatter against the glass.
The tears come without announcement, the way they have come before when she has let herself be still long enough for them to catch up — not a breaking, just a releasing, the body doing what the body does when it has been held in check through a long and violent afternoon and has finally been given ten minutes of quiet to do with as it needs. She does not wipe them. She lets them come.
She looks at Carol through them, through the slight distortion they make of the light and the glass, and she speaks quietly. Not a whisper. A voice. Measured and low and meant to carry even through a sealed wall, even through sleep, the way certain things carry regardless of the physics involved.
“I will help you, mladshaya sestra.”
Little sister.
“I will find the bastards who did this to us.”
She can feel the diamond behind her eye, warm and present, the Greys’ instrument turned against them, the thing that led her here. She thinks of the others it will lead her to. How many more gas stations. How many more corners and cellars and abandoned places where children and people and whatever Carol Banks is carrying have been left behind to bear what was done to them in the dark.
She thinks of all of it, and she does not look away from the sleeping girl, and she says:
“I promise.”
For a moment she stays. Hand on the glass. Tears on her face. The monitor ticking. Carol’s pulse steady and slow, ten feet away and unreachable, real.
Then Ana straightens.
She takes her hand from the glass. She wipes her face with the back of her wrist, once, and does it without self-consciousness, the same way she does everything — as a thing that needed doing, done. She turns toward the door.
She takes one step, and stops.
Not because she has forgotten something. Because she has not said it in English yet, and English is the language of this country she is learning to live in, and the language in which she makes her professional obligations, and the language Everett will hear if she says it in the corridor, and there is something she wants said in every language she has, in every register, so that it is the most sworn thing she has ever sworn.
She says it to the room.
To whatever is listening.
To herself.
“I promise.”
She walks out.
To be continued…
© 2026 Marz Workman. All rights reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment