It Breathes

Grant sleeps maybe two hours.

Mary’s still in the bed when he opens the five miles. Empty of owners. A few loose tags past the edge, walking. Eight hundred thirty-five in the building. Raven on three, hands crossed on her chest in her sleep, if she sleeps.

The chili can is in the sink. The pantry is a cave with a number on it.

Mary doesn’t open her eyes.

“You’re going to the house, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m the landing pad again?”

“Of course.”

She sits up. Hair wrecked. Pistol already on the nightstand like it slept there.

“Please take her, but watch her hands. You do not stand in the cut. I don’t care how curious you get.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Please say it anyway, master.”

“I’m not standing in the cut.”

“Good. Please eat something. Then go before I talk myself into coming and leaving eight hundred people with a hole in the door.”

He eats crackers. They taste like cardboard.

The air on the third floor feels off now.

Raven is on the edge of the bed again. Black clothes. Black eyes and hair. She looks up when he steps in from the hall girl on three.

“Master.”

“We’re going to his house. You show me the room. You don’t go in the cut. You don’t put a hand on anything unless I say.”

“Yes, master.”

A pause.

“He kept food there. Cans. Water. He didn’t like coming into town unless he had to. If the pantry here is what Mary said, you should check the kitchen first.”

“Okay.”

Mary is in the doorway.

“Landing pad,” she says, like a reminder and a threat. “Jose stays on four. Eve on the roof. Leanne knows you’re gone. If the map lights up, please come home.”

Raven keeps her eyes on the floor.

“I won’t betray him.”

“You better not.”

Zoya drives. Shotgun on the floorboard. She still doesn’t use the rearview as much as possible.

Jose watched them leave from the stairs and didn’t say anything to his leaving boss this time. He just looked at Raven’s hands and eyes and went back up.

The house is east-northeast. The same building the unreadable man, Ellis, sat in for days. Ordinary. Two-story. Lawn that gave up last week. A porch Grant now hates on principle.

Raven’s feet hit the first step and she stops.

Grant waits.

“It’s just a porch now,” she says. “I can tell. It feels like one.”

“You don’t have to go first.”

“I should. I know which floorboards yell.”

She goes first. Grant behind her. Zoya stays with the bus, engine on, eyes on the street.

Inside it smells closed. Not rotten. Controlled. Dishes in the rack. A coat on a chair that still looks like him.

The kitchen is the first good news in two days. Shelves of cans. Rice. Beans. Bottled water stacked like he was waiting out a winter. Grant gets two duffel bags off the bus and starts loading.

“Take all of it,” he says. “Zoya can do trips.”

“Yes, master.”

Raven doesn’t touch the food. She stands in the doorway with her hands visible and watches the hall that goes to the basement door.

Grant leaves the duffel bags half full and follows her gaze.

“Show me.”

The basement door is ordinary too. A switch. A bulb.

The stairs are narrow. Cold comes up them before they are halfway down. Not AC cold. The other kind. The kind she talked about.

The room has no windows. Concrete. The cut is in the middle like she said, not pretty, a groove you could put fingers in. Packed gunk in the channel that Grant does not inventory. Hair. Things that were teeth. The drain in the center is a black circle the size of a dinner plate. Air moves in it. You can hear it if you stop talking.

Raven stays on the last stair.

“That’s it.”

Grant walks the edge. He does not step over the groove. The air out of the drain is wrong in a way his five-hundred senses can name as cold and not anything else. No people in it. No Garret. No smear. Just a hole that wants to be listened to.

“Does it still do anything?”

“I don’t know,” Raven says. “He never had me stand in it after the first time. He said the drain already had what it wanted from me. Sometimes at night it made a sound. Not words. Like somebody breathing through a pipe.”

Grant crouches. Doesn’t put a hand near it.

“Anybody else go in there?”

“Not that I saw. He talked about ‘another’ once, years ago. A girl before me. He said the drain didn’t keep her. I don’t know what that means. He didn’t like saying her name.”

There’s a workbench against the wall. Notebooks. A metal box. Grant opens the box with two fingers. Inside: an old black ring with strange symbols on it, a lock of dark brown hair, a photo of Raven from before — white in her eyes, ordinary teeth, a smile that belongs to a bartender. Under that, another photo, older, a different girl, same age-range, same too-long stare at the camera. No name on the back.

He takes both pictures and the top notebook.

Raven hasn’t moved off the stairs.

“That’s her,” she says, when she sees the second photo. “He kept it in the bedroom too. I wasn’t allowed to ask.”

“We’re leaving everything here except what we can carry. I’m not sleeping in this house and I’m not leaving you in it.”

“Yes, master.”

The drain breathes once. A soft pull of air, like a mouth under the floor.

Grant stands up.

“Upstairs. Now.”

Raven goes. She does not look back. Her hands stay in sight the whole way up.

Zoya packs three loads of food before Grant lets the house be a memory again.

Rice. Beans. Soup. Water. A first-aid kit that is actually stocked. Mary is going to cry about the rice and then pretend she is fine.

No women in the house. No women in the area outside. Ellis kept his claimed girls somewhere else, and they probably ran off from there after he was killed anyway. This place is just the drain and the porch.

On the last trip Grant locks the basement door from the outside with a chair under the knob that probably won’t matter if something comes out of the drain. He knows that, but he does it anyway.

Raven sits on the bus with her hands in her lap. Zoya drives away like the house is going to follow them.

“You okay?” Grant asks, which is a stupid question.

“The porch let me leave,” Raven says. “That’s the most okay I’ve been in that doorway in three years. The room still wants me. I could feel it on the stairs. Your claim is louder. I kept my feet.”

“Good.”

“If you ever tell me to stand in it again I will, but I don’t think it is a good idea.”

“I’m not going to.”

She nods once. Black eyes on the windshield.

“Ellis would’ve tested it on himself or another girl if he was you.”

“I’m not him.”

“So it seems, master.”

Leanne meets the bus like she’s been counting cans in her sleep.

“Tell me that’s food.”

“It’s food.” Grant smiles. Finally, some good luck for a change.

She looks in a bag, then at Grant, then she laughs once, short, and starts yelling for hands.

The lobby turns into a line. Noor writes nothing for a minute and just watches rice hit the table. Paige is in the line. Tasha. Field women who ate dust yesterday. Jose comes down as far as the turn and takes a bag from Leanne without crossing toward Raven.

Mary finds Grant in the foyer.

“You went in.”

“I didn’t stand in it.”

“I felt the cold from here. Please don’t do that again without a plan.”

“Okay.”

He shows her the photos. Raven before. The other girl. Mary stares at the whites in Raven’s old eyes longer than she means to.

“There’s another one.”

“Was. He said the drain didn’t keep her.”

“That’s not comforting.”

“No. Whatever it means, it doesn’t sound good.”

Raven is against the wall with her hands visible. The new rice line gives her the same space they gave her yesterday. Nobody looks into her eyes. They can feel her power, but also see her deference when she walks past Grant.

Grant eats actual rice. It makes him think that this home of theirs might make it to next week.

Eve comes off the roof for ten minutes, looks at the bags, looks at Grant, and goes back up.

“Door’s still a hole,” she says on the way. “Food doesn’t fix that.”

“Tomorrow,” Grant sighs, and hates that word already.

He checks the map. The five miles is still empty of other owners.

Eight hundred thirty-five.

Raven on three.

The notebook is on the penthouse table. Grant reads enough to know Ellis numbered nights and did not number girls. The cut is drawn over and over, getting deeper on the page. The last page before Claim Day is one sentence underlined.

If it takes her, it will give me the rest.

Mary reads it over his shoulder.

“Burn that.”

“After I know what the rest is.”

“Master—“

“I’m not going back tonight.”

She watches him until she believes it.

Priya is in the hall. Jaycee too. The fever in the web didn’t clock out because they found beans. Mary looks at him, then at the door.

“Ten minutes,” she tells them. “Then he sleeps. He’s been in a hole in the floor all day.”

They take the ten minutes like a gift. It is not a celebration.

Jaycee has the door shut before Priya’s shirt is over her head. No bra. Small high tits, tight brown-pink nipples already hard. She pushes Grant onto the bed and climbs into his lap, kissing him like she has been waiting in the hall for an hour, which she has. Her shorts come off in one yank. Bare. A neat dark patch, slit already wet when his fingers find her. She makes a sound into his mouth and rolls her hips on his hand.

“Master,” she whispers. “Please. I kept thinking about this the whole time you were in that house.”

He lays her down. She is wet, but quiet like Mary said — until he puts his mouth on her. Then she is not quiet. He licks through her, slowly, then sucks her clit while two fingers work inside, curled. Her thighs shake. She grabs his hair and comes on his tongue with her other hand over her mouth, a broken “master” leaking out anyway.

Priya has been watching from the foot of the bed, stripping without being asked. Dark hair down her back. Full brown breasts, darker nipples, a soft stomach, a trimmed black triangle over a cunt that is visibly dripping. She was a virgin the first time. She is not shy about it now. She climbs up, kisses the wet off his mouth, and takes him in her hand.

“I want you inside me,” she says. “Please, master.”

Jaycee pulls her down so Priya’s tits are in her face and Grant can line up. He pushes into Priya in one slow slide. She is soaked, but still tight enough that he has to pause halfway. She breathes out, nods, and he sinks the rest. Her nails find his shoulders. He fucks her deep and even, the wet sound of it filling the room, her breasts moving with every thrust. Jaycee puts her mouth on Priya’s nipple and her fingers on Priya’s clit. Priya comes first, clenching around him, saying master into Jaycee’s hair.

He pulls out, dripping. Jaycee is already on her back again, knees up. He shoves into her and she takes all of it with a gasp. Easier than Priya — Jose and Garret had her first, and her body still knows how to open for it — but hotter, wetter, her heels on his ass. He pounds her until the headboard knocks. Priya sits on Jaycee’s face facing Grant, and Jaycee’s muffled moan vibrates against her while he fucks Jaycee through a second orgasm that leaves her shaking.

Mary is in the chair. She does not join. She watches his face like she is counting whether he is still in the room.

He lasts until Priya lies down beside Jaycee, spreads her legs wide, and says “Please. Again.” He moves to her. Skinny hips, that still-tight grip from a body that only recently learned this. He has to work the last inch. She breathes out and nods and he drives in to the hilt and comes hard, filling her in long pulses, his forehead on hers. When he pulls out, it runs down onto the sheet. Jaycee leans over and licks it off Priya’s thigh without being told, then looks up at him like that was the point.

They stay entangled for a minute. The web drops a degree. Not enough for the hunger to be satisfied — it never is — but enough to sleep.

“Out,” Mary says, gentle, but impatient. “He needs to actually close his eyes.”

“Yes, Mary. Good night, Master.”

They dress like it hurts. Mary stays until the door shuts, then she looks at Grant.

“You still awake?”

“Yeah.”

“Wrong answer.” She smirks.

“Yes ma’am,” he chuckles.

He closes his eyes, but opens the map. It is still empty.

The drain is still in a house east-northeast, breathing through a plate-sized hole.

Raven is still on three lying down with her hands over her chest.

He puts the notebook in a drawer.

Tomorrow is repairing our home, finding out more about the girl the drain didn’t keep, and trying to keep everyone alive.