by Stone, Kyla
“I live near the west side of Chi-Town. Heading back tomorrow. Crazy, huh?” the guy said.
“What’s all the excitement about?” Dakota asked distractedly, forcing herself to be polite.
A low, frantic buzz filled her head.
Fear was already forming like ice around her heart.
She couldn’t just leave in the middle of her shift. She couldn’t afford to lose another job, but she had to contact Eden, had to figure out what to do.
“Some kind of bomb. Terrorist wackos, looks like. Probably ISIS. But Chicago PD caught it in time. Disarming it now, thank God.”
“Good thing,” she said.
He held his mug toward her. “Fill ’er up, would you?”
She grabbed the mug, refilled it at the bar, and returned it to the customer. He didn’t acknowledge her. His eyes were glued to the screen.
Her nerves were stretched taut. Anxiety squeezed her lungs. She needed a break. She needed to reach Eden.
She strode across the room and paused, keeping her back to the empty bar-height table behind her, the glass front door on her left, the bar counter several feet to her right.
The bar wasn’t busy yet. A handful of regulars hunched over their drinks, staring glassily at the second screen hung over the bar, showing the same view of the van in Chicago.
The steady buzz of their conversations was a constant hum in the background: Walter Monroe whining about his ex-wife; Jesse Peretti’s grass kept dying from the increased water restrictions due to the drought; Tamara Santos complaining about more forced overtime.
Mendo Del Rio always brought up politics, especially when he was itching for a fight. The Beer Shack owner and current bartender, Julio de la Peña, had been forced to kick him out several times.
Most of the time, the regulars discussed sports and deep-sea fishing plans, crappy boss problems, and the latest indomitable heat wave.
They were all regular people with regular problems. No one was hunting them.
None of them paid any attention to her.
She jerked her cell out of her cargo pocket—an old model Samsung that barely qualified as a smartphone. It was all she could afford, since she put every extra penny toward her bug out fund.
As she tapped the contacts icon, she kept one anxious eye on the street outside, in case Maddox decided to double back. He was cunning like that.
Wanda Simpson, her sister’s social worker, picked up on the fourth ring.
Dakota didn’t waste time on greetings. “I need to see my sister. Now. Today.”
“Well,” the woman huffed. “I don’t have time for this nonsense today, Ms. Sloane. You know as well as I do that you have court-appointed, supervised visits once a month and no more. Your next visit isn’t for a week—”
“I can’t wait that long.”
“Ms. Sloane, your sister is medically fragile. She needs consistency. The judge, the psychologists, and I all agree that disrupting her carefully maintained routine would be detrimental to her well-being.”
“Which is just shrink-speak for trying to keep me from my sister so you can adopt her out—”
Mrs. Simpson sighed heavily into the phone.
Dakota could hear voices in the background. At the bar, someone turned the TV up even louder. She gritted her teeth, repressing everything she longed to say, pressed the cell to her ear, and turned away from the bar. “Look. It’s an emergency.”
The woman gave another imperious sigh, like she was already patting herself on the back for her boundless, saintly patience. “What kind of emergency, Ms. Sloane?”
Dakota couldn’t tell the social worker who she’d seen or what she feared it meant. She’d never explained what she and her sister had escaped from. To bring Maddox up now would expose them both to questions they wouldn’t—couldn’t—answer.
“I just need to see her, okay?”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Frustration bubbled up inside her. She was already doing her best to do everything absolutely right.
First: gain steady employment and stable housing. Second: petition the courts for custody before Eden’s rich, shiny foster parents sank their claws into her permanently and whisked her away with promises of a real family, vacations to the Keys, art and tennis lessons.
Until then, she kept to herself and stayed wary and watchful.
She saved every penny, spending nothing extra on herself other than her sessions three times a week at the gun range off Miami Avenue.
She carefully maintained a low profile—never attracting attention, avoiding conflict, even when she wanted to punch someone in the kidneys.
It was essential to remain under the radar at all times.
In two years, she’d begun to think that they’d escaped the horrors they’d fled, that the past wouldn’t follow them.
But she was dead wrong.
The fragile sense of security she’d built around herself had shattered the moment her gaze snagged on Maddox Cage among the sweating crowds outside the bar windows.
“I’m practically her guardian!” she forced out. “I’ll be ready to petition the court in a few months—”
“It would be foolish to make such an assumption, Ms. Sloane.” Mrs. Simpson sniffed derisively. “It’s not an appropriate—or healthy—frame of mind, especially considering your inability to maintain steady employment, your lack of a G.E.D. or high school diploma, and your…flexible…housing arrangements.”
Dakota could imagine her smug face, her cheap polyester suits, that awful chemical perfume that smelled like burnt rubber. The woman despised Dakota and her “negative influence” over her fifteen-year-old sister.
A helpless fury roiled in her gut. “I’ve done everything you’ve asked. Gotten a job—”
“Bussing tables hardly qualifies as a job—”
“I have an apartment!”
“In a highly dangerous and questionable neighborhood.”
She and Eden had been separated for almost two years, after they’d been caught sleeping on the sidewalks on Southeast First Street in downtown Miami.
With no parents and no family, the Florida Department of Children and Families—a terrible misnomer of a name if she’d ever heard one—had swallowed them up into its bloated, utterly broken foster care system.
After a slew of disastrous foster placements, Dakota was stuck in a group home for unwanted teens until she’d come of age eighteen months ago.
Her younger sister—beautiful, sweet, traumatized Eden—was placed in a specialized foster home for the medically fragile.
She swallowed back a curse. She couldn’t afford to piss off a woman who still held so much power over her life.
“Please,” she said instead, hating herself for begging, but giving it one last shot. If the woman still refused to help, she’d have to take matters into her own hands.
“You know I can’t do that even if I wanted to, dear,” Mrs. Simpson simpered. “And you know I only have your sister’s best interests at heart…”
Behind Dakota, someone at the bar gasped. Dakota glanced back at the flat-screen. Her arm fell limply to her side. Her fingers barely held onto the phone.
The social worker babbled something, but Dakota wasn’t listening anymore.
She could do nothing but watch the screen in stunned disbelief.
Cold went through Dakota all the way to her bones.
The screen was split now—one side displaying the bomb squad descending on the minivan in Chicago; the other side, a shaky cellphone video of a massive cloud rising into the sky over a city so hazy with smoke, she couldn’t tell which it was.
“...We repeat, we’ve just received reports from outside Washington, D.C. that there has been a massive explosion,” the male reporter said, his voice rising in agitation.
The female reporter tapped her earpiece. “Communication is down in the area, but we’ve received information that a fireball at least a half mile wide has been sighted over Capitol Hill. It appe
ars this is—this is an attack, Gerard. An attack on American soil…”
The first reporter’s face drained of color. “It appears to be a bomb. A nuclear bomb.”
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