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I didn't understand either Kie or the unknown Ariel.
We began to run, like a strange parade of sorts. Through the halls, the slick tile floor that wouldn't stain or mark from blood. St. Martin called back over his shoulder, "Holy shit, you came to get me? Have you called for an ambulance yet?"
The ambulance, it turned out. One on call for the billionaire freak circle, which led me to wonder how often their games resulted in injury.
Two other guards on the outside of the cell stepped back as we approached. St. Martin had seen past them but I had to catch up in order to see.
The cell was fronted by a glass door, undoubtedly shatter-proof, stretching six feet across the opening to the cell. The room itself was bare bones. Prison-like features, the toilet, the sink. There was a bed but the covers looked like they were largely plastic – not enough to suffocate, and too hard to ever shred into a noose.
St. Martin punched in a code and ripped open the door to Kie's cell. My warning came seconds too late.
The cell was liberally painted with blood. The scene was horrifying, the covers ripped from the bed, the mattress on the floor, what looked like a figure wrapped in the blanket, fallen to the far side of the bed, hard to see because the jacked-up mattress, half off the boxspring, interfered with the view.
And the blood. Painted, yes. But painted. It wasn't arterial spray. It wasn't thick or clotted or running down the walls. It wasn't the result of a gunshot and hadn't Jason said just minutes earlier that Kie refused to let anyone near her? If she was stopping them from touching her, then only that much earlier she'd been awake and aware, responding to words said to her, warning the guards to get away from her.
With the door open I could smell the blood. I understood their need to back off and run for help.
"Sir!" It came out almost automatically. "Be careful! I don't think – "
But St. Martin turned to look back at me, fury showing in his expression that I was there, that I hadn't remained behind as ordered to do.
All of which distracted him. He wasn't paying attention to what I was saying. He was paying attention to my ignoring his dictate.
The door slid open when the code was entered. The blood on the walls shimmered in the light because the walls were slick, white, featureless and caught the light, not because the blood on them was so thick or running. It was such a thin layer it had already dried.
The body on the mattress twitched because it was sliding away, down to the floor, unrolling as it went.
She hadn't had much to work with but she'd made the most of what she did have.
Kie came up from behind the bed, from crouching to on her feet almost faster than I could follow. Her mouth was a swatch of darkness and that's where she'd gotten the majority of her blood – a bitten tongue, a bitten cheek, maybe she'd managed the nearly impossible and made her own teeth sink into the skin of her hands or arms.
The blood on the wall was thin because it was mixed with spit or water, thinned out to cover more.
Kie grabbed St. Martin by his shirtfront and threw him into the wall across the hallway, moving past the guards and past me like a blur. She pinned him there, her forearm on his throat, her knee pressed into his groin, her face a study of insanity.
"I don't think anybody should move," she said.
But everyone did.
The guards rushed her and St. Martin. I grabbed at one of them and asked fast if there was a way to seal off the maze.
All I got in response was a blank stare before he shoved me back and closed in on Kie.
I was prepared to see something idiotic and impossible, that she'd made a weapon of bed springs when why would there even be bedsprings anymore, or that she'd somehow gotten her hands on another razor, that maybe after the thing with the gun still no one had searched her.
None of that. None of it. None.
She had her teeth. Set on his junk, because she was too short to reach his neck.
St. Martin breathed fitfully.
The guards, male every one and no doubt wincing to themselves, backed off.
It took another girl, someone without balls or cock, to step forward and tap Kie on the shoulder, assuming she'd be so surprised she'd let go.
It didn't quite play out that way. She let go, but only because she turned on me, hissing, growling, gone feral and animal, her face a mask of panic and anger.
I slugged her in the mouth. Her teeth grazed my knuckles but she dropped, fell straight down and lay on the floor, mewling. Mostly unconscious.
