Chapter 1 - The Silver Keyring
The Silver sedan clicked as its cold engine settled into a slow, metallic idle on the third basement level of the Santoro Tower. The concrete walls around Marin Hollis were stained with salt and water marks from twenty years of winters, damp and heavy with the scent of dark exhaust.
Marin pulled her coat tighter around her collar. Her hands, stiff from the cold shift, took three long minutes to untie the heavy leather lace of her left service shoe. When her foot slid free, she let out a slow, silent breath through her nose.
She did not cry. Crying was a luxury for people who had time to clean their faces before the morning shift.
Instead, she smoothed out the crumpled bills from her coat pocket across her knee. Four twenties. Two tens. Three ones. Forty-three dollars less than the previous Tuesday.
Her fingers moved to the third envelope on the passenger seat—the one with the single blue ink dot in the upper right-hand corner. She slid the cash inside, folded the lip twice, and tucked it beneath the floor mat beneath her feet.
On the steering column, the key ring swung twice as she put the car in gear. The brass tag attached to the ring caught the dim yellow light of the basement fluorescent tube. Stamped deep into the metal were six digits: 04-12-88. A date that no longer existed on any record in this city, except on that piece of brass and in the quiet, empty spaces of her own mind.
Marin drove out onto the street, keeping her speed precisely three miles under the limit. In this district, at two in the morning, cars with rusted rocker panels were stopped for non-functional license plate lights, cracked windshields, or simply for existing in the wrong zip code after midnight.
She lived four miles south, in a building where the front door lock had been broken since August. The hallway smelled of boiled cabbage, old insulation, and the damp wool of coats that never fully dried between shifts.
Her apartment was on the third floor. She did not turn on the main light when she entered. The streetlamp outside her window threw long, amber bars across the linoleum floor, illuminating the small table, the single chair, and the narrow folding cot against the wall.
Marin set her keys on the counter. The brass tag clicked against the formica.
May you like
She sat down at the table, took a clean roll of white cotton bandage from her pocket, and began to wrap her left wrist. She worked slowly, winding the cloth tight over the dark, yellowing purple bruises that stretched from the base of her palm up beneath her sleeve.
She had three hours before her alarm would ring for the inventory shift. Three hours to sleep, three hours to pretend that the world was flat and quiet, and three hours to forget the sound of Miss Whitlock’s voice in the quiet corridor behind the kitchen.
