Page 283 of Slashed Bonds

She’s fighting.

That’s the thing I’ll carry. She’s fighting them. Two men with earpieces who outweigh her by a hundred pounds each, and she’s got her bandaged arms braced on the frame of the glass door and her skates, no, her boots, dug into the carpet, and her face is turned back toward the room and the woman in the white blazer, and the audio catches every word.

“Wait! We’re on the second floor!”

The guards don’t wait.

“You’re going to let her kill our baby?”

Oh.

Oh, Mori.

Not to Naomi. To the room. To four men I can see now at the edge of the frame, standing by a desk with their arms crossed, watching. Theo in front. The question’s for him. Hauntingly, crystal clear, through every speaker in the Civic, an eighteen-year-old asking the father of her child whether he’s going to stand there.

He stands there.

The shock that comes off the crowd is a sound I’ve never heard a building make. Not a gasp. A moan. Twelve thousand people watching a girl get dragged across a balcony in slow motion, because somebody’s slowed it, somebody with a laptop and three days wanted them to see every frame, and then over the rail.

Gone.

The camera’s angle catches the fall. Not all of it. Enough. A shape going down out of the frame and then a sound.

I’m going to hear that sound for the rest of my life. I’d like that understood by whoever keeps the records. A sound like a bag of something being dropped from a height onto stone, with a crack in the middle of it that’s a bone, and then nothing.

Nothing.

The entire arena’s silent.

Not quiet. Silent. Twelve thousand people not breathing, as if the whole building’s leaning toward the speakers to hear if the footage will give them a heartbeat.

It gives them laughter.

Naomi’s. Five years younger, clear as a bell, from the balcony rail where the camera’s caught her leaning over to look.

“Leave her there to die. She’ll be paralyzed by the time anyone finds her, if anyone finds her. That baby’s fucking dead too.” A pause. A thing in her voice that’s almost satisfied. “Trying to be the main character. Pregnant before me. Only I deserve to carry Theo’s child. He’s going to be my husband, after all.”

The laugh again.

And the screen cuts to black, and then to white text, huge, four screens at once:

THE BITCH IS GUILTY.

It glitches. In and out, the text breaking into static and reforming, and in the static there’s a photograph. Naomi’s wedding portrait, from Tuesday, white dress, four men behind her, cropped in close on her face.

With an X over it. Red. Oozing down the screen like it’s wet.

Viper. Dox. Maddie, I’d bet, on the design, because that X is pink at the edges where the red goes thin.

“W-wait⁠—“

Naomi. On the ice. Helmet in her hand, turning, her voice gone from bright-bored to something that cracks.

“This is a setup! This is a⁠—“

She can’t move.

Because the police are on the ice.