The Interview /3

That's the first thing, before the stairs, before she's even fully awake. One monitor's glow instead of two, bleeding up through the banister slats in a color that doesn't match the color she's used to falling asleep to when he streams late. Her body clocks it as different before her mind clocks it as wrong.

Scattered wide across the floor, catching the ring light in small broken points, the way glass looks when something has gone through it rather than fallen off a shelf. Her brain tries the easy story — he knocked something, the stream's still running, he's laughing about it right now — and holds onto that story for exactly as long as it takes her eyes to adjust to the rest of the room.

Standing very still, in the middle of her brother's living room, at — she doesn't know what time it is. Late. Later than that.

Her body does the ordinary thing first. Intruder. Say something. Make noise, don't be quiet, the quiet is for creeping up on your brother, not for this.

Her voice comes out smaller than she means it to.

The woman turns around.

Dani will spend a long time afterward; years, maybe, if she's honest with the version of herself that exists years from now; trying to describe what was on that face when it turned toward her. She will fail every time. Not because the words don't exist, but because the words that exist all sound like something from a film, something composed, and this was not composed. This was a face with nothing left arranging it. No performance, no mask holding it together for an audience, because as far as this woman was concerned there was no audience; the stream, the 800,000 people, the mods, none of that had reached her yet, would not reach her for another handful of seconds. This was just a face with the machinery still running behind it and no cover over the machinery anymore.

That's what stops Dani on the stairs.

Not the glass. Not the shape of the woman's back. The face, turning, and whatever was un-hidden in it.

She doesn't scream yet. Screaming requires a decision and there's no decision happening in her right now, just the stairs under her socked feet and the banister cold under her hand and a woman's face turning toward her in the wrong light of one dead monitor.

And then, past the shoulder, past the silhouette that had been blocking it this entire time;

the floor.

She doesn't process it as Emil yet. That word is still one door down the hallway of her mind, waiting. What she processes first is shape; a shape on the floor that is the wrong shape for a floor to have, in the wrong place, under the ring light that is still doing its indifferent job, still lighting everything evenly, without preference, without mercy.

This time it isn't a question.

She's moving before she's decided to move; past the woman, who doesn't stop her, who doesn't do anything, who is just standing there in the wreckage with a chest that isn't the chest she was looking for and a mind that hasn't caught up to its own hands yet.

Dani doesn't look at the woman again. There isn't room in her for the woman. There is only the shape on the floor, and the getting-to-it, and the sound that starts coming out of her that she will not remember making.

The camera catches her too, now. Wrong angle, same as always; it catches her back, her knees hitting the floor, the glass she doesn't feel cutting into them. It cannot catch her face either.

She's on her knees before she understands she's kneeling, and the first thing bargaining does is make her hands useful, because useful hands mean this can still be fixed.

She doesn't finish the thought. The thought doesn't need finishing. It just needs somewhere to go, and there's nowhere for it to go except back into her hands, pressing harder, like pressure is a currency and if she pays enough of it something will give her something back.

Behind her, the woman still hasn't moved, hasn't spoken, hasn't been priced into this transaction at all — Dani isn't negotiating with her, isn't negotiating with anything that has a face or a name. She's negotiating with the floor, with the ring light, with the version of the last ninety seconds that hasn't happened yet, the one she's still trying to buy back.

Her palms are red. Not with blood only; with the effort of it, the useless furious effort of pressing on something as if pressure were a kind of prayer, as if the body could out-negotiate what has already been decided.

The chat keeps scrolling, small and tinny, thousands of people offering their own version of the same impossible trade — please, please, someone, anyone, do something — the whole internet bargaining in unison with a girl on a floor who doesn't know they're doing it with her.

That's when she sees the axe.

It's on the floor where Delaney let it fall, close enough that Dani's knee is almost touching the handle, and for one full second something in her goes very quiet and very clear in a way nothing else has been all night.

She could reach it before Delaney could stop her. She's already calculated that, somewhere beneath thought, the way she calculated the third stair. She could have it in both hands and be on her feet and Delaney wouldn't move, wouldn't even try, because Delaney isn't defending anything anymore; she's just standing in her own wreckage waiting for whatever comes to come.

Dani's fingers actually touch the handle.

For that second she is not bargaining with anything. There's no trade being offered, no bought-back tonight, no version of this where pressure equals payment. There's just the handle under her fingers and a woman standing three feet away who did this, who is right there, who could be made to understand in the next four seconds exactly what this feels like...

And then her other hand, the one still on the wound, feels him move. Not much. A breath, maybe, or the memory of one. Barely anything.

It's enough.

The bargaining comes rushing back in and fills the space the rage had opened up, because rage doesn't buy anything back and some deep, animal part of her already knows that, already knows the only currency that might still work is the one she was already spending — hands, pressure, please — and every second not spent on that currency is a second she can't afford to lose.

She doesn't pick the axe up like a weapon.

She picks it up like a spill. Like a thing that is wrong in the room and needs to not be wrong in the room, the same impulse that would have her righting a knocked-over chair or catching a glass before it hits the floor, except the glass has already hit the floor, everything has already hit the floor, and this is the one piece of it she can still control.

She swings it away; not at anything, just away and it skids across the boards and comes to rest against the base of the ruined monitor stand, out of reach, out of the frame of anything that matters anymore.

Her hand is back on the wound before the axe stops moving.

She doesn't decide to do the next part either. That's the thing about her hands tonight; they've stopped waiting for her to decide anything.

She reaches up and grabs Delaney's wrist. Not the one that had held the axe. The other one, the empty one, hanging at her side the way the rest of her is hanging, unused, unspent, a woman still standing in the shape of a mission that has nowhere left to go. Dani's fingers close around it and pull, hard, down, and Delaney's hand comes with it; comes easily, weightless, no resistance in it at all, because there's nothing left in Delaney to resist with.

She guides the hand onto the wound, on top of her own, and for one second there are four hands doing the work of two, stacked, pressing, and Dani doesn't look up to see whose hand she's just taken. She isn't negotiating with a person right now. There is only more hands, and more hands is a better trade, and a better trade is the only thing standing between this moment and the one she can't let herself arrive at.

Delaney presses.

Her hand moves the way a hand moves when a body is following an order because it has stopped generating its own. Whatever was running her five minutes ago; the months of tracking, the geometry of a face memorised and carried and misapplied; has nothing to say about this. There was no contingency built for pressing down on the wrong man's chest at the instruction of his sister. So she does it, because doing it is easier than the alternative, which is standing in a room with no next step at all.

For a moment, neither of them is anyone. Two sets of hands and a shape between them that isn't cooperating, and the ring light overhead not caring which of them it's lighting.

Delaney keeps pressing.

Outside, small and far off, still separating itself from the tinny noise of eight hundred thousand strangers, a siren gets closer.

The street has no mechanism for any of this. It was not built for this. It never needed to be.

Nobody in the room hears the chat anymore. Dani's whole world has narrowed to the space under her hands, and Delaney's whole world has narrowed to the same place, the two of them pressing on the same wrong chest for two very different reasons that have, for these last minutes, collapsed into the same gesture.

The siren gets louder.