Chapter Sixteen: The unknown man

Three days passed the way days did when you were trying not to think about something. Slowly and then all at once.

Monday she took the long way to campus without deciding to, adding twelve minutes to a walk she'd done the same way for two years. She noticed halfway there and kept going anyway, telling herself it was the weather, the grey October morning that made the shorter route feel exposed in a way she couldn't explain.

Tuesday she sat with her back to the wall at the coffee shop near the college, the small table in the far corner that nobody ever took because the lighting was bad and the wifi signal barely reached. She'd never sat there before. She opened her textbook and studied for two hours and didn't look up at the door more than four or five times and told herself that was fine.

Wednesday she checked the security app before bed. Found nothing. Checked it again at two in the morning when she woke up for no reason and lay there in the dark with the warmth in her chest doing its quiet persistent thing while the city made its usual sounds outside her window. Nothing on the camera. Just the empty lobby and the mailboxes and the brass apartment numbers that anyone could read if they stood there long enough.

She closed the app and put her phone face down and stared at the ceiling.

It was nothing. It had probably always been nothing. A figure in a lobby for eleven seconds and a stranger on a street who happened to be looking up at the moment she looked down, and she had taken two ordinary unconnected things and stitched them together into something that felt significant because she was exhausted and stressed and her brain had been doing strange things since Thursday night anyway.

Thursday morning she almost didn't deadbolt the door on her way out.

Almost.

She deadbolted it anyway and stood in the hallway for a second looking at the lock and then walked to campus the normal way for the first time all week. Twelve minutes saved. Nothing happened. She bought a coffee, sat in her usual spot by the window, read forty pages and actually absorbed them, and felt something in her shoulders unknot that she hadn't realized had been knotted at all.

By Friday she was almost back to herself.

Almost was doing a lot of work that week but it was enough. Enough to get her through her morning study session and her afternoon shift at the medical records office and the two hours of sleep she managed between that and her night shift at Ember. Enough to let her do her makeup in the dressing room mirror without thinking about security notifications or curtains or the way certain kinds of stillness felt different from other kinds.

Jade was already there when she arrived, halfway through her own makeup, purple streaks freshly done and a new hoop in her left ear that caught the light when she turned her head.

"You look better," Jade said, which from Jade meant she'd looked bad enough the last few days for it to be worth mentioning.

"I'm fine," Asha said, and this time it was mostly true.

She changed into her costume and ran through her set in her head and listened to the muffled bass from the main floor and let the familiar rhythm of it settle around her like something she knew how to wear. Three years of the same sounds, the same lights, the same sequence of movements. There was comfort in it even when she didn't want there to be.

Her first set went cleanly. The crowd was good, the kind of Friday energy that was loud without being unpleasant, and she came offstage feeling more like herself than she had all week. She changed into her between-sets clothes, jeans and a loose top, and sat on the bench with her water bottle and her phone and forty minutes before she needed to be back.

She was halfway through a practice exam on her phone when Marcus appeared in the dressing room doorway.

She noticed his expression before she noticed anything else. Marcus had three expressions. Neutral, which was his default. Concerned, which he reserved for situations that required actual intervention. And something else, something she didn't have a name for because she'd only seen it once before, the night a man had followed one of the other girls to her car and Marcus had handled it with a quietness that had been more frightening than shouting would have been.

He was wearing that third expression now.

"There's someone at the bar," he said.

Asha lowered her phone. "Okay."

"Asking for you."

She waited for him to say Cinder. That was how it always went. Someone saw a set and wanted a private booking or had a question for the stage manager and asked for Cinder because that was the only name they had. It happened. It was handled. Marcus dealt with it before it became anything.

He didn't say Cinder.

He looked at her steadily from the doorway with that expression she didn't have a name for and said, "They asked for Asha."

The warmth in her chest stopped.

Not faded. Not shifted. Just stopped, the way it had in the parking lot when the pull had cut off clean and left her stumbling against the wall, except this was different. This was the opposite of that. This wasn't absence.

This was alarm.

She sat very still on the bench with her phone in her hand and the practice exam still glowing on the screen and the bass still thumping through the walls from the main floor, and she looked at Marcus and he looked at her and neither of them said anything for a moment.

"Who is it?" she asked. Her voice came out steadier than she felt.

Marcus's jaw tightened slightly. "That's the thing," he said. "I've never seen them before."