The house that Zoe normally never would have dared to stand in front of. It was no coincidence that she only came here at night, under the cover of darkness, and when the alcohol had stripped away some of her nerves. It meant they weren’t likely to see her, and she could stand there and wallow in her guilt like a coward, and never actually do anything.
It wasn’t as though she didn’t want to. Zoe wanted more than anything to go up to that house and knock on the door. She wanted it to open and for Agent Shelley Rose to be standing there, her blonde chignon perfectly in place, her pink lipstick without a smudge. She wanted Shelley to smile and say something like, “Read to go, Z?”, and they would get on a plane together and go solve a murder, and everything would be all right.
But it wouldn’t, because Shelley was no longer there. Shelley was in the ground. Zoe had watched them do it, watched them lower her into a fresh pit while her husband and daughter watched at the side of the grave. She had wanted to say something then, but she couldn’t. She wanted to say something now, but she still couldn’t. She didn’t deserve that closure.
Shelley’s husband, left without a wife. Shelley’s daughter, left without a mother. Zoe could knock on the door now and tell them that she was sorry, that it was all her fault, that she hadn’t been able to stop it. She could have shouldered all the blame, taken their hate, whatever they wanted to throw her way. Made them feel better.
But whether it was for their benefit or her own, she couldn’t do that. It wasn’t just about what she deserved. It wasn’t even about whether she had the guts. Zoe looked up at that house and tried to think of something that she could say to them, and all she could think was the house has five windows facing the road, each divided into four panes; the door is six and a half feet tall; the path to the door is six feet long and contains twelve paving slabs; each paving slab is half a foot long, or 15.24 centimeters, or six inches, or 0.167 of a yard, or…
Zoe had no words to tell them. She only had numbers. She turned away from the familiar house and all of its dimensions, forcing herself to take the necessary steps toward home. Every time she ended up here, she felt even lower than when she set off. But still, her feet kept finding the way.
Sooner or later, she was going to have to stop going out at all. The risk wasn’t worth it.
And Zoe couldn’t see any way out of this mess—this mess that she had created. She could only sit at home and leave her phone turned off, and ignore the calls that would come when her suspension was up, and let it all fade into someone else’s memory.
CHAPTER TWO
Elara Vega looked at her watch and raised her eyebrows, the gesture meant only for herself. She was alone, after all; her colleagues had all left, mostly at six when their workday was over. But Elara’s work was everything to her—had always been everything to her.
No, that wasn’t quite true, she reflected as she gathered her things and moved her notes into an orderly configuration for the morning. There had been a time when other things had mattered more. She had raised her son, and for a time there had been her husband, although the divorce came twenty years ago. Two years after that the son had moved out to go to college, and since then, she had been alone. She liked it that way. Just her and the stars and planets, eternal and yet fleeting.
Elara glanced over her tidy desk, checking for anything astray. If there was something she had learned in her fifty-nine years of life, it was that keeping things tidy was a lot less effort than cleaning up a build-up of mess after it had had time to settle.
Satisfied, Elara grabbed her coat from the back of the chair and shrugged it on, heading for the door. She was still straightening the collar as she stepped out into the hall, where a janitor was running a mop in smooth circles over the floor. She always felt bad when she stayed late enough to interrupt the cleaners. They had a job to do, and here she was, walking over the newly washed floor in her boots.
The planetarium was set up with office spaces, corporate and event rooms, and facilities branching away from the central theater, which led directly to the main foyer and the exit. Elara stepped out into the dark space, always slightly eerie at night with the whole building in darkness and all of the chairs sitting silently empty. It had always reminded her of those apocalyptic movies when the characters would come across something poignant: an abandoned theater, the covers on the seats slowly rotting, the projection equipment gone to ruin. She crossed the floor quickly, wanting the comfort of the foyer and the night air.
She was halfway across the front of the seats when a familiar whirring noise started up: the mechanical noise of the projector coming to life. Elara’s steps faltered, and she looked up and around herself in wonder. The stars and planets had burst into light overhead, swirling around until they settled into their places for the beginning of the presentation. She had seen it a hundred times, had even taken part in checking the accuracy of the new astral maps a few years ago when it was updated, but it was something new to be standing right in the middle of it like this. Feeling that you could almost reach out and touch the stars…
But who had turned the projector on? All of her colleagues had gone home, and it wasn’t supposed to be on at this time of night. Orchestral music was beginning to blare, so loud it drowned out everything else. Elara frowned and began to turn, thinking that she would investigate the projection room—
But she was on her knees, staring at the floor. How had she gotten here? Just a minute ago, she had been—but there was a pain in the back of her head—a clattering impact she remembered, louder even than the music—and she found that her legs wouldn’t lift her, and neither would her arms, and everything was throbbing—
There was something else now, something at the back of her neck—another pain—a hand, gripping her tightly, with no thought for the delicate skin. Elara dimly tried to struggle free, wanting the pain to stop, but the hand gripped her more tightly, the ache coming to her from some distant place far away. Like another planet, maybe, shrouded by distance and the light from other stars. She was moving—being moved, by the back of her neck—being taken somewhere, her legs dragging helplessly on the ground.
Elara fought to get her feet under her, to stop them from skidding and bouncing on the smooth floor, but nothing seemed to be working properly, and the music was so loud and the lights were so bright, and something hot was falling down her forehead and getting in her eye. She found herself looking down into something round, metal, the light bouncing and reflecting off something glinting and moving inside—off water—and then—
The cold water was a shock to her system, making her gasp out loud, the one action she had managed to fulfill with clarity since the projector turned on. It was unfortunate that it was also the one action that, in this case, was inappropriate: she inhaled only water, not air, feeling it rush into her mouth and down her throat with a panic that overcame the confusion and pain in her head. She only knew that she had to get out, to get away, to haul herself back to the surface and the air again.
Elara struggled, latching her hands onto the sides of the metal bucket, feeling it move under her in a sickening lurch, but somehow she went with it. There was something over her shoulders, pressing down on her, stopping her from raising her head up out of the water. She felt her vision darkening, black spots appearing in front of her eyes, dancing along with the flecks of light that reached down into the water, playing off the bubbles all around her as she thrashed desperately to raise her head.