Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

Zara slashes the razor sideways across my belly.

I cry out and jump backwards, banging my head on the tile. The razor is small, so it’s not a deep cut, but it stings.

When I look back at Zara, she has one hand between her legs. The other is still holding the razor.

‘I’m not into pain,’ I say.

‘Perfect.’ She swipes at me again. I dart sideways, dodging the razor, but I slip on the soapy floor and crash down on top of the shower caddy. A throbbing warmth spreads across my shoulder blade. The falling water blasts my face.

If I screamed, would the others save me? Or would they just enjoy the show?

Zara puts one foot on my chest, pinning me to the floor, holding up the razor like a hunter posing with a kill. All the air is crushed out of my lungs. Maybe this house had other guests before me. Fred invites someone, they come, the other housemates relax them, then Zara kills them after a few days. I just lost a game I didn’t know I was playing.

And without me, Thistle dies.

Zara shifts her foot, and pushes her toes into my mouth.

Water floods up my nose and between my lips, choking me. I almost bite down. Only confusion stops me.

Zara wiggles her toes against my tongue, and then shifts her gaze to my hips. Looking for something, and not seeing it.

‘Interesting,’ she says. Then she steps back, wraps a towel around herself and slips away.

I roll sideways and cough up a lungful of warm, soapy water. The air rushes back into my lungs.

Getting up will hurt, so I lie there for a minute, thinking. Zara has been looking for a way to manipulate me since I got here. I should have given her a fake vulnerability, something she thought she could exploit. Now I’m considered a threat.

I guess she noticed my lack of a reaction when she shoved her foot in my mouth. Maybe I can pretend to have a foot fetish and erectile disfunction. Embarrassing, but better than revealing the truth. If she realises I’m a cannibal, that I was trying to eat Samson’s foot, she will also realise I’m not Lux.

Then it won’t be her coming to join me in the shower with a razor. It’ll be Donnie with a baseball bat.

Fred is in the kitchen, making coffee.

‘Morning, Lux,’ he says.

I yawn. ‘Morning.’ The adrenaline crash after getting slashed in the shower, coupled with a sleepless night, is killing me.

‘Coffee?’ Fred asks. He has a cup already.

‘Sure.’

‘Help yourself.’ He steps aside.

I put a cup under the nozzle and try to work out what the next step is. I only drink instant coffee at home.

‘You called the FBI agent a baby killer,’ I say, as I look for some kind of make coffee button.

Fred points. ‘You have to tip the old grounds out and put more in.’

‘Oh. Thanks. I knew that.’ I cough. ‘Paradox. I’m only mentally capable of making coffee after I’ve already had coffee.’

‘Heh.’

I tamp down the grounds, like I’ve seen baristas do. ‘So did she really kill a baby?’

‘Well, a foetus. A few years back.’

Something doesn’t fit here. Fred and his team are environmentalists, vegetarians, campaigners against rape and racism. Hailey, the KKK Queen, is here because she advocated the killing of abortion doctors. Imprisoning a Black woman for terminating a pregnancy seems … off-brand.

Then again, I noticed that the inmates are mostly women or people of colour. While all the Guards are male except for Zara, and white except for Cedric, who they seem to ignore most of the time. Their commitment to equality is just an excuse for violence, although I doubt they realise it.

‘How did you find out?’ I ask. It takes me a second to remember the private investigator’s name. ‘Druznetski?’

Fred chuckles. ‘Right. Druznetski.’ He sips his coffee, then adds some more cream. ‘Medical records. There was a big data breach last year. I bought all the files on the dark web. Hundreds of thousands of patients. Your girl was among them. The company fixed the vulnerability but never notified the patients.’ He shakes his head. ‘Despicable.’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Goddamn big business.’

‘Anyway, breaches like that are super useful. A couple of years ago we got fourteen million Texas voter records. Just recently we got the phone numbers and locations of four hundred and nineteen million Facebook users. There was a law enforcement one just before that, with tens of thousands of cases going back a decade. That was very useful.’

‘For finding more victims?’ I say. ‘I mean, inmates?’

Fred smiles. ‘I call them “talent”. But no, the data is mostly for the riot.’

He starts washing his cup in the sink.

TV shows are full of moments like this, when one person says something deliberately vague and someone else asks for clarification. ‘How could you?’ one character will demand angrily, just so the other character can say, ‘How could I do what?’

In real life, people speak to be understood. Fred isn’t waiting for me to ask, ‘What riot?’ He thinks I already know.

‘Oh, right. How is that going?’ I ask instead, trying not to sound alarmed.

‘Yeah, it’s ready to rock,’ Fred says. ‘But I can always use more material—to make it bigger, more effective.’

At the FBI, I hunted kidnappers and crime bosses and serial killers, but never revolutionaries. I don’t know anything about how riots are started or, I now realise, how they are stopped.

‘So what did you and Zara talk about?’ Fred turns to face me. ‘In the shower.’

He’s caught me off guard, and he knows it. His gaze is suddenly less friendly.

He must have seen Zara leaving the bathroom, and then me. Or maybe she told him, when I spurned her ‘advances’.