Page 5 of Girl, Empty
‘Hello?Terrence?Anyone?’
God dammit.What was the procedure for being locked in your office?Did such a thing exist?Michael grabbed the handset on his desk and hit zero for reception.
Dead.
Something wasn’t right.This had never happened before.Not in nine years.His cell phone sat beside his keyboard.Michael grabbed it and thumbed the screen to life.No signal.Zero bars.
In the heart of downtown Indianapolis, surrounded by cell towers, his phone registered nothing but electronic void.A sudden intrusive thought of escaping through the windows entered his mind, but there had to be a way out of here that didn’t involve a forty-floor drop onto concrete.
‘What the hell is happening?’
The coffee machine answered with one final hiss, then died.Michael’s monitor then began to convulse.The details on the screen bled like spilled paint in the rain, then turned into nonsense code.It wasn’t the elegant programming Michael sometimes glimpsed when IT worked on his system, but something that could have been Russian or Arabic for all he knew.
His throat went dry.Michael had to move, if only to offset this alien surge of adrenaline.He leaped to the window and looked out but couldn’t even see the ground.Michael pressed his face against the glass, and that’s when he saw something that shouldn’t be.
A reflection.
But not his own.
Michael spun.His bladder clenched, and his mouth opened to scream or call for help or do something other than stand there like a deer watching headlights approach.He was no longer alone in his fortieth-floor office.A figure in black now stood ten feet away, in a place that should have been impossible to be.
His mind assembled the sequence of events; this reflection – this figure – had emerged from beneath the conference table.
How?
Even Houdini couldn’t get in here.
And then the figure moved fast.Too fast.
Michael's blood spread across the marble floor in the honey light.As warmth pooled beneath him, Michael thought of Emma, who would now spend another afternoon scanning empty bleachers for a father who specialized in disappearing when it mattered most.
And oddly, he thought of Terrence's crossword, which had been right all along.
CHAPTER TWO
Ella Dark had survived thirty-two Christmases, but now that she thought about it, none of them really stood out.Her fondest Christmas had been 2013, when she’d spent the day eating pizza and playing Grand Theft Auto on her roommate’s Playstation.
She wasn’t sure why that particular holiday remained memorable, because she’d never been a pizza lover and her brief love affair with a video game about car theft started and ended that same holiday.Perhaps it was because things had been simpler back then, because that was her pre-federal life.Before obsessive stalkers killed everyone she held dear.
‘What’s happening today?’Luca asked as he walked in.Ella was sitting at her laptop in their kitchen.It was the first real Monday of January 2025, also known as the second Monday in January, because the first one had been part of the holiday period so it didn’t count.
‘You should be in the office.Rookie agents always have a rah-rah speech on the first day back.’
‘I know.I meant you.’Luca switched on the coffee machine then dried his wet hair with a dish towel.
‘That’s the wrong type of towel.’
‘What?A towel’s a towel.’
‘Bath towels are for body parts.Dish towels are for… dishes.’
‘They’re both towels.’
This was the fundamental difference between men and women, Ella decided.The taxonomy of objects.Women understood that everything had its purpose, but men saw a piece of absorbent fabric and thought: problem solved.A dish towel used for hair today became a bath towel used for dishes tomorrow, and before you knew it, the world was in chaos.
‘Never mind.’
Luca sat opposite her, and now she saw that his hair wasn’t even dry.All he’d done was soak a perfectly good towel.‘I know you’re dreading this,’ he said.
