Chapter 3 - Juliet

Prodigal boyfriends are seldom trustworthy.

Juliet Lyon tried to calculate the distance out of the broom closet. The one door, she knew, was probably unreachable through the uniform darkness. And then it spilled back into that grand white hallway for all the chimerical men outside. Across the room and very near the ceiling, she supposed, was that narrow slit of a window which signified she was underground.  There was no light, but rather a gray specularity that seemed to bleed into the room. The fog was outside the low ground window.

 

Still, the nebula was some illumination. Silhouettes – or what Juliet thought were silhouettes – formed in the floating dust in front of her, and she heard faint breathing. Through the cramped storage room, through the uniform darkness, she could see that darkness wore a uniform. On the silhouetted man some inches in front of her, for such an ephemeral instant, a brave ray punctured the fog and penetrated the window and sparked the badge. Police.

 

She was only acutely aware of how she had gotten there. She was more than acutely aware of why. Mother died, Juliet remembered, and Father left for another navy tour, and Jeremy stopped talking. She was on her bridge that day, over the stream and inside it. She didn't have a plan, but neither did Andrew and he usually improvised his way to the victory. The self-proclaimed prodigal boyfriend was skipping rocks when her phone rang the tone for a war channel. Andrew gathered more rocks. Juliet listened to the static caterwaul from her phone. Static was bad so far away from civilization, meant you were being drived.  Some quadrant of her head exploded when Andrew's rock hit home. She knelt bleeding into the creek from her face and back. The trap door in the sky fell open, and the policemen flowed. Andrew had a plan.

 

Juliet opened her eyes. The policeman had a flashlight now, and she saw that her jacket was gone and that her clothes were ravaged enough to be revealing. She didn't shift for fear of losing the silence. She didn't squint out the light, nor did she look into it. The fog outside was so much sanctuary.

 

The officer clicked off the light and Juliet was dark again.

 

"Juliet Lyon, you may stop calculating the distance to the door."

 

She growled a little, venting a bit of her headache. "I may."

 

"You were caught on the bridge out in Ninsei. Your phone died in the sting but that list was found on your computer. If you tell us the missing numbers, we can stop –"

 

Juliet leaped. She fueled panic and terror into a jab to the silhouette and a thrust on the door. The policeman grunted, and sharpened his gaze on the girl half escaped from the chamber. He seized his pistol and fired twice. He never remembered if he hit her.