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I snickered. “Tom must have laid an egg.”

“What did you say?” Shanley’s eyes widened. Her lips remained parted, like the thoughts were there, but she was stuck on how to convey them.

Forgetting this inside joke was very much inside my own head, I couldn’t tell if her feral stare meant she was offended—or impressed. After a moment her wildness faded into a peculiar grin, and a few short yips turned into an uncontainable howl of laughter.

Whether it came from a place of relief or insanity, I jumped in, filling her in on my petty nickname for him, until we were both so consumed with laughter that we clutched our stomachs for air.

“Tom Boiled Egg! That’s great.” Shanley wiped her eyes and headed for the restroom.

After the giggles ran their course and my face ached from smiling so hard, I tried to focus on inventory, but my mind drifted elsewhere. It’d been four full days without the Voices, and while the world was much more manageable without them—predictable, coherent—it also felt like it was missing an element or a color.

I couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or not.

Sure, I’d made a few more friends in their absence, if that’s what you’d call Ryder and Shanley. I held a bag of Sumatran dark roast in one hand (earthy, wild, bitter) and a Costa Rican light roast in the other (sweet, easy, mildly acidic), weighing them alongside my new friendships.

“If we inhale any more of these chemicals we’re going to turn into zombies.” Shanley’s voice scattered my thoughts as her oversized gloves landed in the bin next to me. “I’m also late for a show. What do you say we roll, girl?”

As I went to reference the checklist, she stole it from my hands and threw it in the trash. Clipboard and all. “We’re done with this.”

This time my reaction stalled. Unlike me, she wasn’t bothered by how her actions might or might not be interpreted. She was bold, whether people liked it or not. And Tom would definitely not like what he saw.

As hard as I tried, my eyes couldn’t resist a sweep of the coffee grounds beneath the appliances, the still-soapy kitchen gadgets, the empty napkin container.

For anyone but Tom our cleaning might’ve not been a big deal. Then again, what’s one more infraction for the girl who already topped his shit list?

“Screw it.” I tossed in the towel, the yellow microfiber soaring into the laundry cart.

The flash of Shanley’s teeth gave me the approval I needed to carry out my rebellion against the eggheaded overlord. I grabbed my backpack from the office and switched off all the lights, ignoring the smudges on the pastry case as I threw on my corduroy drop-sleeve.

Faint stripes of light fell in zigzags over the laminate from the headlights of passing cars. They doubled Shanley’s shadow, making her appear broader than the doorframe she waited in front of. I followed her after you motion out into the courtyard, illuminated by the waxing moon. Heat steamed from the gutters, grunts came from shady corners, and stores lay abandoned for the night.

“I’m going this way.” Shanley gestured towards the grouping of nightclubs at the opposite end of the street. “Keep standing up for yourself, River. Mutiny suits you.”

“Any time you want to schedule an uprising, just holler,” I said as we parted ways.

“Let’s make it easy and arrange it now,” she called, walking backwards to face me. “Say same time, same place? Er, uh, next shift?”

“You got it!” I yelled before she disappeared behind a neighboring bakery.

Smiling to myself, I turned the opposite way, taking the alley of graffiti behind Kona Koffee, a charming passage of dumpsters that flanked the pee-soaked wall.

The construction site on my other side hadn’t seemed threatening when I came to clock in. But this late, devoid of workers in their orange safety vests, it was nothing but a crater of darkness. I picked up the pace and swung my backpack around, my breath clouding in front of me. Strange, because it was the peak of summer, and although there’d been a chill in the air, I hadn’t exactly needed a parka when I’d left Kona Koffee. Now the cold curled my fingers, so numb I couldn’t pinch them together to unzip the front pocket and grab my headphones.

I choked on an icy inhale, as if the rising steam from the gutters had wrapped around my throat, trapping the air. My gut somersaulted, turning tight and acidic, as a whisper on the wind tickled the thousands of nerves in my ear. I groaned through strained teeth as the patter of tiny paws scraped the worn asphalt, fleeing a presence that couldn’t be seen—the goosebumps on my skin feeling more like dozens of rat claws climbing all over me.

That idea seemed to take hold, causing me to low-key panic: I wiped my arms, my neck, my legs—but my hands didn’t brush against anything furry, nothing fell off me and scurried into the crevices, despite the squeaks and scrapes growing steadily. My spine curled as water droplets trickled out of drainpipes and burst against the asphalt, reverberating inside my skull.

I cursed all the innocent little noises that made the night so lovely and intriguing—my eardrums on the verge of bursting at the shout of my own voice. Soon, there was nothing but a vortex of sound all around me.

And that could only mean one thing.

Chapter 10

One, two… I sensed two Voices out of the three.

Sensed, not heard, because they were barely audible, as if they couldn’t break through the normal static of the universe to reach me. Meeting it head-on—that deep-rooted fear I’d fought so hard to ignore—turned my blood to stone. Something wasn’t just off. Something was wrong.

Every inch of me froze, including my lungs.