Dead Stop

Cam Billings is a detective who cannot enter the dark. This is not a metaphor. Her legs stop at tunnel mouths. Her arm extends. Her body makes the decision before her mind arrives.

She loses her shield over it. She loses something else too, something that happens in a subway tunnel at a station she will never stop seeing, and that loss has no official designation and nowhere to be filed.

Then a woman walks into her office and puts an envelope on the desk and a photograph beside it. A woman with a rose gold chain at her throat and an emerald pendant and eyes that give nothing to the camera. A woman who needs finding.

Cam finds her.

She watches her through pharmacy windows and diner glass and the cold pre-dawn dark of a Marble Hill street. She watches her hold a coffee cup with both hands. She watches her touch the pendant when she is frightened. She watches the specific way a person moves through the world when they have decided, somewhere below the level of thought, that the world is not going to hold them much longer.

She does not look away.

She should look away.

The case ends the way cases end. The woman walks into a tunnel and the train comes through and Cam is on her knees at the railing with the tile cold under her kneecaps and her hands wrapped around the iron post and the dark giving nothing back.

Five weeks later she is on the floor of her office with an empty bottle and a contact sheet positioned so the last thing she sees before she stops being awake is a woman laughing in the sun with an emerald burning green at her throat.

Then she sees her again.

Same face. Same walk. Same line from jaw to collarbone. No necklace. Different name. No memory of any of it.

Cam builds a theory. The theory holds if she doesn't look at it too directly. She doesn't look at it too directly.

There is a slide on a conference screen. Four words. A DNA strand beneath them. Cam looks at the slide for a long time.

She was the experiment.

She closes the laptop. She walks past the man on the sidewalk. She goes down into the station and stands at the yellow line and the train comes out of the dark and she gets on and the doors close.

It takes her into the dark.