Chapter Three: The Price of Being Seen
Rin followed them the way smoke follows fire: close enough to taste, far enough not to burn.
She kept thirty, sometimes forty yards back, moving from shadow to shadow, boots silent on broken glass and gravel. The four men walked with the easy swagger of people who believed the night belonged to them. Red-filtered flashlights swept ahead in slow arcs, painting the world the colour of old blood. They talked in low bursts, jokes about cans of beans, about a girl back at camp, about the last group they'd "shared."
Rin listened.
Rin learned.
She was small enough that the darkness folded around her like a cloak. Seventeen, maybe, but built like a fourteen-year-old who'd forgotten to eat for a month. The oversized flannel hung off her shoulders; the backpack dragged at her spine. She looked harmless. She had decided that was useful.
They reached the flooded switching yard just after midnight. Moonlight lay on the shallow water like spilled milk. Abandoned boxcars stood in crooked rows, graffiti bleeding down their sides.
That was when the other voices drifted across the open space.
Two people. Young. Afraid.
Rin dropped behind a stack of rotting railway ties and became part of the wood.
Twenty-five yards away, a boy and a girl-no older than twenty-stood in the moonlight clutching each other. Their clothes were patched and filthy, their faces hollowed by hunger. The girl held a small backpack to her chest like it could stop bullets. The boy had one arm around her, the other hand raised, palm out.
"Please," the boy called, voice cracking. "We're just trying to get to the river bridge. We don't have anything worth taking."
The four men spread into a loose semicircle without a word. Rifles rose. The leader (broad-shouldered, wearing the black-painted catcher's chest protector) stepped forward, hands open, smile wide and warm.
"Hey, hey, easy. We're not animals." His voice was honey over broken glass. "Camp's two miles east. Real walls. Hot food. You two look like you haven't eaten in weeks."
Hope flickered across the girl's face, fragile and stupid.
Rin watched from the dark, violet eyes unblinking.
She knew what came next.
Her body knew.
Some buried fragment recognised the rhythm of this dance.
The leader offered a canteen. The girl reached for it.
That was all the permission they needed.
The one with the rope moved first-fast, practiced. A loop dropped over the boy's head and yanked tight before he could scream. The girl made it two steps before a hand clamped over her mouth and an arm like a steel band locked around her waist. The rifleman kept his weapon trained on the boy's knees, casual, almost bored.
They forced them both down between the tracks.
Rin did not move.
She did not flinch.
The leader knelt in front of the girl, brushed a strand of dirty hair from her face with mock tenderness.
"Shh. Don't fight. Makes it worse."
The boy thrashed against the rope until blood ran down his neck. Someone kicked him in the ribs until he folded. Then they turned him over.
Rin watched every second.
She watched them strip the girl while she screamed into a gloved hand. Watched them hold the boy face-down in the oily water until he stopped fighting, then drag him up gasping so they could start again. Watched them take turns, laughing quietly, passing a flask between them like they were at a tailgate party.
The girl's screams turned to whimpers, then to nothing.
The boy never made it back to screams.
When they were done, they wiped themselves on the couple's own clothes. One of them slit the boy's throat for the mess he'd made. Another stabbed the girl three times in the chest (quick, efficient, almost kind). They searched the bodies with the same bored thoroughness they'd used in the pharmacy. Took the shoes, the backpack, a silver bracelet the girl had worn. Left the rest for the water and the moon.
Rin counted heartbeats.
One hundred and forty-seven from the first scream to the last gurgle.
Then silence.
The men slung the new duffel, lit cigarettes, and walked north along the tracks, footsteps already fading.
Rin waited another full minute.
Then she rose.
Her legs were steady.
Her hands did not shake.
The chair leg rested against her palm exactly where it had been the entire time.
She walked forward, boots silent, until she stood over the bodies.
Moonlight painted everything silver and black. Blood looked like ink. The girl's eyes were still open, reflecting the sky. The boy's face was half-submerged, mouth frozen in a silent O.
Rin crouched.
She searched the ground with quick, clinical fingers. Found the crushed pack of cigarettes the men had dropped in their excitement (eight left, plus a lighter). Took them. Found a small folding knife in the boy's pocket they'd somehow missed. Took that too.
She did not close their eyes.
She did not say sorry.
She did not feel the weight of what she had witnessed pressing against the inside of her ribs.
She felt nothing at all.
Just cold, flat observation:
This is the world now.
This is what men do when the lights go out and no one is left to say no.
This is why you stay small.
This is why you stay hidden.
She stood.
The violet in her eyes had gone almost black in the moonlight.
Rin turned south, opposite the men's trail, and walked away.
Behind her, two fresh corpses cooled between the rails.
Ahead of her, the city stretched wide and hungry.
She slipped the new knife into her boot, adjusted the backpack, and kept moving.
No tears.
No nightmares waiting to bloom.
Only the quiet, perfect understanding that whatever had been done to her memories, it had left her exactly what she needed to be.
A ghost in a child's body.
A witness who never blinked.
A girl who would never again be surprised by what people were willing to do in the dark.
Rin disappeared into the night without a sound.
The moon followed her anyway.
(End of Chapter Three)