to take a piece of him with me, even if it was only something as inconsequential as a couple of drawings. It was a souvenir, I told myself. Besides, the F.B.I might want it to profile him or something.
It didn’t take much for me to justify myself.
It took longer to slide the mattress back over than it did to move it in the first place. But once I did, I was particularly careful to put my ear to the door to listen for voices or footsteps. If someone was waiting to intercept me, I at least wanted to be prepared. The only thing I could really hear, though, was the sound of my heart beating in my ears and the rain pounding on the deck above. After a few agonizingly long minutes, I decided it was safe to remove the crate and unlock the door.
As I hoped, the door opened without any issues and I slipped out quietly, closing it behind me. I hobbled out into the narrow hall, not failing to realize how much my ankle hurt now. Still, I tried to be as cautious as possible. I noticed some tool boxes and cables hanging from the pipes and rafters, which concerned me a little, but I tried not to focus on them and kept my senses on the direction I had come from last. I distinctly remembered what Polo had mentioned to me about Hold 6 and how it was the last place to get unloaded. I anticipated that even if someone tried to find me there, I could hide away amongst the containers and then run out when an ideal opportunity presented.
I heard some voices charging down a stairwell to my right as I descended a corridor, but I slid behind a large metal frame where I managed to squish myself up enough against the wall so the group didn’t see me. At what felt like two hundred miles a minute, I was certain my pounding heart was a GPS of my location—beeping me away to everyone. But they jogged past and headed in a completely different direction, not having seen me.
I entered the hold, which was still unlocked. Although it was dark and the rain poured through the webs of the crates, it still felt safer than Charlie’s cabin. My eyes took more than a few minutes to adjust, however, as soon as they did, I began hobbling on the planks and used both hands to hold onto the sides of the railing. My hands shook as the planks squeaked from the rain and the motion, but relief still welled within me. If nothing else, I had gotten somewhere I could buy myself some time. I felt proud of my resourcefulness and began thinking that maybe I could get through this after all.
I had to pause every few steps and rest my weight on my good leg. It was frustrating, grueling work, but I kept telling myself it was necessary and I had to be practical. The daunting part was at least relieved by the rain coming through the ceiling. I opened my mouth and let it fill with the freezing water. Within a matter of minutes, however, I was drenched. I briefly considered going back, but knew that being already halfway across the hold and in the midst of the maze of containers, it wasn’t very smart. Besides, I didn’t have anywhere else to go.
I stopped once more, a few steps before the final edge of the passage. The wind was crisp and roared against the metal containers, making them echo in a song I didn’t understand the lyrics to. In another circumstance, I might have liked the noise, I might have thought it was nice, but it only gave me a headache now. I looked up at the wall of the great ship and saw an anomaly in the metal flanking. I reached my hand up to touch the abnormality. It was as though a hole had been made in the wall, only it hadn’t come through all of the way. I pulled myself closer and examined the deformity in an attempt to figure out what it was. Strangely enough, it was misshapen in its center and squared at its ends. I hadn’t noticed it my first time here. As I squinted, I thought I saw smeared red blotches in the center of its core. When I realized what the red was, I was almost in a full-on run to get to the platform.