Ruth

"He makes me do bad things."

“He makes me do bad things to others.”

“He makes me let others do bad things to me.”

The room holds its breath.

Outside, winter tests the windows, and the river listens.

A government office in downtown Chicago, 1975. Radiator ticking, cheap blinds casting ribs of light across a scratched desk; the smell of old coffee and damp coats. Somewhere behind the buildings a pewter lake waxes and wanes. Cold air slips through the window, tasting of iron and snow.

The woman across from me holds very still. Red lipstick—fresh, exact. Pearl buttons. A brown cardigan. A clipboard angled toward her lap like it might catch whatever falls next. When she breathes, she does it quietly.

“Does he hurt you?” she asks. There’s a little South Side music in her voice, a Sunday warmth wanting to be a porch and a hand on your shoulder saying keep steady now. “My name is Lucille,” she adds, as if names are bridges and this is how we cross.

I stare at the strip of light cutting the desk. The radiator ticks. A moth flutters once against the fluorescent fixture and disappears into the dented cover.

“No,” I say. “He makes me be.”

Lucille’s brows knit, not with anger but with grief at not understanding. Outside, a bus hisses. Doors clap shut like a mouth keeping a secret.

I chose the chair nearest the door. My left hand rests where the light can find it. Some openings must be seen before they can be believed.

“May I see your hands, Ruth?”

I slide my right arm from my leather sleeve. Where a wrist should narrow and bones should climb into palm and knuckle, there is only a round, salt-white nub, polished like a river stone. It catches the light and returns it colder.

Her breath trips. She reaches, then stops, her palm hovering above my unfinished part, warmth meeting my chill without crossing.

“It’s all right,” I tell her. “It is how I was made.”

Heat stirs under the fringe across my forehead; seven black marks wake: wounds remembering a blade. They sit an inch above my brows, half an inch high, intricate as lace cut from shadow. The last of them—the one my right-side bang always hides—itches to be read. The air thins when it does that, like the room is holding back weather.

“How long has he kept you?” she asks.

“Since the Binding,” I say. “Since the last Holder.”

She doesn’t know these words, but they give her focus. “What can I do?”

“There’s a warehouse,” I say. “By the river.”

I have practiced many sentences that might open doors. These are the ones that open this door.

Her eyes flick to the window. She is already imagining the river—green-brown, slow, wearing oil like mourning clothes. I do not need to imagine. I feel it in the pipes and in the throat of the city. If I were a compass, that water would be north.

“He keeps me there,” I say. “He will make me do bad things if you do not come.”

“What’s his name?”

“He has had several,” I say. “Today he is only tired.”

“You’re a minor,” she says automatically, then lets the sentence fall. “All right. If we go, we go now, before my supervisor gets back from lunch.” She takes a breath that steadies both of us. “Are you in danger?”

“Yes.” The danger is weather deciding to break.

Lucille stands. The chair sounds like a shoe pulled from mud. Keys in her pocket. Clipboard under her arm. She hesitates and then drops a small white metal box with a red cross into her bag.

At the door she hesitates, the brass knob beneath her palm. A distance opens not measured by feet: the space made when someone steps onto a road with no turning back. She feels it and decides anyway.

“Come on,” she says.

We cross the corridor’s waxed floor. A janitor pauses his mop. The elevator arrives with a tired bell. On the way down, she watches the changing numbers. I count steps the way some people count prayers: the atrium (thirteen), the lobby doors (twenty-two), the curb (twenty-six). The river is close. It always is.

Outside, sleet freckles the pavement. The wind smells of lake and exhaust. We turn right, then left; past a loading dock; under a bridge that sings when trains go over. One hundred and twenty-seven steps. Two hundred and six. At two hundred and ninety my skin tightens the way water does just before it freezes. By three hundred and thirty-three there is a door.

We find it where the street gives up: brick, blind windows, a corrugated panel buckled like a scar. The padlock is new and looped through nothing—snapped shut to look like closure. Lucille notices. We slide the door. Steel-cold air spills out.

Inside: forklifts asleep under tarps, pallets slumped like tired men, a catwalk rusting into lace. Water drips somewhere far back. The river presses its face to the wall, close enough to smell: oil, silt, winter.

He waits on a folding chair under a bare bulb, a small kingdom of light in the dark. Old in the way metal is old—pitted, bent, still dangerous. Skin like paper on a grate. A gray handkerchief in one fist. When he sees us, terror and relief wrestle once behind his eyes.

“You brought her,” he says to me, not to Lucille. “On your own. You walked here without being told.”

“Yes,” I say.

He laughs once, then coughs until it folds him like a pocketknife. He tastes an old word. “You think you’ve come to take a girl from a bad man,” he tells Lucille. “I’m only a man. The danger is her.”

Lucille steps between us. “Sir, I’m with the Department—”

“Departments.” He snorts. “If I die before you take it, she will be what she was made to be. She will be what the marks say.”

“What marks?”

My fringe lifts in the draft. The seven runes warm like coals remembering flame.

“Those,” he says. “You can’t read them. No one can.” He swallows. “Except she told me. She remembers everything. Ask her.”

Lucille looks at me, steady, her brown skin's reaction, not paling, but still showing her feelings. “Ruth,” she says, careful around my name, “what do you remember?”

A room without walls. Wet earth after fire. A woman’s breath ragged with weeping. “A woman stood over me,” I say. “She carved light into my face. I did not know the word for pain yet. It was a number that would not end.”

“Listen,” the old man says, the word sanded down by years. “War made her. Not witchcraft—grief did it. Husband, sons, mother—burned out of the world by uniforms and orders. She took clay from the Bobr when the river ran low—sugar-white and mean as bone. She mixed it with spit and ash and the salt of her own eyes. She didn’t speak spells; she spat curses. She carved those marks of animation and purpose”—his hand trembles toward my brow—“until her hands were claws.

“They say a golem breaks when you scratch out a letter. This one does not. Bury her in stone or drown her in iron—she will wait. She will count. She will stand up and keep going. She doesn’t bruise. She doesn’t rot. When she is cut, the cut closes, like clay deciding the knife was a rumor.

“She is strength dressed as a girl. She does not tire. She does not sleep unless told to pretend. Chain her and she will wear the chain until metal remembers it used to be ore. Burn her and the fire will learn its place.” His eyes shine with something that is not pity. “She was made for one thing, and the woman named her for it. Ruth-less. Without pity—without mercy. The math of vengeance that never ends: killing forever.”

He glances at me, baffled and gentle. “And yet she talks. She listens. She learns. She tells you what she remembers—ask, and she will answer.”

The river in the wall breathes once, as if the building had gills.

“She’s strong enough for the small games men play,” he says. “Lift an engine block like a loaf of bread. Hear your breath lie and your bones tell the truth. You don’t save her the way you save anyone else. You don’t own her and call it protection. You don’t point her at your enemies—that’s a prayer that answers you in full measure.”

He looks at the floor. “I tried to rescue her. Years ago. Like you. She walked within my steps because that is the rule. I told myself rules are safety. Then I learned the other rule: if I let go, she becomes what she was before there were rules. She will not stop until the world is a single solved problem—each and everyone found and killed.

“So, I kept her. Every night I said at least I saved the world until the sentence tasted like base coin.”

He nods toward my brow. “Those marks? No one reads them. I don’t. You don’t. She told me once, whispering like a secret that didn’t want to be true. It means what you think. Ruthless.”

He sags. “She is most dangerous when she chooses to come to you on her own,” he tells Lucille. “It means the Bond is slipping. It means she hears something besides commands.” He draws a shredded breath. “And it means I am going to die.”

His eyes find mine—fear and gentleness tangled. “You want proof,” he says to both of us, a man who wants to be wrong and cannot be. His lips tremble into a terrible, tender smile. “Prove it,” he whispers to me, voice sharpening like a nail. “Break her right arm, make it hurt.”

I turn. Lucille is still speaking when I take her wrist. Her coco brown skin is warm. The bones sit under it, long white matchsticks. I place my thumb and fingers where the force will be clean.

“The hell—” she begins.

I break it.

The sound is like a frozen branch splitting. Her forearm opens twice, neat as a seam ripped with a swift hand. White bone mouths the air, glossy and shocked. Blood is very red against her coat. Lucille’s breath leaves her in a long, soft oh. She sways. Shock is a door closing. Her body chooses not to hurt yet.

“It’s done,” I say.

The old man is crying. Not for her—though he looks. Beside his chair: a paper bag, a chipped mug, a photograph handled until the faces are fog. A note on top—HELP HER—shakes in his scrawl. He was not always this. The first time he saw me, he reached as Lucille just did—both hands open, human first. He meant to rescue. Then the Bond chose him, the world did not end, and mercy fell prey to the corruption of total power.

He presses a hand to his chest. “There’s no time. Take it. Now.”

He turns up his palm.

At first it looks like light bleeding under his skin, a pale pearl trying to surface. Then it is a sphere the size of a large marble, an ivory so pure it seems to drink the room. The Bond. It lifts from his palm with the reluctance of a kept promise and hovers between us, patient as a star between tides. It must not touch me lest I be ruined. It must live only inside a Holder.

The warehouse shivers—this is the unBinding, the leash at its loosest.

I feel it: the chance to be free. The world slants. The river presses harder through the wall. Metal blooms rust as if remembering earth. The lamp thins and grows hungry. My eyes prickle; the blue gutters and something new strikes—red with veins of gold, as if a furnace has been lit behind glass. Heat climbs my skin and the skin answers by cracking, fine lines racing like lightning across a clay sky. Violet fire licks the fractures. Air sizzles where it touches me.

“Take it!” he croaks. He is already sliding sideways, life slipping off him like a coat. “Take it now and command her.”

Lucille lifts her left hand and the Bond comes to her palm as if it always belonged there. The white marble sinks through her skin like a stone into deep water, leaving no wound, only a cold that makes her flinch.

He nods, a small, exhausted benediction. “Command,” he says, and his head drops forward, and he is gone.

I am very bright. The room is very small. The river sings a killing song; I hold it back. Lucille swallows.

She looks at me through heat and cracks and gold and violet—through the ash that she thinks all will be if she is too slow—and finds the word she has never said to anyone with the intention of saving the world.

“Stop,” she commands.

Everything pauses.

My body's violet flames draw back and go out like candlewicks pinched between wet fingers. Cracks knit, leaving hairline silver. Red eyes ebbs to winter blue. The river steps back from the wall. Rust settles. The bulb brightens once.

Lucille sags against a pallet, breathing through her nose. Her right arm hangs wrong, white bone winking through torn wool. She looks at her left hand—at whatever has moved in under her skin—and then finds my face.

“Ruth,” she says.

It is not a command. It is a name.

“I’ll find a way to set you free.” The words are small and steady. They land. Behind them I hear another sentence forming, the one the old man learned to say to himself.

Something inside me answers—a wire humming in winter, not obedience and not defiance. A shape that could be hope if given time.

“But first—” Her mouth tries a smile that is mostly pain and courage. “Before I faint and ruin both our chances… will you help me with my arm?”

“Yes,” I say.

I kneel. “This will feel cold,” I tell her. I align the breaks; the sound is smaller now, the way a storm is smaller when it is leaving. I split the cardboard from the kit, tape tight and true, wrap the bandage in a figure-eight until the bright red is quiet under white.

Her breath fogs. Sweat beads at her hairline. She bites the inside of her cheek and lets the pain arrive without giving it all the room.

“Look at me,” she says when the last pin is set.

I do as she commands.

“I meant it.” Her eyes shine—not with tears, exactly, but with something that wants to be light. “I will not keep you because I can. I will keep you safe until I learn how not to.”

On the floor, the photograph turns its blurred faces to the ceiling. He did not begin as he ended.

The runes along my brow are warm as coals agreeing to stay coals. The Bond sleeps under her skin. The river holds still the way a hand holds still when it is not there.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

The word sounds different in her mouth—as if she is thanking me for stopping, not only for the splint. As if she does not yet hear the sentence waiting in the years: at least I saved the world.

“You’re welcome,” I say, and the shape inside me changes a little, like steel remembering it can be something other than a knife.

We sit with the old man cooling and snow knitting a softer city outside. Lucille breathes until her color returns. Then she nods.

“Come on,” she murmurs. “Let’s get out of here.”

I stand when she stands. We step into the sleet-shined alley and retrace the city’s seams: under the singing bridge; past the loading dock; along the service brick still sweating river-cold. I count as one measures a tide—three hundred and thirty-three back to the door, two hundred and ninety to the curb, and the rest to the elevator’s tired bell. The world stays.

* * *

Kansas City. Another office with careful furniture. The river close enough to ootaste in the air.

He’s young; twenty-something, face full of beard, waiting with stylus and tablet. The blinds make pale ribs of light across his desk. A vent hums.

“Whenever you’re ready,” he says.

“She makes me do bad things,” I say.

The stylus pauses mid-glide. “Who is she?”

Silence, the soft listening kind. The river moves as if trying not to be noticed.

“My Holder,” I say.

He nods like he understands. “Do you want that to stop?”

“I want to be free.”

A flicker, quick as the quiver of a string, runs through me and is gone.

He leans forward. “How can I help you?”

If he stands, if he says yes, if he follows, doors open. I have practiced these moments. I know what rescues look like before they happen.

“I’ll show you,” I say, and the words are the same shape they were once, and they open the same door.

We rise. Outside, the river keeps its language.

But this time, I think at the water I can’t yet see, I am stronger.