Chapter 5: Alicia

Late May 2020

The text came at 11:03 p.m. on a Wednesday.

Unknown number, Seattle area code: Landed. Terminal nearly empty. Wearing the coat. Nothing else. See you in 2 hours, Captain.

Bob stared at the screen until the letters burned.

Alicia Sato. Forty years old. Former principal dancer turned extreme rope bottom. FetLife handle: sakura_pain. Three weeks of messages that had started polite and ended with her sending a thirty-second video of herself suspended in a brutal futomomo, tears streaming, begging in Japanese for the day someone would finally “tie my soul, not just my body.”

He had answered with one line: Come when the planes fly again. Kneel when you arrive.

Now the planes were flying (barely) and she was two hours out.

He spent those two hours in the basement.

The space was still half-finished: exposed studs, concrete floor, a single hanging point he’d reinforced himself with a four-by-four and aircraft-grade eye bolts. Rope bags lined one wall (Mary’s old jute, softened by decades of use, plus new hemp he’d bought and broken in with his own hands since March). A single work lamp on a stand threw harsh white light and long shadows.

He laid out the tools like a surgeon: 50 feet of deep-purple 6 mm hemp, a second 30-foot piece for the chest harness, safety shears, a thick yoga mat, a stainless bowl on a low rolling cart (the catch tray hadn’t arrived yet).

At 1:17 a.m. the doorbell rang once (soft, almost shy).

Bob opened it wearing only black gi pants, barefoot, chest bare.

Alicia stood on the porch in a long black trench coat, white N95 mask, hair in a sleek black ponytail that reached her waist. A small leather weekender sat at her feet. Her eyes above the mask were huge, dark, already glassy with adrenaline.

She dropped to her knees on the concrete without being told.