Chapter 4: The Visitation

The stall had never felt smaller.

I paced the length of it, six steps from door to back wall, then turned and did it again. The straw crunched under my feet. The red eye of the camera blinked. The walls pressed in on me like the sides of a grave.

Six steps. Turn. Six steps. Turn.

I tried not to listen. I pressed my hands over my ears and hummed, anything to block out the silence that filled the space between the barn and the visitation room, but the silence was worse than the noise. Noise would tell me something. Noise would tell me she’s alive, she’s there, she’s still Santa and not whatever Delgado wanted to turn her into.

Six steps. Turn. Six steps. Turn.

I stopped at the door and pressed my eye to the crack where the latch didn’t quite catch. The barn is dim; the overhead lights switched to low power mode for the evening. I can see the visitation room door at the far end, closed, a strip of light showing beneath it. No shadows. No sound.

Hale is gone. He walked back to the main office after closing the door, his tablet tucked under his arm, his face giving nothing away. He didn’t look back at me. He didn’t need to. He knew what happened in the visitation room. He’d facilitated it a hundred times, a thousand times. He’s the one who scheduled the appointments, who collected the premiums, who filed the reports marked “satisfactory.”

I wonder if he ever thought about Maria. I wonder if he ever thought about any of them.

The folder was in my hand. I didn’t remember picking it up. The pages are wrinkled now, damp from my sweat. I opened it again, not to read. I couldn’t focus on the words, but to hold something that isn’t the walls, isn’t the straw, isn’t the silence.

A photograph fell out. I hadn’t seen it before. It was paperclipped to the deposition form, tucked between pages of legalese. I picked it up, my fingers trembling.

It was a girl. Young, maybe sixteen, maybe seventeen. She was smiling, her face turned toward the camera, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. She was wearing a t-shirt with a cartoon character on it, something from a show I didn’t recognize. She was holding a leash attached to a small dog, a scruffy thing with its tongue hanging out.

On the back, in handwriting that loops and curves, is a name: Maria. Age 16. Before.

Before?

I stared at the photograph for a long time. This is the girl Agent Chen watched die. This was the girl who worked until there was nothing left. This was the girl whose name was being carried through the halls of the state capitol by a woman in sensible flats and a severe bun. This was the girl I was supposed to become if I testified. A girl in a photograph. A name on a deposition. A cautionary tale.

I put the photograph back in the folder and pressed it flat against my chest. The paper is cool against my skin, a small anchor in the heat of the stall.

I didn’t know how long I stood there. Minutes. Hours. Time didn’t move the same way in the stall. It stretched, contracted, and bent around the edges, and lost meaning. There were only before and after. Before the visitation room door opened, and then after.

When it finally did open, the sound was so small I almost missed it. A soft click, a scrape of metal on wood. Then footsteps. Slow. Deliberate.

I pressed my eye to the crack again.

Delgado came out first. He adjusted his cufflinks, his shirt still crisp, his linen pants uncreased. He looked the same as he did when he walked in. Composed. Satisfied. Untouchable.

He paused outside the visitation room door and said something over his shoulder. I couldn’t hear the words, but I saw his lips move, saw the shape of a smile that had nothing to do with kindness.

Then he walked down the barn aisle, past the other stalls, past the camera, past the small window in my door. He didn’t look in. He didn’t need to. He got what he came for.

The main office door opened and closed. The sound of a car engine started, the crunch of gravel, and then nothing.

I wait. One minute. Two. Five.

The visitation room door was still open, a rectangle of dim light spilling onto the barn floor. No one came out.

I opened my stall door. The latch caught, stuck, then released. I’m in the air before I could think about what I was doing, my bare feet silent on the concrete. The other stalls were dark, the other girls asleep or pretending to be. The camera at the end of the barn swiveled slowly, tracking the aisle, tracking me. I didn’t care. Let it watch. Let it record. There was nothing I could do that they hadn’t already seen a hundred times before.

I reached the visitation room and stopped in the doorway.

Santa was on the floor.

She was curled on her side, her knees drawn up to her chest, her mitted hands pressed against her face. The harness was still on; it never came off. Her hair is spread across the floor in a dark tangle. Her shoulders are shaking.

I crossed the room in three steps and dropped to my knees beside her. My hand went to her back, and I felt the tremor running through her, the fine vibration of a body that has been pushed past its limits.

“Santa,” I whisper. “Santa, I’m here. I’m here.”

She didn’t move. Her hands stayed pressed against her face, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps that caught in her throat around the bit. I can see the edges of her mouth where the metal had rubbed the skin raw. There was blood. Not much, just a thin line, already drying, but enough to make my stomach clench.

I looked around the room. The bed was made. The camera in the corner was dark and turned off for the client’s privacy. The walls were bare, the floor clean. There was nothing to tell me what happened. Nothing except the way Santa is curled into herself, the way her body is trying to disappear.

I slid my arm under her shoulders and pulled her upright, leaning her against my chest. She resisted at first, a small sound of protest, but I didn’t let go. I wrapped my arms around her and held her, my cheek pressed against her hair, my heart hammering against her back.

“I’ve got you,” I say. “I’ve got you.”

She made a sound. Not a growl this time. Something smaller. Something broken. A whimper that came from a place so deep I felt it in my own chest.

I held her tighter. My straps pressed into her skin. The collar on my throat pressed into hers. We are two bodies marked by the same permanent boundaries, held together by nothing but flesh and leather and a promise I made in the dark.

“I’m going to get us out,” I whisper. “I swear to you, Santa. I’m going to get us out.”

She shakes her head. The movement is small, almost imperceptible, but I felt it against my shoulder. She didn’t disagree. She’s telling me it’s impossible. She’s telling me that Delgado already owned us, that the contract already owned us, that the gear already owned us, and there was no escape from something that became your skin.

“I don’t care,” I say. “I don’t care what it takes. I don’t care what it costs. I’m not going to let him do this to you again.”

She still goes. The trembling stops. Her breath slowed, the gasps evened out into something almost steady. She listened. She waited.

I reached for the folder. It was on the floor where I dropped it, the pages splayed open, Maria’s photograph face-up on the concrete. I picked it up and set it in Santa’s lap, pressing her mittened hands against it. “There’s a woman,” I said. “Her name is Agent Chen. She’s from the state. She’s trying to change the law. She wants to make the contracts reviewable. She wants to make the gear removable.”

Santa’s head lifted slightly. Her hands moved beneath mine, her fingers useless inside the leather mitts pressed against the photograph.

“There’s a hearing in three weeks. If we testify, if we tell them what happens here, what happens in the visitation room, what happens on the routes...” I stopped, my voice catching. “It could change things. It could change everything.”

She looked at the photograph now. At Maria’s face, at her smile, at the dog on the leash and the cartoon T-shirt, and at the life she had before any of this. Her breath hitched again, but this time it was different. This time it was recognition.

“She died,” I said quietly. “Agent Chen told me. She died three years ago. Dehydration during a long route, the report said, but Agent Chen said there was more. She said Maria worked herself to death. Used until there was nothing left.”