"I'm okay. I'm all right." But it took a great deal of courage to turn her head, meet his eyes. "I'm okay."
"We can drive to the hotel, and let this go for now. Forever, if that's what you want. We can drive straight to the airport and go back to New York. Or we can go to where they found you. You know where it was. It's in your file."
"Did you read my file?"
"Yes."
She started to pull her hand back, but his fingers closed tight. "Did you do anything else? Run any searches?" She asked.
"No. I didn't, no, because you wouldn't want it. But it can be done that way if and when you do."
"I don't want it that way. I don't want that." Her stomach began to hitch. "The light's turned."
"Fuck the light."
"No, just drive." She took a deep breath as horns began to blast behind them. "Just drive for a minute. I need to settle down."
She slid down a bit in the seat and fought a vicious war with her own fears. "You wouldn't think less of me if I asked you to turn around and drive out of here?"
"Of course not."
"But I would. I'd think less of me. I need to ask you for something."
"Anything."
"Don't let me back out. Whatever I say later, I'm telling you now I have to see this through. Wherever it goes. If I don't, I'll hate myself. I know it's a lot to ask, but don't let me rabbit out."
"We'll see it through then."
He wove through traffic, turning onto roads that weren't so wide now, weren't so clean. The storefronts here, when they weren't boarded up, were dull with grime.
Then everything began to spruce up again, slowly, as if some industrious domestic droid had begun work at one end and was polishing its way down to the other.
Small, trendy shops and eateries, freshly rehabbed apartments and town homes. It spoke, clearly, of the gradual takeover of the disenfranchised area by the upwardly mobile young urbanite with money, energy, and time.
"This is wrong. It's not like this." Staring out the window, she saw the shamble of public housing, the broken glass, the screaming lights of yesterday's slum quarter superimposed over today's brisk renewal.
Roarke pulled into a parking garage, found a slot, cut the engine. "It might be better if we walked a bit."
Her legs were weak, but she got out of the car. "I walked then. I don't know how long. It was hot then, too. Hot like this."
"You'll walk with me now." He took her hand.
"It wasn't clean like this." She clung to his hand as they walked out of the garage, onto the sidewalk. "It was getting dark. People were shouting. There was music." She looked around, staring through the present into the past. "A strip club. I didn't know what it was, exactly, but there was music pouring out whenever someone opened the door. I looked inside, and I thought maybe I could go in because I could smell food. I was so hungry. But I could smell something else. Sex and booze. He'd smelled like that. So I ran away as fast as I could. Someone yelled after me."
Her head felt light, her stomach clutched with a sharp, drilling hunger that came from memory.
"Little girl. Hey, little girl. He called me that. I ran across the street, through the cars. People shouted, beeped horns. I think... I think I fell, but I got up again."
Roarke kept her hand in his as they crossed.
"I couldn't run very far because my arm hurt so much, and I was dizzy. Sick."
She was sick now. Oily waves pitched in her belly and rose into her throat. "Nobody paid attention to me. Two men." She stopped. "Two men here. Must've been an illegals deal gone bad. They started to fight. One fell and knocked me over. I think I passed out for a minute. I must have because when I woke up, one of them was lying on the sidewalk beside me. Bleeding, groaning. And I crawled away. Into here. In here."
She stood at the mouth of an alley, tidy as a church pew now with a sparkling recycler.
"I can't do this."