It begins with a group of girls in a basement and the smell of burning wood, of plaster and mortar blazing into dust. Of black smoke curling into the room, of one girl, her dark hair still wet from the bath, pressing her face to the space between wall and door, feeling the heat from the orange fire up against her cheeks.
It begins with a courtroom, with a decorated detective refusing to testify against two criminals with records. Of a headstrong girl and a promise she had made to him. "Your answer would not change mine; you are a fine man," she had said, her voice almost trembling, and at the time he had thought maybe it was out of tenderness. But it was out of sorrow, sorrow at having to lie to a friend. "My place is not with you," she had said to him a week later. The whole courtroom went silent, hisses and whispers snaking through the audience, the girl's father sputtering out her name in shock. The rest of his team looking at him like he was going to break.
The girls stepped into the hallway, where several objects were curling into husks in the fire. The dark-haired girl was trying not to cry, not out of shame, but out of knowing her tears were precious. Of growing up on legends of girls like her, harvested to bare bones for their tears. Broken glass sliced at the bottoms of her feet; she left bloody little prints as she limped along.
That night, he walked back home through the snow, duffle coat buttoned all the way up over his pristine crisp suit, returning to his brownstone apartment not the same man he was when he had left it. "So this is where your heart truly lies, then?" he'd asked her. The set of her face, her straight stance had told him he didn't need an answer. But he'd asked anyway. He remembered thinking that he had never seen her more beautiful. "It is, Detective," she'd replied. Only when he had gone to bed, an open bottle drained on the kitchen counter, the apartment groaning as it settled in for the night, did he allow himself to cry.
The girls stood in that hallway for a while before finally, someone broke into the basement to rescue them. They were carried out one by one, into the night air, and taken to the hospital. Some of them had been missing for a couple of weeks, others missing for years. The girl with the dark wet hair was eventually adopted into a family she'd learn to love, in a house she'd learn to call home. But at night, she'd close her eyes and hear, "Syrena, won't you cry?" When she touched the raised scar on her hip, she knew this pain would be with her always.
It begins with a new case, months after he was rejected, years after she climbed out of that basement. They were two beautiful people; it was a beautiful snowy day in a beautiful city. Everything about the world seemed quiet and lovely to them.
Except for the body.
