Page 23 of Subduing the Shark

Jack almost said something about the fact that Amani rearranged his own bar four times a week, but he caught himself. Amani was talking to him. About drinks and shelf organization and the proper way to load a tray. Normal things. The things coworkers talked about when they were coworkers instead of a trauma survivor and one of his abusers performing a complicated dance around each other's damage.

"Left to right," Jack said. "Simple, grenadine, curacao, orgeat."

"Orgeat is the almond one. Don't confuse it with the amaretto."

"I know what orgeat is."

Amani glanced at him. There was the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth that wasn't quite a smile but was in the same neighborhood. "Since when?"

"Since I've been working at a bar for weeks. I pay attention."

"You pay attention to everything." Amani said it neutrally, a statement of fact, no warmth and no accusation. He poured the drink he'd been mixing and slid it across the bar to a waiting customer. "Go fix the grenadine."

Jack fixed the grenadine. He rearranged the syrups in the correct order and while he was behind the bar he noticed that the speed rail was low on vodka. He pulled a bottle from the back shelf and replaced it without being asked. Amani watched him do it and said nothing.

At midnight, Jack changed and left. Harold was at his post. Their gazes met as Jack crossed the floor toward the elevator and Harold gave him a small nod, the kind that said I see you. Jack nodded back.

He went home. Dresden was asleep. The house was quiet. Jack lay in his bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about the way Amani had said you pay attention to everything and the twitch at the corner of his mouth that had almost been a smile.

Then he thought about the van. The rope. Amani's wrists. The sound Amani had made when they'd handed him over, a noise that Jack had heard in his sleep every night in holding and still heard sometimes in the dark of the shiver house when the television was off and the ocean currents weren't there to drown it out.

He got up.

It was after one. The house was still. Dresden's snoring came through the thin wall between their rooms, steady and deep, the sound of a man who slept easily because nothing he'd ever done kept him awake. Lichen's room was dark. Rashe was out, wherever Rashe went at night.

Jack went to the kitchen. He opened the junk drawer and found what he was looking for under a stack of takeout menus and expired coupons. A notepad. Small, white, with the logo of acasino hotel on the top in faded gold. Someone had stolen it from a hotel lobby months ago and it had been sitting in the drawer ever since, used occasionally for grocery lists.

He sat down at the kitchen table. He picked up a pen from the counter. He opened the notepad to a blank page.

And he started writing names.

The first name was Amani.

The pen moved and Jack wrote it in block letters at the top of the page because Amani was the reason he was here, the reason he was sitting at this table in this house at one in the morning with a stolen notepad and a pen that was almost out of ink. Amani was the name that everything else orbited around. The kidnapping, the van, the rope, the crane, the holding cell, the punishment, the bar, the hoodie, the thrown glasses, the direct order about tonic water. All of it started with Amani.

Below Amani he wrote the names of the other people the shiver had taken. Not just for Grainger. Before Grainger, after Grainger, the people who'd been traded or sold or loaned out as part of the shiver's dealings with other groups. The ones Jack had personally helped take. The ones he'd known about and hadn't stopped.

Then he wrote the names from the challenges.

Those were harder. Some of them he remembered clearly. Others had blurred together over years of the same ritual, the same floor, the same blankness. He wrote the names of every shark he'd beaten in a challenge and collected from. Young men who'd come into the shiver barely grown and had learned the rules the same way Jack had, by losing. Older ones who'd been in the system so long they'd stopped seeing it as a system at all.

He wrote the names of the ones who'd beaten him. Dresden. Rashe. Lichen. Others, over the years, a rotating cast of sharks who'd won the fight and taken what the rules said was theirs. Jack wrote their names too because they were part of it, becausein a system where everyone was both victim and perpetrator the lines didn't separate cleanly. He'd hurt people who'd hurt him. They'd hurt people who'd hurt them. The violence circled and fed on itself and no one ever stepped outside it because stepping outside meant being alone.

He filled one page. Turned to the next. Kept writing.

Some of the names he had to sit with for a long time before he could put the pen to paper. A woman named Cass who'd been part of a different shiver that merged with theirs for a summer, who'd fought Jack twice and won both times. A man whose name Jack was pretty sure was Devon but might have been Devin, and the fact that he couldn't remember which made him set the pen down and press his knuckles against his closed eyes until the pressure hurt.

He picked the pen back up. He kept writing.

And then he got to Tully.

The pen stopped. Jack sat at the kitchen table and looked at the space on the page where the name should go and his hand wouldn't move. Tully had been nineteen when he joined the shiver. Scrawny, loud, scared in a way he tried to cover with bravado. He'd challenged Jack his second week because he was trying to prove something, and Jack had beaten him in under a minute because Tully didn't know how to fight and didn't know that losing meant more than losing.

Jack remembered Tully's face after. Not during. After, when it was over and Tully was on the floor and he'd looked up at Jack with an expression that Jack had never let himself think about because thinking about it meant seeing what he'd done from the outside. Tully hadn't gone blank. He hadn't gone still. He'd looked at Jack like he was the first person who'd ever hurt him, and the shock of it had been so raw, so new, that it meant no one had. Before that night, no one had ever hurt Tully. Jack had been the first.

Tully lasted six months. Then he ran. Nobody talked about the ones who left. The shiver closed around the empty space like water filling a gap and Tully's name stopped being said out loud and Jack had let him disappear because letting people disappear was easier than thinking about why they'd left.

Jack wrote Tully's name on the page. His hand was shaking badly enough that the letters came out crooked, the T leaning sideways, the y trailing off the line. He put the pen down and pressed both palms flat against the table and breathed through his mouth because his nose was full and his eyes were burning and the kitchen was too bright and too quiet and too small.