Number seven. It was seven. Ruby stood looking at the chipping painted number on the maroon door in front of her, and the tears and nose-run threatened again. She gracelessly wiped at her face, paying no heed to which parts of it actually needed wiping, and kicked at the door. She'd seen people in movies kick doors open. Unfortunately, this was no movie, and all she ended up with was a dull ache radiating up her leg. When the knob turned and the door was pulled inward, though, Ruby forgot the pain and shoved past the unhealthy-looking middle-aged woman who'd opened it.

She didn't know what she was doing, only that she needed to do something, and the place to do it seemed to be here, this motel room.

Her eyes fell on the table, which was littered in ash trays and bottles and bits of paper. A man sat on the chair, but he didn't appear to be quite with it, so Ruby bent and swept the surface clean. The woman who'd let her in moved from questioning to cussing, pockmarking her foul tirade every so often with chastisement. Ruby felt a hand on her shoulder but shrugged it off before moving to the unmade bed, which she couldn't look at too long before her whole body began to burn. Past that, to the bathroom, which had been so trashed with clothing and more bottles and half-eaten food that she could hardly step to the tub. She paused at the shower curtain, recalling dully the moments she'd spent soaking herself after . . . well, after what'd happened. Then she yanked the cheap plastic aside only to find another woman, naked and half-awake, in the empty tub.

"Hey," groaned the woman, turning her body awkwardly, her skin squeaking unnervingly against the dry porcelain. Ruby looked down at her nudity, disgusted at the fleshiness, the brillo-pad of hair down there, the giant lolling breasts. Eyes barely able to stay open, the woman seemed to attempt a smile in Ruby's direction, but the girl swiped the curtain back and spun about only to trip on an empty box of wine, falling over it onto the floor.

"Baby, come on, now."

The rough voice above sounded like it should belong to a mother, and as hands slipped beneath Ruby's armpits and pulled her up, the girl began to sob.

The woman who'd opened the door, who'd snapped at her and then begun swearing at her, began to soothe, to encourage, as with an arm around Ruby's waist she helped the teen hobble out of the bathroom and toward the bed. Ruby was crying too hard to notice where exactly she'd been seated.

"All right then, baby, all right. Let it out. Let it all out." The woman rubbed Ruby's back, rocked her side to side a little. "You just get rid of whatever's in you, and then we can talk about it."

Ruby indulged herself, not least of all because she literally couldn't stop, now that she'd started. She cried and cried, no concern about her abject appearance, no feelings of shame, just release. Who the woman next to her was, she didn't know. And what exactly she'd walked into didn't matter either. The last twelve hours were a blur of anger and disbelief. Damien had tried to kill her. Fucking kill her! He'd put his hands around her throat, and oh, how beautiful his fingers against her skin had been. Even as the pressure had mounted, as she'd lost her breath, as her throat had constricted, Ruby had noticed a terrible and confusing sensation, aching up from between her legs into her core, and all of everything had built up, mounted within, promised some rapturous release, but then he'd let her go. She'd fallen, the trembling stirring dissipating. It'd almost been more satisfying than what he'd done to her in the motel, and yet she sensed the abnormality of her feelings, how wrong it was to think anything positive about his actions.

He'd left her, and even now she had no idea what to do. How could he have gone? How could he have just abandoned her, after everything? She'd waited for him, and she'd told him as much, but he hadn't cared. Nothing she'd said had mattered to him. Instead, he'd seen her as disposable.

And yet, he hadn't killed her. He could have; she would've let him. She would've let him do absolutely anything by that point, would've trusted that he knew, that he understood what must happen. But he hadn't. What had stopped him? She'd spent the subsequent hours considering that very thing, not just why he'd wanted to do it but why he'd stopped himself after starting.

Maybe she'd have been better off dead.

Oh, the sobbing just intensified when she reminded herself of that—that the world might've been better off without her. What did she have, now? Her brother was gone, her parents were virtually absent, and the only human being she'd ever really truly, deeply loved had tried to get rid of her after weeks of ignoring her. She had nothing, now. Nothing.

"You ready to talk about it?" the woman asked after probably thirty minutes had passed and Ruby had finally cried herself dry.

The girl couldn't do more than nod. She was beginning to remember where she was: that stupid motel room, where Damien had actually paid her attention for the first time, where he'd touched her, put his hands on her. And she'd always wanted him to, but when he'd actually done it—

Oh, God, Damien! She thought she might start crying again.

"Let's sit out front, all right? Come on, baby."

Ruby allowed the woman to lead her out of the apartment (the man on the couch was still asleep or dead, and the woman in the bathroom had never come out). The two of them sat on the curb beneath the late morning sunshine. As Ruby's eyes began to adjust through her watery vision, she realized the woman who'd been comforting her was familiar. "You work at the gas station, don't you? The Amoco on Old Portal?"

The woman crouched next to her, dressed in torn leggings and a cropped T-shirt revealing a swath of wrinkled stomach, seemed surprised. "Well, I did, yeah. You must've come in there and seen me. I ain't been there for a couple months, though." Her hair was pulled back and up into one of those plastic claw clips. It was an accidental ombré of pinkish ends, browning middles, and intermittent gray. Everything about the woman's face, from its wan coloring to its harsh days-old makeup, made Ruby sad. She found she couldn't say anything unless she looked forward into the parking lot. And even then, the awkwardness that she'd kept at bay while melting down began to creep back now that she had cooled off.

She muttered only, "Thank you."

"Tell me about it," the woman said. "What've you got to be cryin' like that for?"

So Ruby told her about the state of her family and about running away from home. She didn't tell her about Damien, not exactly, only that some asshole had hurt her. She talked about her Mama being a whore and her Daddy being an abuser and how she hadn't known where to go or what to do only that she felt as if she needed to come back to this place because it was the source of so much anger, and as Ruby talked, the woman—who announced her name was Tracy—began to smile. She didn't know those people in the motel room, she said. They were clients. They'd paid her to party, and they'd paid her a lot, she said. And, Tracy admitted, she herself knew what it was like to be a young girl in need. She too had been kicked out of her home at a young age, found she'd had to fend for herself. And she'd done all right, tried out different jobs and everything, but realized she needed to go back to being an independent business woman. It was a business she had, not some hobby. She offered services for people, and they paid her for it. And Ruby could be like her. Ruby could come with her, could help make money.

Oh, whatever else Tracy said, it sounded hopeful to a girl like Ruby, who was nothing if not hopeless in that moment. And so the two set off together, and while the first months of her time spent with Tracy were, in fact, somewhat fun (for Tracy spent a lot of time being kind to Ruby, treating her as an equal, offering her alcohol and cigarettes whenever she wanted even as they bounced from place to place, from friends' couches to more motel rooms, spending many nights in Tracy's trashed car and more nights in strangers' apartments). And Ruby, though lonely and largely introspective, was satiated enough that she was oblivious to the insidious creep of her new mother-figure's actual plans. Before long, the girl became so dependent on the substances Tracy offered her to refuse the favors the woman had begun to demand. Things started small but fast escalated, Ruby told to snuggle or sit on laps of men as old as her father and often older. Told to place her hand somewhere special or give a quick kiss, to show a part of her body or dance or bathe while someone watched. The leap to sexual activities and favors was not a distant one; Ruby needed what Tracy had, and Tracy wanted to make money. There were no more kind words between them. No more comforting arms around waists or encouraging moments. And while Ruby knew what she'd essentially become, she couldn't find a way to free herself of it, nor, if she were brutally honest, did she wish to do so. She forgot herself. Through the substance abuse and the human abuse and three forced abortions (one during which she nearly died) and illness and self-harm and self-hatred and self-blame, the girl lost herself, whoever she'd been, whoever she might have become.

Still, Tracy could pull off Ruby's age as fifteen for only so long, though even at twenty, Ruby managed to project all the nescience and youthfulness of someone two-thirds her age, as underdeveloped and defeated as she was. And when money didn't come in regularly enough, when Tracy found the two of them living no longer in a ratty apartment but out of her car, she trafficked the young-woman to a few men who'd been coming around for a while.

That would have been the beginning of the end, or perhaps the midway in a downward slide toward an early death, had not Ruby, the moment one of the two men to whom she'd been sold shoved her into the back of a delivery truck, lifted her head and found herself standing in front of a door, a maroon-colored door, with a chipped-paint number seven staring her in the face.

Sunlight warmed her back. Her chest fluttered as if a butterfly were caught inside. What was she doing here? What had just . . . happened? She blinked several times. Angry. She was angry. That was right. And absolutely positively at a loss, because of Damien. Because of what he'd done—tried to kill her last night! That's right, he had!

She wasn't even going to bother knocking, didn't need to kick in the door like she'd seen in movies, because it was open already, just a sliver, but enough that all it needed was a gentle push and in it went. What came out, immediately, was a cool, dank stench, vinegary, Ruby thought. Like . . . like when someone opened a jar of pickles or those jalapeño-stuffed olives her Mama had treated herself to once in a blue moon. A memory darted through her thoughts, but Ruby couldn't quite wrap her attention around it and instead stepped into the dark rectangle beyond the bright.

Her eyes needed a moment to adjust, but as the girl picked up bits and pieces of the dark room, her vision aided by the stripe of light slipping through the curtains and the fat beam pouring from the lit bathroom, she realized the place was an utter mess.

She remembered this room, recalled where the lamps were, and stepped around the table, past the sofa and chair, to twist a switch. Suddenly illuminated, the space presented a nightmare Ruby quickly wished she hadn't seen. Arlo. The memory she'd pushed back—his body, that thing! On the chair right beneath her outstretched arm was a man, or what had been a man. The half of his face in decent condition consisted of one wide-open, bloodshot eye, several teeth in a lipless mouth, and a perfectly smooth, oddly intact forehead. The rounds of his cheeks were entirely gone; his nose bitten right through the bridge to the bone. His head appeared to have been pressed downward, as if some insanely strong fist had punched it into his shoulders, forcing several ribs to escape through his chest, and as for the rest of him, well, Ruby had little desire to study it more closely.

She stumbled in her shock, disturbing the numerous bottles and paraphernalia scattered across the coffee table, barely keeping on her feet as she turned around to see the bed where she'd had her first ever romantic encounter.

A woman's head of pinkish hair splayed across the pillow, a blanket pulled up under her chin. But Ruby knew instinctively that the woman was not asleep, and when she pulled back the blanket, she was met with the gore of a woman torn in two, all of her inner meat spilled out in an indistinguishable mess across a blood-soaked mattress.

The woman's name, it'd been Tracy, Ruby thought, though she wasn't sure how she knew it.

Something jangled in the bathroom, glass bumping up against glass. Ruby snapped to attention. What she'd seen out there in the desert, Arlo's body . . . it hadn't been mountain lions or coyotes. She'd tried to tell herself it'd been her imagination, just like the police said, and Damien had taken over all her thoughts, her whole awareness, but now it came back, and she couldn't walk away. She knew she should, but she couldn't. Step after step, she moved as if in slow-motion to the door of the bathroom, each tiny sound indicative of another's presence causing her breath to catch. She had to know this. Maybe if she had some grand secret, some hidden awareness or understanding, if she could solve Arlo's death, the violent deaths of these people, maybe he'd take some interest in her again. Because as scared as she was in that moment, she'd have given anything in the world to feel his hands around her throat again, to feel the pressure mounting within, above and below. She'd suffer the worst sadness, the worst fear, the worst agony for him. If there were a cougar or a monster in the bathroom, its claws wrenching through her belly couldn't hurt her more than Damien could. No. And she would show him she could take whatever he wanted to give her. He could threaten her with a gun; he could burn her with his cigarettes; he could put things inside of her or take things out of her or beat her or scream at her or bite her or scratch her or tie her up or take a knife and slice bits of her away day after day and she wouldn't care, she'd love what he did, because it'd be from him.

She had nothing to lose if she couldn't see him again. She'd rather be dead.

Ruby drew right up to the bathroom and peeked inside. Something was definitely in there—she could tell by the soft but certain splashing noises, the strange sounds she couldn't quite make out but which sounded something like sucking and breathing at the same time. Whatever it was, though, it was behind the closed shower curtain. The woman, Ruby recalled. The naked woman. She had no idea how she knew a naked woman was beyond that curtain, but it didn't matter; that woman was still alive after whatever attack they'd been through!

No longer afraid, the girl whipped back the plastic. A face immediately shoved right up against her own, nose-to-nose, eyes melding into one, and thick black hair floated around them as some supernatural storm cloud. The mouth of the face widened, widened, widened, its teeth bits of glass running red, and emitted a terrible scream that sent Ruby to the floor. An insanity of rope and moisture whipped all about, so that the girl covered her face to deflect, and quite suddenly, the sound and the wind and the chaos vanished, just like that.

A drenched, trembling Ruby managed after some minutes to rise to her knees. When she was able to see into the tub, saw it was filled with what looked like blood and the remains of that naked woman she'd known would be there, smelled that potent vinegary smell, she vomited right over its edge.

"Ruby Rouge," rumbled a deep voice, and the girl turned to find a familiar figure in the doorway. "Come on with me, girl. I need you, now."