The alley was a dismal place, littered with broken bottles and dreams. It wasn’t any nicer in the torrential downpour.

Something softly splashed behind me. I knew better than to hope it was a particularly large rat. I spun, my momentum carrying my first into my would-be attacker’s face. Bastard had the nerve to look surprised.

I sent my other hand sailing into his jaw. 200 pounds of glorified thug crumpled onto the pavement. With a sigh, I ziptied his hands and feet and rolled him off to the side so he wouldn’t get run over. His face was perilously close to what might have once been a burrito. I nudged it a little bit closer.

A sharp gust rippled a nearby trashbag, and I kicked it reflexively. The rain bore down with renewed agression. I gave the poor sod one last glare and I squelched my merry way to my apartment.

The third floor is, in my opinion, the best floor to live on in most cheap apartments. Floors one and two are too easy to break into. Any higher than the third and you start limiting your escape options, though the fourth is a good alternative, provided you’ve got at least one more floor above you.

My hands shook as the adrenaline wore off and the cold settled in. It took me almost twice as long as usual to get my door open. I watched the mirror as I slid all the deadbolts back into place. My body ached for a warm shower, but I forced my self to do a quick sweep of my small apartment.

The water scalded my freezing skin, but the warmth refused to seep into my bones. I watched the blood and dirt swirling away. If a forensics team ever got their hands on my apartment, they’d have a field day.

Pajama clad, I made my way into the tiny kitchen. I wished I could order take out, but if the delivery man didn’t try to kill me himself, someone else would be waiting in the lobby, and I wasn’t sure I had the will to fight for my life again today. Instead, I grabbed a box of macaroni from the plywood shelf above the sink. Malnutrition was going to kill me before any of those idiots ever did.

I ate the boxed macaroni the way boxed macaroni is meant to be eaten: sitting on a wobbly plastic folding chair and staring desolately out the barred window. I tried to look at the bright side. At least I wasn’t waking up in a wet pile of trash with burrito sludge in my face.

I left the dirty dishes in the sink, because if they finally got me tomorrow, I didn’t want to have wasted my last night on earth doing dishes. I did, however, brush my teeth, because dying with orange teeth seemed too pathetic even for me.

My mattress squeaked predictably as I settled onto it, the usual broken spring digging into my back in the usual place. The water stain on the ceiling looked a bit like an elephant today. I yanked to chain dangling from shade-less lamp on the floor beside me. The semi-darkness wrapped me its bleak embrace.

Cars raced nowhere on the street below. There was something comforting in the sound. I closed my eyes and imagined it was a vast river, its current carrying me far, far away.

That night I dreamed of a cottage draped in roses, of a clear stream singing, of dazzling sunshine that promised eternal safety and warmth.

The yelling woke me. I stumbled to the window, cursing. Some idiot had crashed into some other idiot down on the street below. From the sound of it, each was equally certain it was the other's fault.

I collapsed back into bed, but it was no use. It was blue skies, not a cloud in sight. The sun blared into my room, determined to deprive me of any further sleep. With a groan, I rolled back to my feet.

For breakfast, I had something labelled "instant coffee." It took five minutes to dissolve and resembled gutter water more than coffee, both in appearance and taste. I gulped it down nearly boiling. The burning helped mask the flavor. I added the gritty cup to the sink mountain.

The usual morning din replaced the yelling crashers, and my appartment felt strangely peaceful. Even the sun shone less aggressively. I caught myself humming a little as I pulled the thick, battered file from behind the convection baffle. The file's contents I laid out neatly on the floor. Why the Apex needed me dead, encrypted at least once and printed out under the cover of night a week before I left. Unfortunately, I couldn't break the code, so I had no idea how to use it.

Today, it turned out, would not be the day I miraculously discovered secret code-breaking super powers. Surprise, surprise. I found patterns, only to have them break before they yielded any meaning. Back hunched, brow wrinkled, I scribbled away in my on sale for ninety-nine cents composition notebook.

Some time after noon, my empty stomach and aching spine grew annoyingly noticeable. I set down notebook and pencil and slumped back against the cracked wall. I wasn't sure anyone would care if I screamed, but I decided against risking the attention. Better to be the kind of neighbor everyone forgot existed.

After an unfulfilling lunch of canned chicken soup, which claimed to contain vegetables, though it refused to specify what kind, I armed myself for an excursion. Black clothes and seven hidden knives. Easy to go unnoticed in a crowd, but spiky if attacked.

As I neared the door, I noticed the smell of fresh death wafting under it. I peered out my peephole. The corpse lay slumped against the wall opposite my door, directly in my line of sight. There was no obvious injury. Anyone who'd passed it would've assumed it was just someone sleeping. Most people don't recognize the budding smell of new death. Still, I needed deal with it before it grew rank with rot.

I edged the door open, but no one jumped out to stab me. A warning then, not a trap. Keeping a watchful eye on the hall, I rolled the body to face me. I saw her familiar face and my blood boiled. The body they'd left me had once belonged to Vera.

Years of discipline propelled me forward, betrayed only by the slightest tremor in my right hand. My left arm wrapped around Vera, lifting her as she leaned against me. If no one looked too closely, the illusion of drunkeness held. Luckily, this wasn't the kind of neighborhood where people made a habit of looking closely.

I took us down the stairs, eyes scanning. Her feet thumped against the stained carpet. I set her down by the back door, propped against the peeling paint.

The worn hilts steadied my hands. Cold focus flooded my muscles. I slammed the door open with my shoulder. The woman waiting beside it turned, steel glinting. I blocked her slash with a sharp edge to the wrist. Her severed hand rolled, the knife it still held clattering against the asphalt.

I parried her remaining knife away from my side and sank my blood-soaked blade into her gut, twisting. She slumped over me. Blood dripped onto the pavement, not all of it hers. She'd managed to turn the failed stab into a deep slash down my thigh.

I dropped the knife not in her gut and grabbed her wrist, twisting her arm behind her back and holding her close. She struggled half-heartedly. I tilted the knife in her gut upwards. She coughed, and warm blood soaked my shirt.

I eased her down and off my knife. She shuddered and tried to sit up, impeded by her bisected stomach muscles. I knelt over her, pressing her shoulders down.

"I'm sorry," I told her and parted her throat to end her misery.

I rocked back onto my heels and fell with a strangled cry as my injured leg gave out. Cursing, I pushed up with my good leg and slumped against the rough brick. My breath shuddered as I fought for control.

I looked from one dead body to the other and wished I were one of them. The woman they'd sent was young, couldn't have been with them for more than two years. I wondered why they'd chosen her to die. Her eyes were almost the same green as mine, and her face held a passing similarity. Maybe it was supposed to be a metaphor.

I shook my head and limped inside. Vera felt heavier as I dragged her clumsily across the threshold. I laid her beside the other woman and put my bloody knife by her hand. The other woman I dragged on top of her, wincing as the movement tugged at my thigh wound.

I wrapped the woman's lifeless fingers around Vera's throat. They lined up perfectly with the marks there. I laughed silently, bitterly. How kind of the Apex to deliver me the instrument of Vera's death.

I slunk back inside and struggled up the stairs. My apartment door stood open to display the sad remnants of my apartment. They'd even scattered my dirty dishes across the floor. A pink note on the door read "We have this copy. Deliver yourself and any other copies tomorrow and you will live" in tidy black pen.

One hand holding a knife and the other using the wall as a crutch, I burst into my apartment. When no one stabbed me, I closed and locked door behind me. I checked each room for lingering intruders, but found only my slashed up mattress and more pieces of my oven.

I sank to the floor. I needed to figure out what that damn file said.

A gunshot in the alley propelled me out of my self-indulgent sulk. I lurched forward and peered out the kitchen window. A precarious collection of metal, the loosest definition of a car, rumbled streetward, alone. Probably not a gunshot, then.

With a resigned sigh, I got my shit together. Anything that couldn't fit in my sturdy black backpack or on my person was abandoned. My blood soaked clothes I stuffed into four layers of takeout bags to discard along the way.

I closed the front door behind me for the last time, overcome by an odd sense of loss.

The subway crowd drag me into its anonymous mass and I breathed a little bit of the tension out of my shoulders.

In the jostling, transit cards and coins jumped unnoticed into my hands. A grimy silver train clattered up to the platform. The crowd surged forward and I let it carry me.

I stood, arm wrapped around a still warm pole, backpack dangling in front of me. The oily scent of the train mingled with the stale sweat and sour breath wafting off the crowd. A man in a cheap suit elbowed his way through the tumult.

The shrill warning tone pierced the subdued murmur and the doors swung shut. Shaking violently, the train plunged into the tunnel. I clung to the pole as the crowd swayed and stumbled.

As the train lurched out of the fourth station, a hand brushed my leg. I grabbed it and yanked.

A smudged waif strait out of a Dickens novel stumbled into the hulking man beside me. The man shook his head and muttered something presumably offensive. The waif twisted away, leaving me holding a crumpled piece of paper.

I checked my pockets, but found nothing missing. Smudged ink on thin paper, nearly illegible, declared something like, "Troll Bridge. Midnight. A man in a cloak. Say, 'Galileo,' hear, 'Figuero.'" Below the writing the creator of the note had taken a brave stab at a drawing of two simple swords in a V. The creator of the note should never pursue an art career, but the symbol of the Nadir was unmistakeable.

I changed trains twelve times, using a different stolen card each time, backtracking and turning and zigzagging, though I didn't cross the island's midway line. There waited the West Side, an overpoliced and gentrified pile of expensive smiles and impractical clothes presided over by the illustrious Apex. The only thing I missed were the fancy showers.

The note rustled in my pocket with every jolt of the train. Its proposal echoed in my ears, rendered in a throaty growl. It was ridiculous and theatrical, which tracked with what I knew of the Nadir, though that wasn't much.

Every few weeks, the Nadir staged some flashy attack against the Apex. Many involved explosives. One featured a large boogle of weasels. All resulted in chaos. They supplemented this with creative anti-Apex graffiti, which heavily featured slogans like "Poleax the Apex," "A-blechs," and "fuck you apex assholes." Their efforts seldom produced lasting damage, but the Apex couldn't figure out how to get rid of them.

Which didn't explain why they wanted to meet with me. Or how they found me. I was starting to suspect I'd grossly overestimated my disappearing skills.

I wrangled free from the crowd and trudged into the fading light. Standing there, a meaningless obstacle in the flow of people, I realized I was rapidly running out of options.

"Fuck," I spat. An elderly woman in a floral skirt glared at me as she strode past.

"Fuck," I repeated, louder. The woman huffed, but kept walking.

"Fuck," I said again, quietly this time.

I couldn't take on the Apex alone. I barely survive the Apex alone, it seemed. At the very least, maybe the Nadir could help get off this island. This damn island.