Inhabited - chapter 10 (with images) (Patreon)

The white-out breaks apart and the world returns as a sharp, unyielding pressure against her skull.

The room is dark, lit only by the streetlamps bleeding through tall industrial windows. A loft. A practical one. Exposed pipes run across the ceiling. Stacks of oversized design books sit unevenly on a raw wood coffee table. The apartment of someone who makes good money and spends it on a few curated things instead of square footage.

Then the pain hits.

It is not a surface thing. It is deep, deeper than muscle. A slow grinding pull dragging down through her pelvis and into her thighs. Heavy. Absolute. She has been winded before, taken a bad hit. This isn't that. This is from the inside.

She gasps. The sound is a short, sharp hiss.

Her knees come up toward her chest by themselves, the body folding around the cramp before she chooses anything. As her hips tilt against the mattress, a thick warm wetness slides between her legs. It clings to the skin.

Blood. The word arrives before the thought. Her first instinct is to check for the wound. The body, which has been through this before, does nothing. Doesn't flinch. Doesn't reach.

She pushes the duvet back. She is wearing a soft gray t-shirt and cotton underwear. The underwear is soaked through, the stain almost black in the low light.

She swings her legs over the edge of the mattress. The floorboards are cold. She looks down at her hands resting on her bare thighs. Darker than the ones she has been looking at for the last ten days. Darker than Cara's, darker than Ruth's. Not a variation. A different body entirely. She turns them over. The palms are lighter.

Then the name arrives. Nadia Okafor. Thirty-seven. Creative director at a brand and identity firm she co-founded in Tribeca. The apartment settles into place around it, room by room, like furniture being uncovered.

The cramp surges again, a hot wave that forces her to stand just to change the geometry of her pelvis. Her lower back throbs. She walks toward the bathroom on the outside edges of her feet, favoring the heavy ache that has spread down into her hips.

The bathroom is tiled in dark matte slate.

She pulls the ruined underwear down and sits on the cold porcelain of the toilet.

The blood is darker than she expected. Red gone to brown at the edges. There is more of it than she thought there would be, and some of it isn't liquid exactly. She has had ideas about what a period is. This is not any of them. She separates her knees and looks down between them and looks away again.

She pees. There is a lot going on. The blood is mixed in, and she had not thought about this part, about how peeing on your period works or doesn't work, and there is a brief flicker of this is what women deal with. She reaches for the toilet paper. It takes more than she would have used.

The body requires management. She opens the vanity drawer.

A box of tampons. She unwraps the crinkling plastic of a green applicator. The mechanics of it are a puzzle. The body knows what to do. Her hand finds an angle before the mind can interfere. Then the mind interferes and the angle goes wrong and the rigid plastic hits something it shouldn't, and she winces, hard.

The uterus cramps in response to the tension. She breathes through her teeth, a ragged sound in the quiet bathroom. She has to stop thinking about the geometry and let the body's muscle memory take the wheel. She relaxes her hand. Lets the wrist drop. The plastic tube angles further back, toward the curve of the spine. It slides in. A dry, uncomfortable friction. She depresses the inner tube, deploys the cotton, pulls the empty plastic shell free.

She sits there a second longer than she needs to. Catches her breath. She leaves the underwear in the bathroom and goes back to bed.

She wakes some hours later, stands, goes to the bathroom and turns on the shower.

The water pressure is harsh. She steps under the stream. The hot water hits her shoulders and washes down across her chest and stomach.

She looks down at herself. The water hits her chest and runs over the breasts and down her belly. They are smaller than Diane's, surprisingly so for a body this tall, and the nipples have already pulled tight from the heat. She runs a soapy washcloth over them. There is a small involuntary sound at the back of her throat she didn't expect. She keeps washing.

The warmth of the shower, the privacy of it, the body slick under the washcloth. A reflex fires without asking permission. Not a decision. Just the habit of reaching for something because a warm shower alone is when you reach for it. She puts a hand between her thighs.

The skin there is warm. The body shows up faintly, hesitantly, the response her own body would have given still cataloged somewhere under the muscle. Then the uterus contracts, a long heavy dragging clench that radiates down both thighs at once, and the touch goes from possible to ridiculous in one beat. The biology is in the middle of something. It has no interest in where her mind just went.

She leans her forehead against the cold slate of the shower wall and waits for the cramp to pass, and then she finishes washing.

She washes the hair. It is short. The whole thing takes thirty seconds. There is no heavy mass pulling at the base of the skull, no wringing it out. It is the first unearned good thing that has happened to her today.

She dries off with a rough towel. The flat stomach is slightly distended, bloated with the cycle. She takes three ibuprofen from a bottle in the cabinet and swallows them dry. The chalky coating scrapes the back of her throat going down.

The walk-in closet is a study in severe lines.

Everything is black, charcoal, or stark white. Heavy wools, stiff cottons. She bypasses a soft knit sweater. She pulls out a black cashmere turtleneck and a pair of wide-leg charcoal trousers.

Fresh underwear, heavy black cotton. She pulls them up. The bra is unpadded, an architectural wire that holds the breasts firmly in place without offering any soft elevation. The turtleneck goes over her head and fits tight against her ribs. She pulls the trousers up, the thick wool settling high on the waist, pressing uncomfortably against the bloated lower belly.

She sits on a wooden stool to put on her boots. Heavy black leather with a stacked block heel.

The moment she stands, the boots shift everything. The heel tips the weight back into her calves. Her spine loads differently. Her chin comes up. She can feel how much work it is going to take to stay in them all day. The calves are already engaging. The lower back is already adjusting. She looks in the mirror briefly and does not linger.

She grabs a heavy leather tote bag and a wool overcoat.

The walk to the firm is ten blocks down toward Canal Street.

The morning air is freezing, a sharp wind blowing off the Hudson. The street is a chaotic mess of delivery trucks and pedestrians walking with their heads down.

A man in a thick jacket is walking in the opposite direction. He is looking at his phone, drifting slightly toward the center of the pavement. He expects the oncoming pedestrian to adjust. It is the unconscious mathematics of the sidewalk. He is bigger. He has fifty pounds on her.

She registers the physics automatically. A collision favors mass. The instinct is to step right, to avoid the impact.

Nadia's body does not step right.

Her shoulders stay perfectly square. The block heels strike the concrete with a heavy rhythmic finality. She holds the line. The physical vulnerability is still there. She knows exactly what would happen if a man this size decided to grab her. The body just doesn't move out of his way.

The man looks up a fraction of a second before impact. He registers the severe face, the unyielding posture. He physically jerks to the side, his shoulder brushing a streetlamp, his coffee sloshing over the plastic lid.

She does not look at him. She does not alter her stride.

Something comes up in her chest that is close to triumph and she has the good sense to be embarrassed by it. She has felt this before, on a sidewalk like this one, from the other side of the calculation. It masks the dragging ache in her pelvis for a block or two.

The firm occupies the fourth floor of a retrofitted warehouse. She pushes through the heavy glass doors. The reception area is raw concrete and exposed brick. The open floor plan is sprawling. Desks littered with sketchpads and tablets. The moment she walks onto the floor, the temperature of the room changes.

People look up. Postures straighten. Conversations drop in volume. It is a highly calibrated awareness. They are tracking the boss.

"Morning, Nadia," a project manager says from a nearby desk. The tone is careful.

"Morning."

Her own voice startles her. Lower than she expected, resonant, with a metallic edge of certainty. She walks into her office. A corner space, enclosed in soundproofed glass, overlooking the street below. She drops the heavy tote on a low leather sofa. She sits down in the Herman Miller chair. The movement sends a fresh wave of cramping through her uterus. A hot pulling sensation that makes her grip the edge of the desk until her knuckles go pale. The ibuprofen is doing nothing against the hormonal tide.

Every minor sensory input is an abrasive insult. The hum of the ventilation system. The clatter of a keyboard outside the glass. Her skin feels paper-thin. She wants to break something.

A shadow falls across the doorway. A man stands there. Mid-thirties. Perfectly tailored shirt, sleeves rolled exactly twice. Jordan. Senior account executive. His own clients. His own book of business. He defers to her in the room but not by much. The setup runs on small understandings.

"Hey," Jordan says. He doesn't wait for an invitation. He steps into the office, carrying a tablet. He leaves the glass door wide open behind him.

Out on the floor, two junior designers and a copywriter are standing near the printing station, directly within earshot.

"Do you have a second for the Harrison account?" Jordan asks. His tone is collaborative, confident. The tone of a peer, almost. "They sent back the revised deliverables."

"Show me," she says. The cramps are a dull roaring static behind her eyes.

He sets the tablet on the desk between them. He leans in slightly.

"They want to pull the launch date up by two weeks," Jordan says. "It completely compresses the design sprint. I drafted a response pushing back on the timeline, but I wanted your eyes on it before it goes out."

She looks at the drafted email on the screen. It is soft. Diplomatic. It outlines internal resource challenges and suggests a compromise meeting later in the week. It leaves a massive window open for the client to argue. Her mind, surfing a wave of raw irritable hormonal aggression, rejects the text instantly.

It is inefficient. It invites an argument they do not need to have.

She taps the screen, highlighting the entire second paragraph, and hits delete.

"Don't send this," she says.

Jordan stops. His hand hovers over the desk. "It sets a boundary on the timeline."

"It invites a negotiation," she says. She does not look up at him. "Tell them the launch date is fixed to the original scope. If they want it two weeks early, we drop the motion graphics package. Yes or no."

Jordan stands perfectly still.

The silence bleeds out of the office and onto the open floor. The copywriter by the printer stops talking. The junior designers are staring very intensely at a blank piece of paper.

A small rigid flex of the muscle along Jordan's jaw.

"Nadia." He keeps his voice low, but the collaborative warmth has evaporated. "Harrison is a relationship client. If we just hand them a blunt ultimatum, they're going to walk."

She turns the chair, finally looking up at him. The vibrating irritation of the physical pain bleeds directly into her voice, rendering it flat and dismissive. "Are you managing the account, or are they managing you?"

The air in the room turns to ash. It felt like a standard correction. Cutting through the corporate diplomacy. Authority declared and obeyed.

Jordan's face goes blank. The relaxed confidence drains out of his posture. He nods once. The withdrawal behind his eyes is total.

"Understood," Jordan says. The word is ice.

He picks up the tablet. He does not look at her again.

"I'll send the email."

He turns and walks out of the office.

She watches him go. There is a brief sharp spike of satisfaction at having solved the problem. She turns to her own laptop.

The rest of the morning is endurance. The cramps come back hard around eleven. She sits through a branding presentation with a startup client, holding a face of severe engaged interest while her uterus contracts every few minutes. The body feels heavy, waterlogged. The wool trousers cut into her waist.

By one o'clock, the pain is blinding. She cancels her afternoon internal meetings. She tells the project manager she is taking the rest of the day to review files from home. Nobody questions her.

She walks back to the Tribeca apartment.

The heavy door clicks shut, sealing out the noise of the city. She drops the coat on the floor.

She goes to the bathroom. The pulling string. Dry friction where there shouldn't be any. Too much dark blood for one liner. She washes her hands with a bar of eucalyptus soap, her knuckles aching.

She walks into the home office.

The NovaSphere rig sits in the corner, resting on a stand. She ignores it.

She needs to find the journalist. Philippa had given her the name in the basement room. Michael Osei.

She sits at the raw wood desk. Opens Nadia's laptop. The aluminum is cold under her wrists.

She opens a secure browser and types the name into a search engine.

The screen populates with bylines. Tech blogs, mid-tier publications, industry newsletters. She scans the titles. General tech reporting. Reviews of accessories. Critiques of server latency.

Her fingers move across the keyboard, applying boolean filters with thoughtless mechanical precision. She filters out the editorial pieces. She filters out the corporate profiles. She queries for sync protocol vulnerability. She adds handshake architecture. She adds session-layer packet drop.

She is hunting the structural flaw. She is looking for the exact technical mechanism that causes the rig to fail. She is scanning Osei's digital footprint to see whether he had mapped the code the same way she had mapped it in Cara's apartment.

The system filters down to a handful of articles. None of them are the smoking gun. None of them contain the session logs or the final piece of writing.

She closes the laptop. The screen goes black, reflecting the dim light of the loft.

She leans back in the chair. Her hips ache. The bleeding continues, a relentless drain on her energy. She has the name. The trail is cold on the public web. To find what he found, she will have to dig deeper into the NovaSphere architecture itself.

She rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. The physical toll of inhabiting this woman is already immense, and the mess at the office is still waiting for her. She sits in the quiet apartment, listening to the hum of the refrigerator.

Outside, somewhere down the block, a car horn lays into itself for a long time and then stops.