Tarnished by Kate Jarvik Birch

with old cigarettes, and the remains of a half-eaten sandwich dried in the middle of an open notebook. I scanned the items, pocketing one of the many ballpoint pens that littered the desk.
    Somewhere, not too far off, a man laughed. My heart quickened, reminding me that I didn’t have time to be picky.
    My eyes traveled down to the desk drawer. Is that where Tony kept his secrets? I tugged at the handle and it jerked open a few inches. Even in the dim light, I could see the shiny barrel of the gun. I’d never seen a real one before, but I’d seen enough of them on the Kimbles’ television shows to recognize it. The bad guys always had them, didn’t they? Even in real life.
    I slid the drawer shut, wishing I’d never seen it. This wasn’t the sort of thing I’d wanted to find.
    I pulled the pen back out of my pocket and left it on the desk. I didn’t want to take anything from this room. I just wanted to leave.
    Back at the stairway I paused. Light still shone out from under the doors of a few workrooms, beckoning me.
    I stopped at the first door and placed my ear against the wood. The muffled hum of voices buzzed back, but the words were too quiet to understand. If I could just make out a sentence or two… I held my breath, listening. My hands twitched at my sides. I could just crack the door a little bit, peek inside.
    I twisted the handle. Ever so gradually, it turned beneath my hand. I knew how to do this. I would be so delicate with it that no one would ever even see it moving. Bit by bit the handle turned and after a minute I pushed the door forward ever so slightly, just enough to peer through the slit.
    The room wasn’t huge, just a small box no bigger than the rooms we’d grown up in. But the furnishings weren’t anything like the ones at the kennel. The walls were a deep crimson red almost the same color as the thick Persian rug that lined the floor. In the middle of the room there was a bed mounded with expensive looking pillows. On it, a girl reclined. She wore only a silk scarf, draped delicately across her body. My face flushed as my gaze traveled over her, not because I’d never seen another pet undressed before, but because someone must be paying to see her this way.
    The slit in the door was only big enough to see part of the room. Ever so slightly, I eased it further open. A chair came into view. On it, a man sat bent over a large sketchbook. His hand moved frantically, like it couldn’t get the graphite down onto the paper fast enough.
    “Move your chin to the right,” he said. “Not that much. Good. Right there.”
    I stepped back, pulling the door shut.
    One of the jobs was posing for drawings? We used to pose for each other back at the training center. Not with our clothes off, but I’d seen pictures of classical art. This wasn’t anything new. Was Missy really so worried that I wouldn’t be able to handle posing nude?
    K at was still asleep when I collapsed down next to her.
    All I could think about was the gun. I could imagine the cold weight of it in my hand as I pulled it from the drawer. There was nothing stopping me from going back for it. I wanted it, more than any of the other things I’d ever stolen, but it frightened me too much.
    After a while there was the soft shuffle of feet and the creak of stairs. Kat opened her eyes, rubbing them as she scanned the group that trailed into the room.
    “They took Lacie?” she asked, sitting up. On the side of her face there was a red crease from one of the cushions. It reminded me of the way Ruby used to wake in the morning with lines from her pillow creased across her cheeks.
    The girls moved slowly to the wardrobe, helping each other climb out of their dresses. I could tell that they wanted to leave them there, wadded on the floor, but they were too accustomed to being responsible and so they lifted them, smoothing out the wrinkles before they hung them back on the rack for next time.
    “Which one was it?” Kat asked.
    “The man