Tightrope

Cora

I sat bolt upright in my crappy cot as soon as I heard the first shot. They taught me a lot of bullshit in the Academy, shit I never ended up using in the real world, but the one thing they gave me was a damn near perfect sense of when a fight had broken out. I jumped out of bed, my body aching from my last night with Zahur, and padded to the door to listen.

More gunfire. Mostly automatic. A lot of yelling. Nearly all Arabic. Another fucking thing they didn’t teach me before putting me undercover that would’ve come in fucking handy.

One of the other women, a college kid named Allie, crept up to me. “Do you think they’re here to save us?”

I looked down at her and tried not to grimace. Her face was all black and blue from a run-in with one of the guards the other day, but she hadn’t even spent time with the fucker holding us all here yet. She’d only got taken a week or two ago. I didn’t want to crush her fucking dreams. But I’d been here for a month and a half, taken for almost a y