Free Get Katja by Simon Logan Page A

her.
    She appears to be completely unaware of his approach despite the headlights now falling on her.
    He picks up some speed but keeps it in first, the engine whining, and when he’s only a few metres away she finally looks up, her eyes going wide and the car slams into her.

22.
    Nikolai’s squat is an old college dorm, severed from the rest of the neighbourhood in which it is nestled by an overpass that sweeps up and overhead like the light-flash of a blade. The road’s support structure straddles the building on either side, fencing it in. There’s a constant drip-drip of oily water from high above.
    He leads Katja inside and along a wide corridor with a black and white tiled floor, the lacquer long since scrubbed away, ornate doors spaced at regular intervals. There are notice boards mounted on the walls in the gaps between the doors, a legacy from the building’s previous usage, now littered with notes from the various inhabitants to and from one another—insults, love letters, threats. There are graffiti and drawings sketched onto the wall in Biro, the paint beneath chipped away. And gig posters, just like the one Nikolai had discovered earlier and torn down.
    The rest of the inhabitants linger in the background and through the gaps in the doorways, as if each senses the presence of someone new and wishes to keep their distance. They pass one room marked with double doors, and Katja glances through the little windows nestled into it. It’s blindingly bright inside, the outline of huge lamps only just visible, and she recognises the stench of homegrown instantly. A girl in her late teens, all plump lips and rock-steady attitude, strides past in bright pink canvas boots. She’s chewing gum and pops the bubble she has been working on as she passes them.
    They keep walking.
    Nikolai leads her down a short set of steps and into what was once an office. The furniture has been shoved to one side, snapped and broken where necessary, replaced with a couple of sofa beds, a small lamp, a CD player and a stack of CDs. A small chest of drawers and a couple of shelves. Katja notices a set of drumsticks in a plastic jug. Nikolai sees her looking at them but doesn’t say anything.
    “You okay?” he asks instead.
    “Yeah,” she says, shrugging. She surveys the room, picking up CDs and plucking books from a shelf just to have something to do.
    “Your neck . . .”
    She touches a finger to her throat and it comes away tacky. She pulls at the dressing and drops it into a bin full of empty energy drink cans.
    “You sure it’s safe here?” she asks him.
    “Yeah,” he says without particular conviction. He closes the door as if to reassure her.
    “I just got sick of hiding, Nik,” Katja says, unprompted. She looks into a mirror, blurry with fingerprints. She tilts her head from side to side, running a hand across her shaven scalp and neck tattoo. “I guess I knew the posters would be a risk even after doing this to myself—but what the fuck else am I good for?”
    She touches the new trach tube emerging from her throat and she reluctantly admits to herself that it does actually look quite good.
    “Why do you think he took you? The surgeon.”
    “Who knows,” she says. “There was some other guy in a raincoat too.”
    “So what now?”
    “Now I lay low until the gig.”
    “You can’t still go ahead with it—who knows who else has recognised you?”
    “I told you already, I’ve had enough of hiding, Nikolai. I need the money but more than that I need to play again. It’s the only time I feel worth a shit.”
    “And it’s worth the risk?”
    “You either take control or others do,” she says.
    She opens the drawers of the chest unit one by one, plucking items of clothing from it then pulls off her skull t-shirt, unties her boots and wriggles out of her leggings. Nikolai finds sudden interest in the posters on the walls as she stands before him in her underwear.
    “The fat guy, the one who jumped me in