Chapter 17: The Ambush
The Ambassador Hotel lobby didn’t just feel cold; it felt preserved. Travis pushed through the heavy brass-and-glass doors, leaving the wet city bustle behind, and stepped into a vacuum of hushed, amber-lit air. His boot heels clicked on the veined marble floor, each sound sharp and isolated, like stones dropped in a well.
The scent hit him first—polished wood, old carpet, and the cloying, vanilla-tinged ghost of a thousand forgotten cigars. It was the smell of money that had settled into dust. His eyes, adjusted to the grey daylight, took a second to parse the cavernous space: towering columns swathed in faded velvet ropes, chandeliers dripping crystal tears, clusters of empty leather armchairs facing cold fireplaces.
And there, in the same chair by a potted fichus that looked just as fake as he remembered, sat Don.
He was a still-life of confidence, legs crossed, one hand resting on a slim leather portfolio beside him. He hadn’t seen Travis yet. He was studying his phone, a faint, proprietary smile on his lips, as if reviewing a winning hand.
Travis’s stomach tightened. The singing static from the morning hardened into a single, high-pitched tone in his ears. Just a man in a chair, Mavis had said. But this chair was a throne in this silent kingdom.
He forced his feet to move. The thirty-yard walk felt like crossing a tundra. The air grew thicker with every step, the smell of the lobby layering over the lingering scent of his own lavender body spray, a pathetic armor.
Don looked up as Travis was ten feet away. The smile widened, became professional, welcoming. It didn’t reach his eyes. They were the colour of the marble floor—polished and cool. He unfolded himself from the chair with a smooth, unhurried grace and extended a hand.
“Travis. I’m glad you decided to join me.” His voice was a calm, resonant baritone designed to fill quiet spaces.
Travis took the hand. The grip was firm, dry, perfectly calibrated. It felt like shaking hands with a mannequin wired for warmth.
“Don,” Travis said, his own voice sounding reed-thin in comparison.
“Shall we?” Don gestured to the paired armchair opposite his. “I took the liberty of ordering coffee. I remember you take it black.”
A waiter materialized beside them, a silent specter in a burgundy vest, placing a porcelain cup and saucer on the low table beside the leather portfolio. The implication was clear: Don remembered everything. He curated details. He controlled the environment. Travis sat, the buttery leather sighing under his weight, swallowing him.
Don settled back into his chair, the king resuming his seat. He didn’t touch the portfolio. He steepled his fingers. “I’ll be direct. The offer stands. The figure, of course, is negotiable upward. Parallax sees tremendous value in… discreet, specialised communities. We facilitate. We protect. We provide a structure where… unconventional inclinations can be explored without risk. You’d be a cornerstone of that structure.”
He made it sound philanthropic. A public service for the privately deviant.
Travis wrapped his hands around the warm coffee cup. He hadn’t agreed to coffee. The heat was the only real thing in the room. “And the people in that structure? The ones who don’t want to be ‘facilitated’?”
Don’s smile tightened a micron at the corners. “Autonomy is an illusion, Travis. Everyone has a landlord. Everyone pays for their privacy, one way or another. I’m offering you a way to pay with currency, instead of with constant anxiety. With your cooperation, your unique living situation remains exactly that. Unique. And undisturbed.”
The threat was velvet-wrapped, but the iron core was unmistakable. Your wall. Your Mavis. Your problem.
Travis’s mouth was dry. He heard Mavis’s voice in his head, a tinny, defiant echo: Make it noisy.
He opened his mouth, not sure what was going to come out. A refusal? A plea? Before a sound could form, a sharp, electronic pop exploded to his left.
A blinding white flash seared his vision.
He flinched, coffee sloshing hot over his fingers. A second pop followed. Shouts erupted by the massive front entrance.
“Mr. Henderson! Mr. Travis Henderson! Is it true Parallax Holdings is soliciting clients with atypical sexual profiles for a proprietary data venture?”
A woman in a trench coat, hair whipped into a frenzy by the wind outside, was striding across the lobby, a phone held aloft. A bulky man with a professional camera was beside her, lens like a giant, unblinking eye. Their footsteps were a violent slap against the holy quiet.
Don’s polished composure cracked. Just for a second. His head snapped toward the interruption, and the bland warmth evaporated from his face, replaced by a flash of pure, icy fury. It was there and gone, smoothed over into an expression of bemused confusion, but Travis had seen it. The man hated the noise.
The hotel staff, previously invisible, converged like antibodies. “Miss, you cannot—this is a private lobby—”
The journalist—a local digital scandal-sheet stringer named Chloe, Travis would later learn—ignored them, beelining for the chairs. Her eyes were bright, predatory. She’d caught the scent. The forum post had been vague, paranoid, but it had named Parallax and the Ambassador. It was enough for someone hungry enough.
“Are you here to sign a non-disclosure agreement, Travis?” she fired, the phone microphone thrust toward his face. “Can you comment on the nature of the ‘services’ Parallax is interested in?”
Don was on his feet now, his body a solid, blocking shape between Travis and the camera. “This is a private meeting,” he said, his voice no longer a baritone but a blade. “You are trespassing. Security.”
But the damage was done. The silence was shattered. The contained, pressurized box Don had built for this conversation was flooding with chaotic, unbiddable air.
Travis stood up, his legs wobbly. The hot coffee stain on his jeans was a spreading badge of reality. He looked from Don’s rigid, furious back to the journalist’s eager, shrewd face. The high-pitched tone in his ears exploded into a roaring, chaotic hum.
This was the noise.
It was terrifying. It was a freefall.
It was also his.
Don turned his head, just slightly, enough to pin Travis with a sidelong glance. The message was clear: Shut this down. Deny it. Or else.
Travis met his gaze. The fear was still there, a live wire in his chest. But beneath it, riding on the hum, was a wild, untamable surge of something else. A fuck-you of epic proportions. Mavis was in his head, cackling.
He stepped around Don, toward the journalist and her blinding phone light. He felt unmoored, ridiculous, a mess of wild hair and coffee stains in a temple of old money.
“The nature of the services,” Travis said, his voice finding a strange, shaky strength in the chaos, “is none of Parallax’s business.” He looked directly at the camera lens, a tiny dark pupil just like the one in his wall at home. “And it’s none of yours, either. But if they’re sending guys in suits to strong-arm people into selling their private lives, then maybe more people should start talking about what they’re being asked to sell.”
The journalist’s eyes widened. Gold. This was pure, unscripted gold. “So you are confirming an attempt at coercion?”
Don’s hand clamped onto Travis’s upper arm. The grip was painfully tight, a message of ownership and threat transmitted through bone and muscle. “We’re leaving,” he hissed, the smooth facade gone, his voice raw with suppressed rage. He began to physically steer Travis away, toward a side exit marked ‘Private.’
Security finally reached the journalist, hands on her shoulders, pulling her back. She was still shouting. “Travis! Who is Mavis? Is that the name of the service? Travis!”
Hearing Mavis’s name shouted in this hollow, public tomb sent a new kind of chill through him, one that burned. Don heard it too. His fingers dug in deeper.
They burst through a service door into a stark, fluorescent-lit hallway lined with industrial carts. The lobby’s muffled commotion vanished, replaced by the hum of a ice machine. Don released him as if his skin were contaminated.
He got in Travis’s face, his polished scent now mixed with the sharp tang of sweat. “You stupid little bug,” Don snarled, all pretense discarded. “You think posting on your little pervert forum was clever? You just turned a private transaction into a public infection.”
Travis rubbed his arm, feeling the bruises form. “There was no transaction. You were just mugging me in a nicer room.”
Don’s laugh was a short, ugly bark. “You have no idea what you’ve started. That wall of yours? That pest you keep? They’re not secrets anymore. They’re liabilities with your name on them. And liabilities get managed.” He leaned closer, his voice dropping to a venomous whisper. “You wanted noise? You’ll get it. The kind of noise that brings inspectors with clipboards and thermite charges for hive removal. You’ll come home to a sealed, empty space. And you’ll have no one to blame but your own big mouth.”
The vision was too specific, too horrible. Travis saw it: the hole filled with quick-dry foam, the walls stripped bare, the silence absolute.
Don saw the hit land. He smoothed his tie, the mask of control struggling back into place. “The offer is now withdrawn. The cost of doing business with you just became prohibitive. Good luck, Travis. You’re going to need it. The world doesn’t like noisy little secrets.”
He turned and walked down the hallway, his steps measured and precise, disappearing around a corner without a backward glance.
Travis stood alone under the buzzing lights, the roar of the lobby replaced by the deeper, more terrifying roar of consequence. He’d done it. He’d made noise. And the echo was going to shatter everything.
He fumbled for his phone, his hands trembling. He had one missed call. Unknown number. A voicemail notification.
He didn’t listen to it. Instead, he opened the forum app. The notification from before. He tapped it.
The single reply to his post loaded. The username was Wallflower23.
The message was brief: “Parallax visited me too. Last Tuesday. They threatened my home. I live in Portland. If you’re real, we need to talk. There are more of us.”
Travis stared at the words. Portland. He wasn’t alone.
The ice machine down the hall cycled off with a deafining clunk.
In the sudden, total silence, the hum returned. But it wasn’t inside his head anymore. It was out here, in the world. A low, gathering hum. It had started with a post. It had flared in a flashbulb. Now, it was a quiet line of text on a screen, a thread thrown across a dark void.
He pushed open a heavy steel door that led to a grimy alley behind the hotel. The cold, damp air smacked him, ripe with garbage and rain. He leaned against the wet brick, his breath coming in ragged clouds.
He’d wanted a bucket of water to fight the fire. He’d just been handed a single, shaky drop.
But it was a start.
He typed a reply to Wallflower23, his thumbs clumsy with cold and adrenaline. “I’m real. Tell me everything.”
He hit send. Then he began the long, cold walk home, toward a wall that might not be his for much longer, to tell a five-inch creature that the war had truly begun.
The walk home was a blur of concrete and condensation, each step a numb echo of the confrontation in the marbled silence. City sounds—the hiss of tires on wet asphalt, a distant siren, the fragmented conversations of strangers—felt like they were happening behind thick glass. Travis’s mind played Don’s last words on a corrosive loop: liabilities get managed. The phantom smell of quick-dry foam and thermite smoke haunted every breath of damp alley air.
He finally fumbled his key into the apartment lock, the familiar rasp of the deadbolt a sound that now seemed terrifyingly fragile.
He stumbled inside, the encounter with Don a raw, bleeding wound pulsing under his skin. The door clicked shut, sealing him into the dim, lavender-tinged stillness. He slumped against the wood, his backpack thudding to the floor. The adrenaline that had carried him across the city fractured, draining away to leave a sickly, hollow dread pooling in his gut.
He just stood there, breathing in the scent of his own sanctuary, trying to remember why it ever felt safe.
A faint skittering, like a dropped pin, came from the wall near his bed. The tiny, perfect hole in the baseboard darkened for a second, then glowed with a faint, inquisitive light. Mavis emerged, his movements uncharacteristically slow, deliberate. He didn’t call out. He simply padded across the worn carpet, a tiny shadow in the gloom, his large eyes fixed on Travis’s face.
Travis slid down the door until he was sitting on the floor, knees drawn up. He felt shattered.
Mavis climbed the mountain of denim and settled on Travis’s kneecap. He didn’t speak. He just looked up, his small face etched with a concern so deep it seemed to age him. Then he leaned forward, pressing his entire body, a warm, feather-light weight, against the back of Travis’s trembling hand.
The simple, silent comfort was a chisel hitting a dam.
A choked sound escaped Travis’s throat. He lifted his hand, turning it so Mavis stood in his palm. “He knew your name,” Travis whispered, his voice gravelly and wrecked. “That journalist. She shouted it. In that huge, empty room.”
Mavis’s head tilted. “So I’m famous now? Do I need an agent?” The joke was there, but his tone was flat, the usual mischievous lilt buried under a layer of shared fear.
“He said they’d seal the walls. That they’d… manage the liability.” Travis’s vision swam. “I made it noisy, like you said. And now I think I’ve painted a target right on you.”
Travis’s phone, deep in his jeans pocket, buzzed against his thigh. A hard, insistent vibration. He flinched.
He didn’t look. He couldn’t bear to see another unknown number, another voicemail icon, another message from the void that was now pressing in. Instead, his fingers closed gently around Mavis, lifting him. He cradled the small creature against the soft cotton of his sweatshirt, right over his sternum.
He felt the frantic, bird-quick rhythm of Mavis’s heartbeat tap-tap-tapping against the slower, heavy drum of his own. Two rhythms, out of sync, yet contained in the same shuddering cage.
Mavis didn’t struggle. He nestled in, his tiny hands gripping a fold of fabric. “Your heart’s going bananas,” he murmured into the cloth.
“We need to leave,” Travis said. The words left his mouth and hung in the air, solid and terrifying and utterly necessary.
Mavis went very still. “Leave?” The word was small. “This is… this is my wall.”
“It might not be for long. Don doesn’t make empty threats. He was too specific.” Travis took a shuddering breath. “And there’s someone else. In Portland. Parallax visited them, too.”
“Another… like me?” Mavis asked, pulling back to look up.
“I don’t know. Someone with something to lose.” Travis’s mind, fogged with panic, began firing, making terrible, swift connections. “They’ll come here first. This is where the noise started. They’ll want to… clean up the source before anything else leaks.”
The phone buzzed again in his pocket. Once. Then, a moment later, twice more in quick succession.
Mavis looked down toward the sound, then back up at Travis’s eyes. “That could be the Portland person.”
“Or it could be Don, telling me the crew is on their way.” Travis’s grip tightened infinitesimally. “We can’t stay. We have to go. Tonight.”
“Where?” Mavis’s voice held a note of pure, unadulterated fear. The world outside the wall was a vast, inhospitable galaxy of giants and storms and house cats. “Travis, I’m five inches tall. My car is a cotton ball.”
A wild, half-hysterical plan began to form from the wreckage in Travis’s mind—a plan built on the single, solid reply from Wallflower23. A thread thrown across a void.
“Portland,” Travis said, the decision crystallizing. “We go to Portland. We find them.” He finally fished his buzzing phone from his pocket. The screen glowed in the dim room. Three new messages. One was from the unknown number. Two were from the forum’s direct message system.
He opened the forum first. Wallflower23 had written again: “They use a white van. No markings. Did you see a van?”
The second message, sent just seconds ago: “Call me. Now.” A local Portland number followed.
The text from the unknown number was terse: “Last chance to discuss terms. Call by 8 PM.”
Travis looked at the time. It was 7:42. His blood went cold. The deadline wasn’t for negotiation. It was a marker. It was a warning of when the management would begin.
He thumbed the screen, pulling up the number from Wallflower23. His hand was steady now, the dread forged into a sharp, clear purpose. He looked at Mavis, who was watching the glowing rectangle with wide, solemn eyes.
“We’re leaving,” Travis repeated, and it was no longer a shock, but a mission statement. He tapped the call button and brought the phone to his ear, the steady dial tone the first note of their frantic, impossible flight.
The dial tone purred once, twice, in his ear—a mechanical heartbeat. Then a click, and a voice, younger than he expected, breathless. “Hello? Is this—?”
“It’s Travis. From the forum.”
A sharp exhale. “Oh, thank god. I’m Eli.” The name was uttered like a secret handed over. “Listen, you can’t be home. If they came to you today, they might be verifying right now. They watch. The white van was outside my place for two hours before they knocked.”
Travis’s eyes locked on his darkened bedroom window. The street outside was just an empty curtain of night and orange streetlight. For now. “We’re leaving. Tonight. Heading your way.”
“Okay.” Eli’s voice tightened with focused urgency. “Okay. Don’t use your credit cards if you can help it. Don’t book anything online. Assume anything with your name on it is a tripwire. Can you do that?”
“I’ve got some cash.” Travis’s mind was already racing through his apartment, inventorying his life. “How do I find you?”
“Get here first. Get safe. Then message me on the forum from a library computer or something. We’ll figure it out.” A pause, filled with the rustle of Eli’s own movement. “And Travis? Thank you for posting. I thought I was just… going crazy alone.”
The call ended. The silence it left behind was different. It was charged, purposeful. Travis lowered the phone. Mavis was staring at him, still cupped in his hand.
“Portland,” Mavis said, testing the word.
“Portland,” Travis confirmed. He stood, placing Mavis gently on the rumpled bed. “We pack. Now. Take everything you can’t live without. Assume we’re not coming back.”
What followed was a quiet, frantic harvest. Travis moved with a speed he didn’t know he possessed, pulling suitcases from the closet, flattening cardboard boxes he’d kept behind the fridge. His hands weren’t trembling anymore. They were efficient, almost clinical. Clothes, his modest laptop, a few books that felt like friends, the small toolkit his dad had given him. The mundane artifacts of a life filled three suitcases and four large boxes. It was startling how little of the space around him was actually his.
He worked around Mavis’s domain. He heard the skittering and scraping intensify behind the wall, a frenzied echo of his own efforts. After twenty minutes, Mavis reappeared at the hole, straining to drag a bundle wrapped in what looked like a frayed piece of silk. It was the size of a paperback book.
“A little help?” Mavis puffed.
Travis knelt. He didn’t ask what was inside. He simply slid the bundle out carefully. It was heavier than he anticipated. Mavis darted back in, returning with smaller packets: carefully rolled leaf-parcels tied with thread, a polished pebble that shone like a dime, a tiny spool made from a toothpick.
Oddly enough, Mavis had a medium box’s worth of things. Travis didn’t comment. It was a lifetime, scaled down. He found an empty shoebox and lined it with a soft t-shirt, creating a nest. One by one, he transferred Mavis’s treasures: the heavy silk bundle, the leaf parcels, a collection of iridescent beetle wings, a perfect, tiny thimble that served as a washbasin. Mavis directed the operation with quiet, solemn nods, his usual mischief replaced by a profound focus. His entire world was being uprooted.
Travis sealed the shoebox with packing tape, leaving one end lightly tacked for air. He packed it into the last large box, cushioning it between his own pillows.
The apartment, stripped of its personal clutter, looked exactly like what it was: a temporary shell, bleak and inhospitable. The hole in the wall gaped, dark and empty. Travis stared at it, a knot in his throat. That hole was a pupil, a connection, a universe. Soon it would just be a defect in the drywall for some stranger to patch over.
He wrote the letter to his landlord at the bare kitchen counter, the pen scraping loudly. He kept it vague, citing a “family emergency” and an “immediate threat to personal safety” that forced a sudden relocation. He apologized for breaking the lease, enclosed cash for the next month’s rent and an extra two hundred for potential repair costs—though no amount of money could fix what they were truly taking. He didn’t sign it with his usual flourish, just his name. He left it on the counter, weighted down with his keys.
Loading the car was a silent, sweaty ordeal in the cold night air. The street remained still. Every shadow felt deliberate, every distant engine a potential white van. He heaved the boxes and suitcases into the back of his aging station wagon, arranging them to leave a clear space on the passenger seat for the shoebox. The car sagged on its springs, packed with the tangible weight of their flight.
He did one last walk-through. The empty rooms echoed. He stood in the bedroom doorway, looking at the faint outline of the hole. He could almost smell the lavender and the musky, small-creature scent of home. He flicked off the light.
In the car, the world shrank to the cockpit glow of the dashboard. Travis placed the shoebox gently on the passenger seat. He peeled back the taped flap slightly. Mavis’s face appeared in the opening, pale in the gloom.
“All secure?” Travis asked, his voice rough.
“As it’ll ever be,” Mavis whispered back. He climbed out of the box and scaled the front of Travis’s flannel shirt, settling into the chest pocket. He was a warm, slight pressure over Travis’s heart.
Travis took a settling breath, a long, deliberate pull of air that did little to settle anything. He turned the key. The engine coughed to life, a sound that now felt deafeningly loud. He pulled away from the curb, watching the dark shape of his apartment building shrink in the rearview mirror until it was just another anonymous block consumed by the city.
He drove to an all-night gas station on the edge of town, a fluorescent island in a sea of highway dark. He filled the tank, the numbers on the pump whirring like a countdown. He paid inside with cash from the last of his emergency stash, grabbing two plastic-wrapped sandwiches, a bag of peanuts, and a bottle of water.
Back in the driver’s seat, the smell of stale bread and processed meat filled the car. He opened the peanuts, placing a single nut in his palm for Mavis. They ate in silence, watching the station’s bright lights paint the interior in stark, passing intervals.
Mavis sat comfortably in the chest pocket of the man’s flannel shirt, his head peaking out to watch the world go by. His small hands gripped the pocket’s edge. The highway unspooled before them, a black river dotted with distant, speeding rubies of taillights. The sheer scale of it, the relentless motion, was a kind of violence. He ducked his head back in, pressing against Travis’s chest for a long moment, listening to the steady, reassuring drum. Then he peered out again, his large eyes reflecting the oncoming lights, wide with fear and a terrible, dawning wonder.