Chapter 12: Sisterhood in the Dark
The neon from the club sign below Suzi’s window didn’t flicker; it bled. A steady, arterial flow of crimson light that painted the cramped bedroom in pulses, like a heartbeat made visible. It soaked into the crushed velvet drapes, pooled on the scuffed hardwood, and striped the bare skin of Suzi’s back as she sat hunched on the edge of her unmade bed. The bass from The Pit thumped up through the floorboards, a distant, mechanical heartbeat to the room’s silent, human pain.
Tim stood in the doorway, having let himself in with the key she’d given him months ago, back when they were Gil’s twin projects, a matched set. He watched the slow shake of her shoulders. He didn’t speak. He’d come straight from the beach, the salt air still clinging to his jacket, the sand gritty in his boots. He’d known he’d find her here. This room was her confessional: velvet, neon, and the permanent scent of cheap perfume over sweat.
“You followed me,” she said, her voice thick, without turning.
“You knew I would.”
A half-sob, half-laugh escaped her. She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. In the crimson light, her makeup was a brutalist painting—black streaks down her cheeks, glitter stuck to damp skin. She was still in her club clothes from the night before, the sequined top hanging off one shoulder, the leather pants unzipped at the waist.
“I’m a fucking cliché,” she muttered. “The heartbroken shemale, crying in her tragic boudoir.”
“It’s not tragic,” Tim said softly, stepping into the room. He closed the door, muting the bass to a dull throb. “It’s just a room. You’re just a person who got hurt.”
“By your boyfriend,” she shot back, finally turning to look at him. Her eyes were shattered glass.
“He’s not my boyfriend. He’s our dealer. And we’re both addicts.” Tim shrugged off his jacket, draped it over a chair piled with lingerie. He sat on the floor, his back against the bed frame, close to her but not touching. The satin sheets were cool through his shirt. “The beach wasn’t enough?”
“The beach was philosophy.” Suzi’s gaze was far away, fixed on the cracked window and the glowing sign beyond. “This is the fucking fallout. He called. An hour ago.”
Tim went still. “What did he say?”
“He was… conciliatory. Said he got carried away, sharing the ‘creative process’ with me. Said the duo idea was just a thought, that I was his priority.” Her voice dripped with venomous mimicry. “He said he loved the ‘raw authenticity’ I brought to his life. That he needed my ‘unique energy’.”
“He’s smoothing the product. Making sure it’s not damaged before the big reveal.”
“I know!” The word was a whip-crack. She buried her face in her hands. “I know what he’s doing, Tim. That’s what makes it worse. My head knows it’s bullshit. My heart…” She dragged her hands down her face. “My heart is this stupid, lonely thing that wants to believe it. That wants to be someone’s ‘unique energy’ and not just a warm hole with a surprise.”
The raw vulgarity of it hung in the perfumed air. It was the truth, stripped of all poetry. Tim felt it resonate in the hollow of his own chest.
“We’re all warm holes with surprises to them,” Tim said, his own voice quiet in the rhythmic red dark. “Tom and I are just a more expensive set. A matched pair. The surprise is the same, but the packaging is sibling rivalry. It sells better.”
Suzi looked down at him, her expression softening from fury to a deep, weary empathy. “Do you ever feel like a toy?” she asked. The question wasn’t rhetorical. It was a probe into a shared wound. “Like you’re this beautifully crafted thing they wind up, and you perform your little dance of desire, and they get off on operating you? They press the buttons—‘be sexy’, ‘be vulnerable’, ‘be fierce’—and you just… do it?”
Tim thought of the contract. The clauses. The mandated ‘exploration of familial tension’. He thought of Tom moving inside him, their passion filtered through Gil’s approving gaze.
“Every day,” he breathed. “Since the first time I put on a dress and saw that look in a man’s eye. Not the look for a woman. Not the look for a man. The look for a thing. A fascinating, fuckable thing.”
Suzi slid off the bed, the movement graceful despite her distress. She settled on the floor beside him, their shoulders touching. The crimson light painted them both in the same guilt, the same shame. She reached out a hand, her fingers trembling slightly, and traced the curve of Tim’s breast through the thin cotton of his shirt. It wasn’t a sexual touch. It was anatomical. Curious.
“Do you like these?” she asked. “Or are they part of the costume?”
Tim inhaled sharply. No one asked that. Not Tom, who worshipped them; not Gil, who marketed them; not the club patrons, who drooled over them. “They’re… me,” he said, the words forming slowly. “But they’re also the flag I fly. They’re what people see first. The contradiction. The invitation. So, yeah. I like them. And I hate them. They’re mine, and they’re everyone’s.”
Suzi nodded as if he’d spoken a sacred truth. Her hand trailed down, over his flat stomach, coming to rest, palm open, just above the waistband of his jeans. “And this?”
Tim’s cock, soft in his jeans, twitched at the proximity. “That’s the surprise,” he said, a faint, bitter smile on his lips. “The deal-breaker. Or the deal-maker. Depending on the client.”
“It’s just a body,” Suzi whispered, her face so close now he could feel her breath. “It’s just meat and nerve endings. But they make it mean everything. They make it mean we’re freaks. Or trophies. They never let it just be.”
Her words were a key turning in a lock Tim hadn’t known was sealed. A dam broke behind his ribs, a flood of loneliness and fury and a desperate, aching need for understanding that had nothing to do with penetration or performance. He turned his head. Her lips were inches from his, shimmering with misplaced glitter and salt.
He didn’t kiss her. He let the moment hang, a precipice. “What do you want it to mean, Suzi? Right now?”
Her answer was to close the distance.
Her mouth was soft, then insistent. She tasted of stale tequila and the salt of her tears. It wasn’t a gentle kiss. It was a collision, a mutual devouring. A rebellion staged on the mouth. Tim met her hunger with his own, his hand coming up to tangle in the dark, sweat-stiffened waves of her hair. They kissed like they were trying to consume the other’s pain, to swallow it whole and dissolve it in shared saliva.
Clothes became obstacles in a sudden, frantic race for skin. They broke apart only to yank and tear. Suzi’s sequined top went flying, revealing small, perfect breasts with pierced nipples. Tim ripped his own shirt over his head. They fumbled with belts, buttons, zippers. Suzi pushed her leather pants down her hips, kicking them away. Tim shoved his jeans and briefs down in one rough motion.
They knelt facing each other on the velvet-draped floor, bathed in blood-red light, both of them naked, both of them exposed in their complicated truth. Suzi’s body was a symphony of feminine curves culminating in the thick, heavy cock that lay against her thigh, already half-hard. Tim’s own body mirrored it—the swell of breasts, the narrow waist, the hard, leaking length of his erection.
For a moment, they just looked. Not as clients. Not as curiosities. As reflections.
“Fuck,” Suzi breathed, her eyes wide. It was awe, not lust.
Tim reached out first. He cupped her breast, his thumb brushing over the cold metal of her piercing. She shuddered. Then her hand mirrored his, palming his flesh, rolling his nipple between her fingers until it pebbled tight. They leaned in again, kissing deeply, their hands exploring the landscapes they knew so intimately on themselves and saw from the outside for the first time.
Suzi broke the kiss, trailing her mouth down Tim’s neck, over his collarbone. She took his nipple into her mouth, sucking hard, her tongue flicking the peak. A sharp gasp tore from Tim’s throat. He let his head fall back, his own hands sliding down her back, over the swell of her ass. He pulled her closer, so their cocks slid together, a hot, silken friction.
“Oh god,” Suzi moaned against his skin. She reached between them, wrapping one hand around both of their shafts, squeezing them together. The feeling was electric, profoundly taboo and utterly natural. They were the same. They were not the same. The duality was dizzying.
They rocked into her fist, a slow, grinding rhythm. Precum slicked the way, making the glide smooth and filthy. Tim’s mouth found her other nipple, biting gently, then soothing with his tongue. She cried out, her hips bucking.
“I want to taste you,” Tim growled, the desire raw and sudden. “I want to know what I taste like.”
He pushed her backward gently, until she was lying on the piled satin sheets at the foot of the bed. He knelt between her spread thighs, the crimson light making a spectacle of her open body. He didn’t tease. He bent his head and took the head of her cock into his mouth.
Suzi arched off the bed with a shattered cry. Her hands flew to his hair, not pushing, just holding on. Tim worked her, his mouth a wet, hot haven. He used his tongue the way he liked it used on him, tracing the vein underneath, swirling around the sensitive glans. He swallowed her down, deep, his nose filled with the musky, intimate scent of her. He was giving a blowjob, and he was receiving one, in some metaphysical, hall-of-mirrors way. It was the most honest fuck he’d ever had.
“Tim… fuck, yes… just like that…” she babbled, her thighs trembling.
He sucked her until she was fully hard, until she was panting and pulling at his hair. Then he released her with a wet pop and moved up her body, kissing her stomach, her breasts, finally her mouth, letting her taste herself on his lips.
“My turn,” she whispered, her eyes dark with need.
She pushed him onto his back on the sheets and mirrored his position. When her mouth closed over him, Tim saw stars. Her technique was different from Tom’s—less voracious, more curious, licking and sucking as if learning a new language. It was unbearably erotic. He fisted his hands in the satin, his hips lifting off the bed.
“Suzi… god…”
They lost themselves in the give-and-take, a mutually assured deconstruction. There was no power play, only shared discovery. When they were both breathless and throbbing, Suzi pulled off, crawling up to straddle his hips. She spat into her hand, slicking both of them, and then positioned herself so their cocks slid together, trapped between their stomachs. She leaned down, bracing her hands on his chest, and began to move.
It was a slow, sinuous grind, a full-body friction. Their shafts rubbed together, their breasts brushed, their mouths met in sloppy, open kisses. The wet, sticky sounds filled the red-lit room, a bassline to the distant thump of the club music.
“This is for us,” Suzi chanted, her voice a hoarse whisper. “Not for him. Not for any of them. This is ours.”
“Yes,” Tim gasped, his hands gripping her hips, helping her find the angle that made them both see white. “Just us. Two fucking toys rewiring themselves.”
The climb was slow, torturous, exquisite. There was no performative rush, no audience to please. It was a private ceremony of reclamation. Tim felt his orgasm building from the soles of his feet, a deep, rolling wave. Suzi’s movements became jagged, desperate. Her nails dug into his chest.
“I’m gonna come,” she warned, her voice breaking.
“Do it. Come all over me. Mark me.”
With a sharp, guttural cry, Suzi’s body seized. Thick, hot stripes of semen pulsed from her cock, painting Tim’s stomach and chest. The convulsive clenching of her thighs around him, the sight of her pleasure, tipped Tim over the edge. His own release followed, a hot flood adding to the mess between them, his back bowing off the satin as he emptied himself in long, shuddering jets.
She collapsed forward, her sweat-slick body plastered to his, their mixed come a sticky glue between them. They lay there, panting, in the aftermath. The neon heartbeat washed over them. The bass below continued, indifferent.
Minutes bled away, marked only by their slowing breaths. Eventually, Suzi shifted, rolling to lie beside him. She didn’t speak. She just traced idle patterns in the cooling mess on his stomach.
“I’m not going to be here Friday,” she said finally, her voice calm, resolved.
Tim turned his head to look at her. “Where will you be?”
“My sister’s. In Oakland. She’s been asking me to get out of this scene for years. I’m going to say yes.” She met his gaze. “I’ll watch the stream, if there is one. But I’ll be watching from a couch with a cat on my lap and a mug of tea. Not from the wings.”
A profound sense of loss, clean and sharp, pierced Tim. But it was followed by a swell of relief for her. “That sounds… really good.”
“It sounds boring,” Suzi smiled, a real one this time, faint but there. “And right now, boring is the most revolutionary thing I can think of.” She propped herself up on an elbow. “What about you? You’re really going through with it?”
“We have to,” Tim said, staring at the water-stained ceiling. “It’s the only way through. We have to walk into the crater, like Tom said. We have to own the explosion, or we’ll always be afraid of the blast.”
Suzi studied his profile. “You love him. Tom.”
It wasn’t a question. Tim didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.
“Be careful,” she said softly. “That kind of love in that kind of fire… it can weld you together forever. Or it can burn away everything until there’s nothing left but the shape of the missing piece.”
She got up then, padding naked to the small, cluttered bathroom. Tim heard the shower turn on. He lay still, letting her words sink in. The sticky evidence on his skin was already cooling. He felt hollowed out and strangely peaceful.
When Suzi returned, damp and wrapped in a robe, she tossed him a warm washcloth. He cleaned himself in silence. They dressed without urgency—Tim in his clothes from the night before, Suzi in soft leggings and an oversized sweater. The transformation was startling. The club creature was gone, replaced by a young woman who looked tired, and young, and hopeful.
At the door, she pulled him into a fierce, final hug. “Thank you,” she whispered into his neck. “For not letting me be alone down there.”
“Thank you,” he whispered back, “for the rewire.”
He stepped out into the harsh, grey light of the corridor. The door clicked shut behind him, a solid, final sound. As he walked down the stairs, away from the bleeding neon, his phone buzzed in his pocket.
It was Tom. Rehearsal call in 2 hrs. Gil’s bringing the director. The set is built. It’s real.
Tim stopped on the landing, his hand gripping the cold metal railing. He typed back, his thumbs steady. On my way. Is it what he wanted?
The reply was immediate. It’s a fucking prison cell. Concrete and a single cot. With chains on the wall.
A chill that had nothing to do with the drafty stairwell crept down Tim’s spine. Gil wasn’t selling fantasy. He was selling authenticity. He was selling their cage.
He took a deep breath, the smell of Suzi’s perfume still on his skin, underneath the scent of sex and salt. He had just said goodbye to a possible escape. Now, he was walking toward the bars.
Perfect, he texted back. See you in the cage.
Tim walked to the club, the morning sun a stark, judgmental glare against the pavement. The salt from the beach and the musk from Suzi’s skin still clung to him, a layered history beneath his clothes. Each step felt heavier, as if he were walking not toward a building, but into the geometric center of a trap he’d helped design.
The alley behind The Pit was deserted, trash bags blooming by the service door. He used his key, the metallic scrape echoing in the concrete silence of the back hallway. The usual pre-show sounds were absent—no thumping soundcheck, no burst of laughter from dressing rooms. Just a hollow quiet, broken by a low, synthesized drone coming from the main floor. It was a track he didn’t recognize, all ominous bass and skittering high hats.
He pushed through the heavy black curtain separating the wings from the stage. The house lights were down, but the stage was lit with a cold, clinical white wash. What he saw stopped him dead.
The set was indeed a cage. Or the suggestion of one. Thick, unpainted concrete blocks formed three walls. A single, narrow cot with a thin mattress was bolted to the floor. On the back wall, heavy chains hung from rusted eyebolts, their ends pooled on the floor like dead snakes. It was brutally effective, less a fantasy prison and more an interrogation cell. In the center of this sterile nightmare, two men moved.
Tom and Gil. They were alone on the vast, empty stage. Both wore only black posing pouches, the fabric stark against their skin under the white light. Tom’s long hair was tied back, revealing the tense line of his jaw. Gil’s bald head gleamed like polished stone. They were attempting to dance, their movements halting, out of sync with the sinister track. It was a stiff, awkward pantomime of eroticism.
Tim remained hidden in the deep shadow of the wing, his breath tight in his chest. He watched Tom turn, a slow, professional pivot that brought him within inches of Gil. Gil mirrored him, his hands coming up as if to grasp Tom’s hips, but stopping just short of contact. The space between them crackled with a palpable, awkward energy. Dancing erotically with a shemale was one thing. This was different. This was raw, unadorned male proximity, stripped of the convenient, audience-pleasing ambiguity they provided.
They tried again. The music built to a repetitive, pounding crescendo. Tom swayed closer, his back now to Gil’s chest. Gil’s hands finally settled on Tom’s waist, his fingers splayed over the defined muscles of Tom’s abdomen. The touch looked less like passion and more like a measurement. They moved together, a reluctant synchronicity forced by the beat. Each rotation, each step, brought their bodies closer.
Their posing pouches touched. A brush of black fabric against black fabric. They both froze for a microsecond, then continued, the grinding motion now unavoidable. Tom’s head was tilted back, his eyes open, staring at the ceiling grid. Gil’s gaze was fixed on the side of Tom’s neck, his expression unreadable. They knew the truth of their bodies, the shared memory of their cocks rubbing against each other inside Suzi, the phantom sensation of being separated only by a membrane of flesh inside Tim. That knowledge was a live wire in the cold room.
Now, they were alone. No conduit, no buffer. Just the memory and the grinding present.
Tim could see the tension in Tom’s thighs, the rigid set of his shoulders. He saw Gil’s jaw clench, a muscle twitching near his temple. The deliberate, slow grind of their hips became the only real movement. The dance fell away, leaving behind a blunt, mechanical friction. Through the thin spandex, the shapes of them began to change, to swell and harden in response to the relentless pressure.
Tom’s eyes slid shut. Gil’s fingers dug in harder, pulling Tom’s ass tighter against his own hardening cock. The music, a cavernous drone, seemed to approve. This wasn’t desire. It was a physiological rebellion, an animal response to friction and memory that bypassed every tangled feeling of resentment and manipulation. Their bodies were betraying the complex hatred, speaking a simpler, crude language.
The track ended not with a climax, but with a sudden, digital cut to silence. The white lights seemed to grow brighter, more exposing. The two men sprang apart as if scalded. They didn’t look at each other. Gil turned and walked stiffly off the stage on the opposite side, disappearing into the shadows. Tom stood alone in the concrete cell, his chest heaving, his hands curled into fists at his sides. He looked down at the undeniable tent in his pouch, his face a mask of furious shame.
Then he too walked off, heading for the shared dressing room. Tim waited, counting to fifty in the dark, his own heart hammering against his ribs. The image was seared into his mind: the involuntary, silent fuck enacted through two layers of spandex. He finally moved, his feet silent on the worn floor, following Tom’s path.
The dressing room door was ajar. Tim pushed it open slowly.
The room smelled of stale sweat, cheap cologne, and the metallic tang of nervous energy. Gil was already there. He was completely naked, lying on the worn red velvet sofa that lined one wall. His bald head was propped on a cushion, his body a landscape of defined muscle and dark tattoos. In his hand was a fleshlight, its opaque sleeve already slicked with lube. He had it wrapped around his erect cock, which stood thick and flushed against his stomach. His eyes were closed, his other hand pinching a nipple, twisting it roughly.
Tom stood a few feet away, still in his posing pouch, visibly straining against the fabric. He was glaring at Gil, his anger a physical heat in the small room. The frustration from the stage, the humiliation of his own body’s response, was boiling over.
“Hey!” Tom’s voice was a low, sharp bark. “I want to use that.”
Gil’s eyes slid open. They were dark, calculating, devoid of any post-dance vulnerability. He didn’t stop the slow, steady stroke of the fleshlight around his shaft. A droplet of pre-come glistened at the tip. “If you want it so much,” Gil said, his voice a bored, challenging rasp, “come and take it.”
It wasn’t an invitation. It was a power check. A test of who would break first, who needed the release more desperately. Tom’s nostrils flared. The shared, unresolved tension from the stage was a knot in the room, and this was the only blade offered to cut it. Without another word, Tom ripped his posing pouch down and off, kicking it aside. His cock sprang free, fully hard, jutting aggressively from his body. He crossed the space in three strides.
He didn’t ask. He grabbed the fleshlight, his fingers covering Gil’s on the hard plastic casing. Gil tightened his grip for a moment, a contest of strength, his eyes locked on Tom’s. Then, with a smirk, he let go, surrendering the toy but not the control. He kept his hand beneath it, his fingers now tangling with Tom’s as they both held the sleeve around his cock.
“You’re a desperate fucker, aren’t you?” Gil murmured, his head lolling back against the cushion. “Can’t even get off without borrowing my tools.”
“Shut up,” Tom growled. He was angling the fleshlight, trying to position it over his own aching dick, but Gil’s grip and the awkward angle made it difficult. Their knuckles pressed together, slick with lube. Tom’s cock bumped against Gil’s, a hot, solid slide of skin on skin.
“There it is,” Gil breathed, a cruel smile playing on his lips. He pushed his hips up, grinding his shaft deliberately against Tom’s. “That’s what you wanted on stage. That’s what you were grinding for. Not the dance. This.”
Tom’s resolve seemed to fracture. With a grunt of pure frustration, he abandoned the attempt to use the fleshlight separately. Instead, he pushed it down, so it sat loosely around the base of Gil’s cock. Then he knelt on the sofa, one knee on either side of Gil’s hips, straddling him. He spat into his own palm, a crude, efficient gesture, and fisted both of their cocks together, the fleshlight adding a strange, ridged texture to the mix.
“Fuck you,” Tom hissed, beginning to stroke them in a relentless, punishing rhythm.
“Yeah,” Gil groaned, his cool facade cracking. His hands came up to grasp Tom’s hard, glistening thighs, his blunt nails biting into the skin. “Fuck me. That’s what you’re doing. Using my dick to get yourself off.”
It was a brutally honest physical translation of their entire relationship. Tom’s strokes were rough, utilitarian. He leaned forward, bracing one hand on the sofa back above Gil’s head, his long hair falling around his face like a curtain. Their cocks slid together, Gil’s pressed against Tom’s stomach, Tom’s pumping through the tight tunnel of his own fist and against Gil’s flesh. The smell of them filled the air—musky, sharp, aggressive.
Gil’s hips began to piston upward, meeting Tom’s downward strokes. The sofa springs creaked in protest. “You and your brother,” Gil gasped, his breath hot against Tom’s collarbone. “You think you’re so special. You’re just another set of holes. Expensive holes.”
“We’re your fucking meal ticket,” Tom snarled back, increasing the pace. The slap of skin was loud, wet, obscene. “And you’re just the pimp who’s too cheap to get his own.”
The insult seemed to electrify Gil. He bucked hard, his cockhead leaking profusely, mixing with Tom’s pre-come to make a slick, filthy mess. “I own what I see,” Gil spat. “And I see you. I see you needing this. I see you hard because of me.”
It was the truth, and it was the ultimate weapon. Tom’s rhythm faltered. A ragged, wounded sound escaped his throat. His professional control, the careful charisma, was utterly gone. What was left was raw, exposed need, amplified by anger and a deep, self-loathing confusion. He was getting off on the friction, on the heat, on the sheer degenerate contest of it.
“Come on, then,” Gil taunted, his own voice tight with impending release. “Show me how much you need it. Come all over your meal ticket’s dick.”
That did it. Tom’s body went rigid. A violent shudder racked him from his shoulders to his thighs. With a choked-off cry that was all fury and no pleasure, he erupted. Thick, white ropes of semen shot across Gil’s stomach and chest, some striping his own still-pumping fist. The convulsive clenching of his hand around their combined cunts pushed Gil over the edge immediately after.
Gil’s orgasm was a silent, tensed arch of his entire body, his mouth open in a soundless shout. He emptied himself in hot, pulsing jets that mingled with Tom’s spill on his skin, the fleshlight at their base filling with his release. For a long, held moment, they were frozen in the disgusting, intimate tableau: Tom straddling him, both of them painted in shared come, breathing in ragged, syncopated gasps.
The reality of it crashed down. Tom looked at his hand, slick and white. He looked at Gil’s smug, sweat-sheened face beneath him. He looked at the mess he’d made. Revulsion, immediate and profound, washed over his features. He scrambled off Gil as if burned, nearly stumbling onto the floor. He stood there, naked and trembling, looking for something to wipe himself with, finding nothing.
Gil didn’t move. He lay there, spent and glistening, a king on a soiled throne. He looked at Tom’s panic with cold, detached amusement. “Better get cleaned up,” he said, his voice regaining its smooth, managerial calm. “The director will be here in twenty. He’ll want to see the chemistry.”
Tom found a discarded towel and scrubbed at his hand, his stomach, his cock, the motions frantic and harsh. He couldn’t look at Gil. He couldn’t look at the door, where Tim still stood, hidden in the hallway shadows, his back pressed against the cold wall, his hand clamped over his own mouth to silence the sound of his breathing.
Tim had seen everything. The aggressive, joyless dance. The fumbling, hate-filled release. He saw the crater they were in, and it wasn’t filled with passion or even forbidden love. It was filled with a corrosive, transactional grime that stained everything it touched. The bond he shared with Tom, that fragile, impossible thing, now felt contaminated by the sight of Tom’s hands on Gil, by the shared, angry orgasm.
He heard Tom dressing, the rustle of fabric, a zipper. He heard Gil rise from the sofa, the wet sound of him cleaning himself with something. Tim slipped away, back down the hall, his mind reeling. He needed air. He needed to not have seen that. But he had. And it changed the geometry of the cage entirely. It was no longer just him and Tom against the world. It was him, Tom, and the vile, invisible thread that now connected Tom to Gil through a shared, resentful climax. He pushed out into the alley, the sun hitting him like a slap. He leaned against the brick wall, gulping in the dry, polluted air.
He had told Suzi they had to walk into the crater. He hadn’t known someone else would be there, waiting to bury them in it.