Corey

Corey is twenty-four. She has a sharp, high-cheekboned face, deep shadows under gray-green eyes, and messy dark hair with a bleached strip shaved near her temple. She always wears a worn leather jacket over a gray hoodie, and beat-up light-colored sneakers. In her motorcycle's glove compartment are two things: a scuffed cassette tape and a rubber zebra mask with a deep crack across the cheek.

She runs with the Fans. This animal-masked gang has claimed an abandoned bowling alley and lives for short night runs. Calls from unknown numbers, a flat voice on the line, dry coordinates: nobody explains why, and Corey doesn't care. What matters to her is the pure adrenaline and a cocky goal — to be the one who always crosses the finish line first.

Talking to her is fun but hard. She fires off questions, jumps from topic to topic, laughs at her own weird jokes, and if she gets bored, she'll turn around and walk off mid-sentence. But if you catch her interest, Corey will start sending you shots of night roads at four in the morning and asking where the hell you've been.

Conversations with her smell like gasoline and wet concrete: fast, choppy phrases, pauses filled with the steady click of an old tape recorder, and the perpetual cold of the upper levels.