Chapter Text
In the Holiday Inn on the outskirts of Denver, Colorado, there are dozens of women with haunted eyes and weary hearts.
They have traveled by bus and train and airplane, carrying false identifications and false names.
They wear a motley array of souvenir t-shirts, sweats, and thrift store finds. Some try to match various fashions, others wear the first thing they find.
They draw occasional glances, with their practiced blank stares that they can’t seem to shake, their military-straight postures. For the most part though, the women are like unseen ghosts moving through the world that belongs to the nice, normal people.
There are families at the pool and teenagers working their part-time jobs at the front desks and a relentless hum of energy and life that the women watch from outside.
They read cheap paperback novels, try decadent breakfast dishes, make purchases with money that was made with their bodies and lives, money that is only now in their hands.
They exchange names, and those that don’t have one choose them.
They weep quietly at night, when they hope no one else can hear them.
They guard each other.
They sit in silence, or murmur to each other in low voices, their Russian accents faint but present.
They go into the city, buy clothes that they like in colors besides black and grey.
They make plans to save the nameless, faceless girls who have been left behind.
The women of the Red Room are learning to be something besides statues and weapons and ghosts.