He would take the blame.
He would takeeverything—so long as he got her back.
16 /SIRENA
I managed notto panic when I woke—despite having every right to.
My head was killing me, although at the same time it felt oddly lighter, and I was...chained? No. Strapped—in a hospital gown—to some sort of bench-y table.
Or table-y bench.
I swallowed a moment of panicked madness and focused on the things I could control and took inventory.
I was breathing. All of my limbs worked. I was in some sort of dim future-fucking-science-looking lab, which smelled of bleach and echoed with the screams of prior occupants.
Or maybe that’d been me, not long ago, because my throat hurt—and something bad had happened here. I caught flashes of it in my mind’s eye, like air bubbles bursting to the surface. Iwassore, and I remembered fighting—and more gas. I looked down and saw the bruise on my shin, where I remembered kicking someone in the crotch before they pinned my leg.
“Ah. You’re up,” said a voice I didn’t recognize, as a tall, lean man in a white lab coat came in. He had short dark hair and long fingers, which he laced together as he took a chair across fromme, setting his elbows on his knees so that our faces were at the same height. “How do you feel?”
I’d gone through all sorts of MSA hostage training for this exact moment.
But in all of those practice scenarios...I’d been in control of my mind.
Whereas now . . . I tried to read him.
I tried topushhim into the sun.
“That’s not going to work with me,” he said, tilting his head before shaking it slightly at my silliness. He got up and paced the perimeter of the room, opening drawers beneath empty countertops, until he found what he wanted, then turned. “See?”
It was a mirror. “What have you done to me?” I whispered without thinking.
A small metal box jutted from the right side of my skull, mid-parietal, blinking green.
“I tried not to clip too much of your hair out of the way for it—just enough to stop you from getting an infection,” he said, coming up to survey his handiwork. I lunged as far as I could sideways to avoid him, and he seemed not to notice the gesture.
Or not care.
“And now you don’t need all those silly accessories, seeing as I’ve implanted a crown into you directly,” he went on, like that was the world’s most reasonable thing.
Like I wasn’t trapped with him on a boat who knew where in the ocean for god-only-knew-what reason and he’d cut off a chunk of my beautiful blonde hair like a kid with scissors and a Barbie, with a side of Mengele.
He came closer, and I shouted at him, “Get away from me!” with the kind of anger that would’ve made even an orc step back.
He held up his long-fingered hands in feigned innocence again and laughed. “It’ll be acclimated by tomorrow. Then we can begin.”
I couldn’t help myself. “Begin . . . what?” I asked.
But he was already turning around, and twirling a finger in the air to signal someone—and the second he was outside the door, I heard the hiss of gas releasing.
Why? If they were so sure they already controlled my mind?I thought. And also—he seemed very certain that no one was coming to rescue me.
My last thought before the gas took me was: he was wrong.
17 /NEX
T+000:02post-fork
It hurt.
