“Wait,” I say. “No—”
He grabs my wrist. He’s stronger than he looks. His fingers land exactly on the bones where a grip is easiest. I twist. He tightens.
“Let me go,” I say. My voice jumps a register. “Hey—”
“Ms. Hale,” he says in a tone meant to soothe or shut me up—who can tell—and pushes through the back door into the loading bay like we’re two colleagues headed to a meeting.
Sunlight slams my face. The van’s engine purrs. Every cell in me shouts at once. I try to yank my wrist back and my shoes skid on grit. The man in black steps forward. He’s big in the way of a man who lifts for work, not for a mirror. He catches my other arm, and I’m made of arms now, nothing else, just levers attached to a woman who came to draw.
“No,” I say loud, and then louder, “No!”
A hand clamps over my mouth. Not the first man’s. The second. Palm down, fingers wide, businesslike, no breath, no slap. My teeth scrape his skin; he doesn’t flinch. He smells like clean cotton and a whiff of something that might be antiseptic or might be the inside of a car that’s been detailed. The details make me want to vomit.
My phone is in my pocket. My brain tries to tell my hand to reach it. I can’t reach anything. Weight lifts me off the ground. The world tilts. My heel scrapes the concrete and loses a cap.My sketchbook flies, pages fanning like a scared bird. It slaps the ground hard enough to scatter extra sheets. A drawing of the child’s crown tears down the middle.
Through the wired glass of the service door, I catch a slice of the courtyard. The sound beyond is distant and bright. Someone laughs. Someone drags a chair. Then the pane becomes a mirror; it throws back my own eyes wide above a hand that doesn’t care I am a human being.
“Cassi—” I try. The hand makes it a grunt.
We hit the van. The inside is dark, a padded mouth. There’s a smell of rubber and oil and a ghost of bleach that says someone cleaned for this. A third man reaches for my ankles. He and the big one fold me like luggage. The first man releases my wrist and uses both hands to shove the crate of my body onto the deck.
My phone skitters out of my pocket and bounces once on the threshold with a sound like a toy. The screen lights. A new message flashes and disappears because my cheek smears against it. I make a sound that might be a sob or a curse trapped in cloth. I kick and get a handful of air. A hand grabs my calf and the angle in my hip says stop fighting or crack. I stop for half a second. They use the window to slam me shut.
“Go,” one says in an accent I can’t place.
“Wait—wait—” I try, and the hand on my mouth tightens, or maybe that’s just my own body lying to me about what parts of it are still mine.
Across the courtyard glass—a hundred feet and a world away—Cassian turns. I don’t hear the doctor. I don’t hear the courtyard. I don’t hear the hum of the van. For a second it’s only the line of his body snapping alert like he’s been yanked by a wire. His head lifts. His gaze sweeps. He looks exactly where I stood by the bench a minute ago and finds no one. His mouth shapes my name. I see it before I hear anything:Aurora.
Then I hear him.
He shouts. The sound rips across glass and air and slams into the loading bay like an order in a foreign language and like my name said by a man who has never begged anyone for anything. “Aurora!”
Alarms begin to beep. First one, then another. They’re small at first, the kind you can excuse as a truck backing up. Then two more join from different corners of the compound and the sound stacks until it pries under my fingernails. Red lights blink somewhere far away in a control room I have never seen.
The man in gray at my feet says, “Now,” and the one at my mouth shifts his hand enough for me to suck one desperate breath through my nose. It smells like rubber and dust and old rain. The van tilts and the outside changes. The service yard edges become a smear. The green world lurches. My head bangs the wall. The men barely sway. The door bangs twice. Someone outside kicks it closed.
Through the inch of daylight before the door seals, I see three things I will remember in perfect order if I live to draw them: a sliver of sky hard as glass; the shape of Cassian’s body clearing the corner like a thrown knife; and the guard at the gate raising his radio and then lowering it when someone grips his wrist and says something soft and lethal in his ear.
The doors slam. The sound is a lid. Darkness swallows the corners. The van surges forward and I am thrown sideways against the padded wall. The hand leaves my mouth at the same time the floor under me becomes road. The men don’t talk. No good kidnappers narrate. I suck two lungfuls of air that taste like someone else’s breath caught in the insulation.
I claw for the door with my left hand like a cartoon character who thinks fingernails can cut steel. The man closest catches my wrist and pins it to the floor, efficient, not cruel. I buck. The other two hold my ankles as if they’ve been assignedlimbs in a training exercise. Their faces are nothing. Not blank; nothing. I search their eyes and see only task. A sharp sick part of me wonders if that’s how I looked when I walked through the gray door.
“Help!” I try, loud as my ribs will let me. “Help!” The word hits the interior and falls back on my face. The engine is loud enough to hide small humans. The driver is a shape in a painted window. The world outside is a strip of light under the doors and the flicker of shadow on the square of glass in the bulkhead.
The van turns hard. My shoulder grinds the wall. A string of curses in a language I don’t recognize whispers from the guy holding my ankles as my heel clips his thigh. He adjusts and we are back in balance, a moving knot that answers to a plan I didn’t write.
I do the math. It isn’t pretty. I was in the open, in daylight, surrounded by his staff, in a place designed for eyes. They still walked me out a service door like a package. They still drove me into a mouth that doesn’t care who I am. Whatever checks and codes and cameras Cassian built into this place, someone reached through and turned them into confetti.
Him?
The thought arrives uninvited and wrong. I bat it away because it doesn’t fit the face I just saw. The face running toward me like he didn’t know how not to. The face that went wild when he recognized the geometry of an empty space where I should be.
Then a worse thought crawls up: if it wasn’t him, then it was someone who stands close enough to him to move his systems with a thumbprint.
“Stop,” I say through my teeth. “Stop.”
“Don’t make this harder,” says the big one, the first words any of them give me. His accent is Midwest softened by time somewhere else. He doesn’t sound like a villain. He sounds like a tired man on a late shift assuring a passenger it will all be oversoon. He keeps my ankles pinned without squeezing. He looks, for half a second, almost sorry. I hate him more for that.
