“I’d like to help you heal.”
I smile. It’s all teeth. “Doctor, I don’t heal. I adapt.”
She draws a breath. “We’ll ensure your safety until?—”
“Until what?” I cut in. “Until someone decides what to do with me? With us?”
“Until you’re ready,” she says, too quickly. “Until it’s safe to?—”
“‘Safe,’” I echo, rolling the word on my tongue like a pill I don’t plan to swallow. “You keep using that word. You think it means something. It’s empty. Nonesensical. It means less than nothing to me.”
She opens her mouth to respond, but the intercom crackles to life – a single tone, then silence. Someone’s listening. Someone is deciding this little conversation’s gone on long enough. She glances at the ceiling, then back at me. Composed again, or trying to be.
“You should rest,” she says. “Your vitals?—”
“Are perfect,” I finish for her. “Aren’t they?”
She hesitates. “Yes.”
“Then leave me alone.”
Her lips tighten. “I’ll be back in the morning.”
“I’m counting down the hours.”
She turns to leave, hesitates in the doorway. “Kayla, this place isn’t a prison. You’re not a prisoner.”
I stretch out on the bed, head tilted toward the camera light blinking faintly above her shoulder. “Of course not,” I say sweetly. “I’m your guest.”
The door shuts with a soft click. The hum swells, swallowing the space between beats. I lie there staring at the ceiling, the too-perfect white, the camera eye that never blinks.
Seytan will come for me eventually. She doesn’t lose people – she reclaims them. And when she does, I’ll be ready.
Maybe I traded one prison for another, but this one’s smaller, quieter, more polite. I trace a hand across my stomach and smile, small and sharp.
Here, the monsters wear name tags.
Here, there are no psychos crawling into my bed at night.
More’s the pity.
YOU MAY EXPERIENCE DISCOMFORT
Teeth - 5 Seconds Of Summer
Bones
They don’t blindfold me. They don’t restrain me either, not at first.
That should worry me more than it does.
The most worrying thing, though, is the total blankness and blinding pain I get when I try to recall what happened.
I wake on a table that isn’t really a table. Transparent composite, reinforced, temperature-neutral. It supports my weight evenly, no pressure points, no wobble. Whoever designed it understands bodies.
The room is glass.
Not walls with windows. Walls made of it. Ceiling too. The floor beneath the table is just opaque enough to give the illusionof privacy without actually providing it. Light comes from everywhere at once, cool and unwavering.
