She watches me for a long beat. Her face is not kind. That’s why I like her. Kind faces always ask you to apologise for perfectly sensible things.
“Do you feel remorse?” she asks.
I run my tongue along my teeth, considering. “For the hydrangeas.”
Her mouth twitches; I win a point. “I’ve spoken to the board,” she says finally. “We’re tightening protocols. No equipment access without two staff present. No garden time without prior clearance from me. No…experiments.”
“Shame.” I glance at the window, at the slice of pale sky, the suggestion of green beyond. “The garden likes me.”
“The garden doesn’t like anything,” she says. “It tolerates. Like the rest of us.”
“That’s not true.” I lean back on my hands, let my hair drip shadows onto the pillowcase. “It likes attention. It likes blood. It likes patient hands.” I tilt my head and give her my best earnest look. “And it likes me.”
She looks down quickly at the clipboard. A small tell. “You’re confined to your room until further notice,” she says. “But I’m authorising a therapeutic schedule – reading material, supervised crafts, limited access to the solarium when it’s empty. We need to stabilise you, Kayla. You can’t escalate like this again.”
“Or what? You’ll call Seytan?” Her name tastes like a coin on my tongue – old metal, other people’s fingerprints.
“Or what,” Doctor Callaway says evenly, “I’ll be forced to reconsider whether you belong here at all.”
I study her. She means it. Or she thinks she does. But under the administrative tone there’s a flicker of something hotter, something like fascination’s little sister. She’s very careful not to feed it. She fails.
“Fine,” I say. “Then stabilise me.”
She blinks. “You’re agreeing.”
“I like schedules,” I tell her. “They make my rebellions feel earned.” I swing my feet to the floor and wipe a bead of water off my knee with my thumb. “Bring me a book that isn’t written for mourners or managers. Bring me tea that doesn’t taste beige. Bring me a needle and thread and something to take apart. And later, when you’re feeling brave, bring me the file you think I haven’t seen.”
Her eyes lift. “What file?”
“The one with the transfer codes.” I smile pleasantly. “I like to keep up with my travel plans.”
“You’re not being transferred.”
“Of course not,” I say, saccharine. “Not when I’m doingsowell.”
There it is again – the twitch at the corner of her mouth, the crack in the vase. She stands, smoothing her skirt as if creases can be willed out of existence.
“You will rest,” she says.
“Yes, Doctor.”
“You will eat.”
“If you insist.”
“You will not leave this room without permission,” she finishes, and for the first time there’s steel in it. “If you try, you will be restrained.”
I widen my eyes. “Promise?”
She closes the door when she leaves, but it doesn’t click. It never clicks. This is not a prison. It’s a well-decorated cul-de-sac with nowhere to go.
I give it five minutes. I listen to footsteps recede, to a cart squeak along the corridor, to the rustle of paperwork like dry leaves. I count breaths. At sixty, I get up and start.
The trick to any cage is knowing which bars are decorative. The window doesn’t open. The door opens too easily. Thecamera in the corner has a smudge at the edge of its lens and a telltale lag when it pans left. The vent cover is screwed in with a stripped head. The bedside drawer sticks, but if you jiggle it forward and lift, it reveals the shallow space behind where useful things get lost. I don’t find anything useful. Yet.
Later, they bring me the tray. Tea that tastes like surrender. A small stack of books carefully chosen to pacify: mindfulness, grief, a novel where nothing truly awful happens to anyone that matters. I thank the guard with pretty eyes, and when he blushes I know how to ask him for things later.
Afternoon stretches. I nap with my eyes open and dream with my eyes closed and practise lying perfectly still. It’s a useful skill. Prey freezes. Predators perform it.
