The orderlies monitoring the therapy stared. One even reached for the walkie-talkie at his belt and whispered something into the black hand-held device.
“He was talking to me,” Lytta spoke pointedly to the orderly, an edge of panic ringing through her voice. “I was talking to him and he didn’t want to get in trouble. He told me to shut up.”
Brooks looked between Lytta and the orderly, but her pleas didn’t stop him from pressing the button and saying, “I need Dr. Kore to the hydro room.”
The small radio crackled as someone answered from the other line.
Somehow, Brooks knew this would be his last straw.
Dr. Kore only gave so many electro-treatments before patients were taken to the last door in the treatment hallway. Patients who went in rarely came out and, if they did, they were never the same.
If a lobotomy were to be his fate, it would be the end of the road.
Theirwalktohydrotherapywas miserable.
Did she say the wrong thing? Maybe she didn’t spell it out correctly?
Lytta knew she could not tell him outright. She had been in this hellhole long enough to realize that any time a resident got too close to Brooks, the asylum shifted, and the resident lost a little more of themselves. Not that he had noticed. They kept him so doped up on some elixir that he was none the wiser. Lytta couldn’t identify the mystery potion, but she’d be damned if she stopped looking for it.
Everyone in St. Dymphna’s was just a walking shell, and Lytta refused to become part of that crowd. She had worked too hard to be there to fail now.
Brooks had been silent the entirety of the morning, and she wasn’t sure what to say to make it better.
When he asked about her scar… she hadn’t been sure what to say. A truth within a lie. Something small enough to slip under the radar of the ever-present eyes but solid enough to keep it in his mind.
She didn’t know much about what he’d been before his arrival at the asylum, but she knew he had the power to shift their fates. She just had to bring him back.
After they were locked up in the steaming boxes from hell, the worst-case scenario happened.
Rue.
Lytta had been watching Brooks for weeks after her arrival, and around every corner was Rue. Sometimes she annoyed the piss out of him, and other times she watched from afar just like Lytta. Little did Rue know, Lytta was watching both of them.
It took her a while to figure out what was happening, but when she started to catch on she knew she was in trouble.
They were running out of time.
She was running out of options.
There was nothing she could say or do in front of the stalker. Brooks thought it was infatuation, but Lytta knew better. How odd was it that she was the only resident able to interact with him so freely? Everyone else was shooshed, ushered away or so drugged out of their godsdamned mind that they couldn’t even see to their own needs. Every patient in the asylum was no better than a ghost, all to keep Patient Zero isolated.
Except Rue.
Lytta had one advantage that Brooks didn’t…
She remembered.
Chaos ran so heavily within her that, whatever this place was, it couldn’t get its claws into her.
Sure. She could be shocked, prodded, sweated to death, and injected with gods knew what, but it never took her mind.
That meant she remembered the world she came from. Wheretheycame from.
Lytta knew madness because she was its mistress. It never truly took over because its purpose was to torture, and the true torture of madness was the moments of clarity in which you see the carnage you’ve caused. Just as the arrow strikes, the taint takes root and you’re lost again.
She considered the disease swimming behind Rue’s eyes as the three of them soaked in steam boxes. Lytta recognized the monster in Rue because it was like looking in a mirror– a monster will always recognize its likeness.
But what Lytta didn’t see in Rue was the clarity of cruelness. She was just an image projected to skew the big picture.
