“So what’s stopping you?”
I cross my arms. “Forget it.” He must think I’m stupid. I know vaguely about Patty Hearst, how a kidnapped heiress was brainwashed into becoming a gun-toting terrorist. That’s not going to happen to me.
He shrugs, as if my refusal means nothing to him. “You asked for something to relieve the boredom. This is all you get.” He heads toward the door.
“You can take this...this propaganda with you,” I call after him. “I won’t read any of it!”
“The books are staying,” Kane says. “Try learning something for a change.” On that derisive comment, he closes the door behind him.
After he’s gone, I sit there, fuming. What a cheap trick. I stare at the books and pamphlets scattered in front of me. I pick one up gingerly. Leafing through it, a black-and-white photograph of a beagle with one side of its body covered in burns leaps out at me. I slap the pages closed. I’m already feeling down and reading these will only sink my spirits deeper.
But I’m really, really bored.
An idea crawls into my head.
No, Amy, no, I plead with myself.
I have to be careful here. I’m already on a slippery ledge. My back talk, the barricade incident, plus the fact I now know my kidnapper’s real name are all glaring indicators I shouldn’t be taking any more chances.
But then I think of my pathetically grateful reaction when Kane offered me a measure of privacy, a right that isn’t even his to grant in the first place.
What next? I berate myself. Am I going to thank him for abducting me? I don’t want to be the archetypal abused victim, in the end so grateful the punch is a mild one.
I pick up a thick tome of a book. And very slowly, very deliberately, I open it up at the first page.
19
KANE
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Nolene’s eyes widen in disbelief. “Her Royal Highness asked for a TV!”
“She asked for one,” I say, stirring the penne pasta in a pot of boiling water. “I didn’t give it to her.”
“You gave her books to read.”
“I gave her a stack of AFD’s reading material,” I explain. “She’s so bored she might actually read some of it.”
“Bored!” Nolene punctuates her outrage by throwing her arms in the air. “You should’ve told her how bored lab animals are, how some of them self-mutilate in order to escape the insane monotony of their lives.”
My lips tighten. “You don’t have to remind me of their conditions.”
“It seems I do.”
We’re in the kitchen preparing Amy’s dinner. Nolene’s movements are jerky as she slams cupboard doors and savagely chops up tomatoes and cucumbers. “Why are you indulging her?”
“Why are you so hard on her?” I counter.
Her breath hisses through her teeth. “Because I want her to pay for what’s happening in her father’s lab, for what she’s choosing to ignore right under her nose.”
“We can throw any number of physical hardships Amy’s way, but if we want to reach her we have to stir her conscience. And that’ll happen when she reads what I’ve given her.”
“If she has a conscience to stir.”
“If not, at least it’ll take her mind off rearranging the furniture. Or trying to escape.”
“I suppose,” Nolene concedes grudgingly, scraping the chopped veggies into a bowl.
