She is running.
In my dreams, she’s always running.
You’re so pretty with your hair like that, Rosa, she says.Would you like to play a game with me?
I inhale sharply as my eyes fly open.
The chorus of my own harsh breaths and pounding heartbeats surge with a disagreement of unintelligible, distant sound. I lay frozen a moment, trembling with cold, my eyes communicating horrors to my mind.
My first thought is that I’ve been buried alive.
I lift a hand to the smooth, eggshell interior of my tomb, and only after my heart nearly gives out do I recognize the first flaw in my theory: this narrow, enclosed space is unnaturally illuminated. Tentatively, I rap my knuckles against the cool stone, and the sound echoes. A second flaw: I don’t appear to be underground.
I strain my ears for more—more anomalous sound, more clues as to my location—and make out only a distorted jangle of metal and the intermittent hum of machinery. Looking down at myself as best I can, I run a blind hand down my body.
It occurs to me then that I feel no pain.
I’m wearing a hospital gown. My ribs appear to be intact. A deluge of memory assaults me: the inmate, the massacre, my imminent death.Clara.
The smiling rebel, who disappeared.
At this reminder of my disastrous failure, I stiffen with dread. If I’m still alive after failing to kill a spy from the mainland, it’s because The Reestablishment has chosen a different avenue of punishment. They don’t believe in acts of mercy.
Voices swell suddenly, footsteps growing louder. I steel myself in anticipation of something—anything—
Several clicks and a sound, like a gasp of air, and my tomb unseals around me without warning. The hulking top lifts upward as fluorescent light blazes through the open sides. I blink slowly against the glare, realizing I’m parched. I swallow against the sandpaper of my throat, then study the surrealist landscape of my nightmare.The stone lid hovers just above me; to my right I glimpse a cross section of torsos. Lab coats swarm and scatter; the steady, familiar blue light of surveillance strobes into my vault.
Even here, now, I am being watched.
I school my features, trying not to betray emotion as I scan what’s visible of my location. There appear to be five people in lab coats; two are turned away from me, and one is exiting the room. I can’t decipher the various clicking and humming of machines. I don’t know what they’ve done with my clothes. I have no idea what torture they have planned.
“Commence transfer,” someone says.
Fear seizes my limbs, renewed terror building as a disembodied voice begins to count down from twenty.
“Wait— Sir—”
“What?” a man barks.
“Based on her vitals, she won’t last more than six minutes in the cradle—”
“Fourteen, thirteen—”
“—and we have her scheduled for ten.”
“So?”
“Nine, eight—”
“Ten minutes and there’s a chance her lungs will never recover—”
“I didn’t make the call.”
“But—”
“Klaus says ten minutes.”
Klaus.
