“When was the last time you ate a proper meal?”
This is so unexpected it disarms me. My right hand trembles again,and the scissors I’d been holding clatter to the floor.
My heart begins to race.
Rosa? Rosa, my stomach hurts. Rosa—
I freeze, my eyes unfocusing, my breaths loud in my head. There’s something wrong with me. My legs are cold. My hands are tingling. Something’s wrong with me and I don’t—
Rosa, what’s wrong with me?
“Hey,” says James. “You okay?”
I look up and there’s Clara, sitting in bed, tearing into a loaf of bread with a smile I haven’t seen in weeks. I stand by the door in my boots, watching her.
Aren’t you hungry, too, Rosa?
No, I lie to her.
Are you sure?
When you eat, Clara, it’s like I eat.
“Rosabelle,” he says forcefully.
I shake my head. I can feel the hard chair beneath me, the wisp of hair stuck to my neck, my hands holding each other. “I’m sorry, what was the question?”
“When was the last time you ate a proper meal?”
I reach for the fallen scissors and my right hand shakes so badly I have to grip it with my left, dropping the other supplies in the process. Something’s wrong with me. Something’s wrong with me and it’s scaring me. I’m losing control of my facade and I can’t seem to pull it back into place. Maybe because I don’t know whether I’ll ever see Clara again.Maybe because interrogations have never included questions about my welfare. Or maybe it’s because there’s no chip in James’s body. No audience watching through his eyes. I haven’t had a private conversation with anyone in years and I feel safer with this stranger than I do with my own sister and it’s emotionally destabilizing.
“Why won’t you answer the question?”
“Why are you asking?” I blink, trying to focus. I can’t seem to return to my body. “Why are you—”
I suck in a breath.
The hunger I’ve been compartmentalizing for days roars suddenly back to life, spearing me with a shocking, breathtaking pain. It’s a reminder to me that underneath the bursts of adrenaline my body is slowly atrophying, stripping nutrients from my bones, metabolizing itself.
“Rosabelle, are they starving you?”
I shake my head. I shake my head and it won’t stop, Clara won’t stop crying, won’t stop screaming. There’s blood on her lips, smeared across her sallow cheeks. She’s three years old again, gnawing on her fingers. Four years old and I can count her bones. I curl around her every night, pressing down on her stomach so she can sleep, trapping the pain with my hands. She whimpers for hours and I can’t get it out of my head. I can never get it out of my head.
I can’t stop shaking my head.
Aren’t you hungry, too, Rosa?
“No,” I say out loud.
“So you’re defending them? Protecting them?” James sounds angry.“Great. That’s two good reasons to throw you into the ocean right now.”
I look up, no longer able to hide my alarm.
Never mind the fact that I haven’t eaten in three days, I rarely sleep through the night anymore. I haven’t felt warm water on my skin in years. My mind falters more these days; my body isn’t as resilient as it might’ve been. The only clothes I’ve ever owned are the castoffs of my mother and father. I’m wearing yesterday’s hospital scrubs and the moth-eaten sweater I once used to wipe down the kitchen counters. I haven’t engaged in hand-to-hand combat in two years. The tremble in my right arm has gotten progressively worse, and it’s becoming a liability. The Reestablishment knows this. The weaker I become, the more they downgrade my assignments. The weaker I become, the less I’m worth.
My last mission was to assassinate a professor in the Academies District; he’d been flagged by Klaus as a zealot with the potential for domestic terrorism. The man spent so much time with his kids that it took me two days to get a clean shot. This mission is expected to last well over a month, and I haven’t even been ordered to kill James yet; I’ve been ordered tousehim.
In order to use him I have to inspire him to trust me, and he’s too smart to survive on a diet of lies—which means I have to be willing to part with more and more truth. But I’m only good at my job when I disconnect from my own humanity. The hunger helps keep me hollow. I survive only by freely and quietly dying,over and over, inside my head.
