Luckily, Doll Hands says nothing to this, but now I’m wondering who the hell Soledad is.
“Did I mention my wife is making lasagna tonight?”
More silence.
“I love lasagna,” says Jeff. “Do you—do you love lasagna?”
When she ignores him for the second time, I start to feel bad for the guy hoping to cut the organs out of my corpse. I sit up and turn to face him. “For what it’s worth, Jeff, I fucking love lasagna.”
Jeff screams.
I lock eyes with Doll Hands for only a second, long enough to catch the horror on her face before I jump off the gurney and shove it violently in her direction, the heavy steel pinning her to the wall with a satisfying crack.She cries out as Jeff scampers off screeching, triggering an alarm as he goes. The hall is suddenly blaring with lights and chaotic sound. I spin around. Panicky-looking people in lab coats start streaming into the hall, but when they glimpse my blood-soaked neck and shirt—and the wilting girl sliding down the wall—they quickly disappear. The place, I note, is bright white and entirely unmarked. I have no idea how to get out of here. More important, I need to find a weapon.
Doll Hands is back for round two.
She shoves the gurney away from her in a jerky motion, struggling for air as she straightens. I watch her clasp a hand to her side as she fights to breathe, and I can’t help but grin at the sight.
“My bad. Did I break your ribs?”
“Drop dead,” she bites out.
“You first.”
“You’re deluded,” she says. “This is not a victory. You have no idea what they’ll do to you now.”
The sirens kick into higher gear, wailing with renewed vigor. It’s probably a matter of seconds before this place is swarmed.
“Look,” I say, shouting a little over the chaos. “I don’t love this situation, either. It feels really weird to hit a girl. But considering the fact that you justmurderedme a minute ago, I think I’m entitled to retribution. So I’m giving you two options: show me how to get out of here, or hand over your knife.”
“Go to hell.”
“Did one of those broken ribs puncture a lung?” I ask, really smiling now. “Can you feel yourself dying?”
“Have you ever had your intestines ripped out of your body?” she says, her eyes flashing. “I hear it’s excruciating.”
“You have five seconds to decide,” I say, crossing my arms against my chest. “Five. Four. Three. Two—Fuck—”
I rear back as a searing pain sets fire to my arm. Apparently she chose option two: hand over her knife. I squeeze my eyes shut and yank the blade out of my shoulder, somehow managing to bite back a deluge of expletives.
“You have terrible aim,” I say, gritting my teeth as I wipe the weapon clean on my shirt. “The trick, if you haven’t figured it out yet, is to kill me instantaneously.” But when I look up at the girl, I can see why she threw the blade badly; she’s half-bent, holding on to the wall for support, her skin ashen. Still, I’m surprised by the look in her eyes. She doesn’t seem angry anymore.
She shakes her head, almost disappointed when she says, “Idiot.”
Then she retrieves a syringe from her pocket, bites off the cap with her teeth, and plunges the needle into her thigh. She nearly screams as she straightens, her chest heaving as she draws air into her lungs.
A thunder of footsteps echoes down the hall.
I turn, bloodied and confused, to discover a swarm of military personnel storming toward me. I mean, obviously this was going to happen—The Reestablishment wasn’t going to just let me walk out of here—but,damn. They’re aiming weapons in my direction I’ve never even seen. Huge, heavy, scary, neon shit. They look awesome. I want one.
“Rosabelle,” a voice booms.
A man detaches from the group and steps forward, and I’m so busy processing the fact that the serial killer is named something as soft asRosabellethat I nearly miss the sight of his veiny metal arm. It also takes me a second to notice that he looks insane. Blue light glazes over his eyes, pulses at his temples, radiates across his bionic prosthetic. A feeling of unease prickles my skin.
Bad memories.
The Reestablishment once put my dad back together with similar sleek prosthetics. That sort of seamless limb regeneration was unheard of a decade ago, and while we still haven’t figured out how to replicate the tech precisely, it looks like it might be commonplace around here. Clearly, The Reestablishment has been advancing new levels of bioengineering, and, clearly, we’ve been underestimating their ability to progress in isolation. For over a decade we’ve been trying to prepare for whatever fresh hell they might be brewing out here, but our spy efforts fall short, over and over, because all our tech is built upon the entrenched systems and networks thattheyestablished.
The Reestablishment knows how to deactivate our satellites because they designed them; they know how to mess with our power plants because they built them; they know how to shut down our electrical grids because they engineered them.The civilians don’t seem to understand that outliers of The Reestablishment still live among us. When the regime fell, only the rarefied elite decamped to Ark Island. Only the highest-ranking, richest military families of The Reestablishment were even notified of the exit plan; they were the ones who could hop on private jets and avoid the fallout.
