Blink and hold.
Release.
I’ve been in a state of suspended disorientation since I was discharged from the hospital. There’s so much I don’t understand about what’s happening.
I have no idea what I’m doing here.
I don’t know why I’m being offered a room in a house; if I were back on the Ark I’d be impaled to a ceiling right now, held in place by blades of directed energy. Sebastian would be overseeing my torture, smiling meekly up at me while someone burned pinprick holes into my organs—never enough to kill me right away, but enough to remind me, as I watched my blood drip onto the ground below, that I am not my own master.
That I cannot save my sister.
Once again, I can’t decide whether the rebels are stupid or surprisingly conniving. These electric manacles fry and snap apart with the right power surge, but the trouble isn’t finding a way to introduce the right current, it’s surviving the subsequent voltage spike.
I’m still a little too weak to risk it.
For now, I’m waiting to understand whether this is some new trap, just as the rehab facility was a glorified prison. It’s worse for not knowing what they’re thinking; the dread is worse. The pretense of freedom is always so much worse.
There are no cameras, anywhere.
The build of the house is old enough that any renovations or modifications to include subtle spyware would’ve presented an inconsistency. As far as I can tell, this place is just as unsecured as the rehab facility; perhaps less so.
This oversight strikes me as impossible.
Then again, I don’t know what I might find in that bedroom. Perhaps someone is waiting for me in there; perhaps I’ll be tortured where I’m expected to rest. In the early years, when I was still learning how to protect my mind, my true feelings about The Reestablishment would sometimes break loose during interrogations. After I’d been punished, and after Sebastian had unhooked me from the wall, Soledad often forced me to sleep in a shallow pool of my own blood.
Soledad is dead, I remember with a start.
James killed him.
A rush of feeling moves through me at the thought of James, my heart threatening to push beyond the veil of death. I crush it back down violently, killing my pulse.
Too much.
I unclench, allowing myself to come back to life a little. The beat is faint at first, then stronger.
“Hi? Hello?” Nazeera steps directly in front of me, ducking her head to meet my eyes. “Can you hear me?”
I meet her gaze slowly.
“Your room is over there,” she says again, gesturing once more to something out of sight. She stares at me like I might be an idiot, then finally walks away, but not before shootingme an uncomfortable smile. She begins to monologue as she strides ahead, turning her back on me.
I’m not planning on killing her, but if I were, this seems like a dangerous mistake.
I am now alone with the screwdriver.
25
Rosabelle
“As you can see,” she’s saying, “the house is pretty small. It’s more of a cottage, really. I still need to fix the roof. The recent storm took off a few shingles, but we got lucky, because there was no water damage inside. There are two bedrooms. Your bathroom doubles as the guest bathroom, which means there’s no private access—”
I sit down inside of myself.
I find a dark corner in my head and make myself small, drawing my metaphorical knees to my metaphorical chest. Here, in this constructed quiet, I allow myself to feel the real speed of my heart, the true temperature of my blood, the actual levels of my hunger—and the findings are worse than I feared. Catastrophic.
I need to be alone.
I desperately want to talk to James.
