Audrey held her stare. “Which do you recommend?”
The woman’s lip curled. “Depends whose side you’re on.”
This woman looked like she was on the last leg of her sanity, but Audrey had to focus on what she might know.
Then, the woman hocked on the floor between them.
“If you’re here for the Separatists, you’ll live,” she whispered. “If you’re here for the Aggregate...” Her eyes slid toward the hall. “He’ll open your mind just like the rest of us.”
Guards stormed in and dragged the unknown female detainee back out.
Patience wasa skill Audrey had learned in prison—but this? This was the kind of waiting that hollowed a soul.
Medics fixed up her wounded thigh and kept Taryn alive—enough for the next round. The bathroom had a shower. Audrey washed Taryn’s wounds and her own clothes, scrubbing until her skin split. At first, Taryn flinched from Audrey’s touch. But by the third day, she gave in to it without meaning to.
During the fourth night, Taryn woke, thrashing so hard the bedframe struck the wall. Audrey crossed the room before she was fully awake herself, catching Taryn’s wrists before she clawed her own face bloody.
Taryn stared at her for a long second, then sagged. Audrey eased her back down, wiped the dampness from her temples with the edge of the sheet. When Audrey tried to talk to Taryn about what was happening to her, she clammed up. She wasn’t interested in reliving the experience, even just to explain. But once, while Audrey pressed a wet cloth to a burn along her waist, Taryn whispered, “They’re not asking about routes anymore.”
Audrey stilled. “Then what are they asking?”
Taryn bit her chapped lip. “More about what happens inside the Fields, especially the tests they conduct in Field One.”
Audrey wanted to ask about the tests, but she didn’t want to make Taryn suffer any more. “Why did you join?” Audrey asked, without looking up from the torn skin at Taryn’s shoulder.
Taryn gave a breath that almost sounded like a laugh. “I thought rules meant safety.”
Audrey’s hands halted.
“I was wrong,” Taryn said.
Voices came through the walls. Even muted by the restraints, they pressed at Audrey’s skull until claustrophobia constricted her chest.
If Emerson were alive, Audrey knew he would probably come for Ryker—not her. But either way, she wouldn’t wait for rescue. That was just another trap. Audrey’s stubbornness burrowed inside her. Emerson was a means to Cary. Cary was the only one who might understand what she was becoming—whatever that was.
Several more days elapsed, and Audrey decided they were trying to turn waiting into its own kind of execution. Every time Taryn was dragged back, Audrey hated Ryker more—not abstractly, but personally. The wounds mattered less than the patience behind them. This was cruelty arranged with purpose, meant to teach the body and the mind the same lesson.
At night, while tending Taryn, Audrey heard him.
Ryker.
His voice permeated Taryn’s memories and Audrey’s sleep—not always clear enough to understand, but close enough to feel. He sounded patient and controlled, never hurried. It was the kind of voice that made terror worse because it never needed to rise. Indeed, Ryker never sounded angry in the memories—he sounded certain—and when his face surfaced, he remained eerily calm. From what Audrey could tell, he simply looked at prisoners until they told the truth.
Whenever his name surfaced in the fragments leaking from Taryn’s mind, the people around him changed.
Voices dropped. Eyes shifted.
Even the guards seemed careful about where they stood.
Sometimes dreams were only dreams. But sometimes, if a person was close enough, their mind merged into hers.
And these felt real.
She saw a younger-looking Cary with him. Ryker spoke softly to her outside a Field. Then, she saw them sharing a meal.
Her sister had been here.
Alive.
