Cecily drops her gaze, and I follow it to a cell phone resting near her foot.
“Don’t even think about it,” I say, and lift the syringe. “Kick the phone onto the floor.”
Cecily hesitates. I can practically hear the gears turning in her head.
“Kick it. Now.”
Gently, she nudges the phone off the bed. It clatters to the floor.
“My dad will be back soon. So whatever you’re—”
“You know,” I say. “You know what’s happening down here. And you didn’t do anything.”
“I didn’t know,” Cecily says.
“Bullshit.”
“I didn’t! Not at first.”
“But you know now.”
She winces. “I—”
“And you still let him do this,” I say. The fingers of my left hand curl into a fist around the syringe. “You let him kill them all.”
Cecily shakes her head. The wordkillhits her like a slap, and I wish it physically hurt her as much as it does mentally.
“How does the girl who gets up every three hours to bottle-feed kittens justify all this? I thought you were nice. I thought you were a good person.”
“I am,” she says, too fast to be believable. I’m unsure which of us she’s trying to convince. “You have to understand, if there was any other way—”
“I don’t have to understand, actually. Your father will kill me either way.”
Cecily flinches. Her indecision plays out on her face; the dip of her chin, the red flush in her cheeks, the quick rise and fall of her chest.
“I don’t want to die,” she says eventually, like it’s enough. Like father, like daughter.
A mangled, bitter laugh leaves my lips.
“You don’t want to die?” I ask. My next words are practically a snarl. “Neither do we.”
“I don’t have a choice—”
“You had a choice. You made the wrong one,” I say. And before she can spew more bullshit, more meaningless apologies that rest on the backs of dead kids, I cross the room. She stiffens, pushing back, but a single lift of the syringe is enough to make her still.
“Your options are sedatives or straps. And you’re lucky I’m giving you a choice at all,” I say.
Cecily eyes me and the syringe in my hand like she’s trying to gauge whether I’m serious or not. And maybe I wouldn’t have been a few days ago. I might have injected her and left it at that.
As much as I’d love to knock her out and leave her, she’s the only one who knows how to get out of this place. I’ll need her.
She struggles when I loop the straps around her ankles, but it’s easy enough to cinch them into place. Harder on the wrists, which she fights, but all I have to do is remind her about the needle, and she lies back. Makes empty pleas as I step away from her.
I snatch the phone off the ground.
“That won’t work,” she says. “No service—”
“Then you won’t mind if I take it,” I say.
