Earplugs.Something about that niggles at me, a familiarity that I can’t quite seem to latch on to.
“Marja!” He sounds closer now. In the hall maybe? He must do this every night. Or maybe even throughout the day.
I shudder against the sweat-dampened and sticky sheets, imagining him approaching me while I’m awake but completely unaware.
My chest feels tight, the sensation of the walls closing in on me. So many of them, invisible but still here, crowding in on the living. That’s why the LINA had never bothered me. Yes, it wassmall, but that limitedallthe occupants. The fewer people around, the fewer sightings I’d have.
A flash of motion in the upper right corner of the room catches my attention, and I crane my head in time to see Voller saluting me, raising that drill. The spatter of the blood sounds so much louder in the quiet dimness of my room.
Before he’s vanished completely, Lourdes appears, her sightless eyes trying to track, her head cocked as she searches.I don’t understand.
A whimper rises in my throat. I don’t know if I can survive this without the pills.
My fingers scrabble against the sheets, searching for them. But they’ve scattered out of reach.
The visitations, from familiar faces and not, continue. Some of them touch me, cool hands brushing against my skin when I cannot escape, cannot move away from their grasping fingers.
Others simply walk through me as though I’m not there, which is sometimes worse. The shudder and soul-deep coldness that comes with the reminder that the solid sanctity of your body is an illusion.
The whispers in my ear, the shouts of despair, the weeping reaches a cacophonous level, drowning out even the loud buzzing in my bad ear that has returned.
A scream bubbles to my lips; only the barest restraint keeps it back. Hot tears trickle down my face, and I can’t reach them to wipe them away.
My mother’s hand brushes my cheek.Be careful, love.I hear her in my head. A hallucination, a ghost? I can’t tell anymore, if I ever could.
Kane appears at the foot of the bed, hands on his hips, his shirt bloodied beneath his open jumpsuit, but the sight of him is a relief. He is brighter, in bolder colors than the Tower ghosts. They seem to fade around him.
He smiles at me, that warm but worried expression I’m well familiar with from him, and suddenly, I’m no longer strapped in abed but standing next to him, in a dimly lit suite on theAurora,after everything went to hell. Literally, perhaps.
Recognition clanks in me, like an off-key note. This is… this is amemory. I remember this.
In a moment, he’s going to reach out and touch my chin. And instead of the caress of cool phantom fingertips, I feel the rough, calloused warmth of his hand.“Are you sure?”
Then the old man ghost reappears, walking right through Kane. “Marja?”
Kane vanishes and in a dizzying moment of reorientation, I’m back in my bed again, strapped in. Sure about what? What was Kane talking about?
The man in my visitor chair moans and drops his makeshift knife, and once more, I hear the spatter of Voller’s blood hitting the floor. Another memory or something else?
Memories, visions, hallucinations all jumbled up in my head until I can no longer tell the difference? How will I know what’s real? And this is here, in the Tower, not on theAurora,where it will surely be worse.
I can feel myself spiraling, my breath racing in and out.Keep it together, Claire. Keep it—
“I don’t understand,” Lourdes says, right near my ear. The whisper of her exhale feels cool against my skin. Memory or visitation? I can’t tell. I can’t fucking tell. Will the rest of my life be like this, either locked up and drugged to the gills or seeing things that may or may not be real?
Panic bursts in me, then, like a river overflowing a dam.
And I scream.
22
“You look like shit,” Reed Darrow says loudly, disgust curling the words.
His voice penetrates the haze, and I peel my sticky eyelids open to see him next to my bed, in another of his precise suits, staring down at me with irritation.
It takes me a moment to re-collect myself. I shift, trying to sit up. The restraints are gone and Reed is here; it must be morning. But early. Because I’m not dressed yet, and the injection site on my left arm is still sore. That small pain helps clear some of the fog. Screaming last night brought attendants running with a sedative.
I made it. I survived the night.
