“What did he want with you?”
Sawyer’s distorted voice came from right in front of her, the reflection in his helmet revealing her pale face.
Panic surged in her memory and her present, the things Iax had said to her surfacing too fast to stop.They can’t know.She couldn’t reveal what he’d told her, or they would dissect her piece by piece.
She glanced downward and noted the medical garb covering her body.
None of this is real.
Heart in her throat, she extended her hand behind her and took a step backward. Her fingers met the padded material of the cell, even though she couldn’t see it. Swallowing, she continued her search of the walls, looking for an escape.
Everything went in reverse again. Sawyer stole the administrator’s yacht, they walked backward through the orbital station, and onto the tether cabin.
Panic made the surrounding images swirl. The world became a cyclone as she lost control of her calm, her skin feeling too tight. Desperate, she lifted her right hand to her left forearm and found the space beneath the sleeve of her medical garb. For a moment, the smooth flesh there confused her, stalling her erratic breaths.
She dug her fingernails into her skin, trying to control the chaos enveloping her head and body.
Everything went black for a moment. She blinked against the change in lighting, hope swelling that this was the end, that giving herself pain tempered her memories, but then she saw her outpost in ruins, her rage surging as she fought to stop Sawyer.
The scene shifted, then jumped backward to a point before Sawyer had landed his ship. Before she’d known Iax as gentle and considerate. She stood in her kitchen, and the storm raged around the outpost.
She froze, still as a statue. The cutting board lay before her, surrounded by vegetables. She held a kitchen knife in her hand. It felt as real as any knife, and she knew that couldn’t be possible.
I’m in a white room.
But she wasn’t, and watched as the knife slid into the potato, slicing it in half before chopping it into cubes.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
Each stroke was sure and precise. She lifted the small pieces with the flat of the knife and slid them into the boiling water. She tried to resist the movements, but the need to do something with her hands overtook her, along with the need for a distraction from… something.
No. Someone.
“What is it you do?” Iax stood in front of her, his reflective eyes glinting in the overhead lights.
Her heart pounded. She shouldn’t be here. She needed to keep this part of her life a secret because… because…
The thought became elusive, replaced by the immediacy of the moment.
“I’m making soup,” she answered, continuing to chop and drop the bits into the pot.
“Your machine would make soup.”
“Doing it myself is relaxing, focuses me. Foster—”
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thudwent the knife. She knew what came next. The lab. The blood test. Her lips went numb with horror.
But then the scene reversed. She couldn’t stop it, and it landed somewhere even worse.
Iax stood in front of her, only a meter away, exactly as he had the morning after he’d first arrived.
Pure terror crawled across her skin. Her heart lived in her throat and pounded in her head. They would see it all. Everything. They controlled her mind like a media feed, and she had no way to stop it.
“Are you going to change me into Calypson?” she asked him.
“No,” he replied, his voice monotone.
No, no, no! Wynn choked on the memory. She couldn’t go down this path. Her life depended on it.
