I step back, and he shoves me on the mattress before I get to the door.
He pushes me down hard, and the weight of him pins me. I try to fight him off me, but he’s stronger. Heavier.
I hear myself saydon’tandpleaseandstop,but none of it matters, and none of it has ever mattered.
“Please,” I plead one last time.
He puts his mouth against my ear. “You’re not going anywhere, Amy. You’re trapped,” he says softly. “Just not where you started.”
Saint
Present Day
The silence in Unit 9 isn’t empty. It’s pressurized, a contained chamber of every scream I’ve had to swallow since I was sixteen. The walls are high-gloss white, designed to reflect your own face back at you until you can’t distinguish where the madness ends and sanity begins.
They call this place the Sanctuary. It’s a sublevel beneath Kenyan University, where the elite bury what they don’t want anyone to know about.
I am the biggest kept secret.
The concentration of the antipsychotic in my blood is diminishing. I feel it going, the fog thinning by degrees, the world sharpening back into edges.
Every breath is a small collection of needles. The fluorescent hum overhead is stitched directly into my optic nerves.
I’m strapped to a mattress that smells of industrial bleach and evaporated defeat. The cuffs are thick leather. They don’t give, not against ordinary muscle.
Mine is not ordinary, but I know that pulling against them now would be effort spent on the wrong problem.
“What’s unresolved becomes immortal,” I whisper to the corner of the ceiling.
Dr. Wick wrote it in her leather notebook last week. She thought it was a symptom. She didn’t understand it was a prophecy.
I close my eyes and replay the night in the dormitory. The draft under her door. The smell of her fear and something underneath, something warm I’ve been turning over in my mind like a stone in water.
I picture her fingers closing around the note.
Slightly trembling.
The delicate articulation of her wrist.
She thinks she escaped something.
She doesn’t know I’ve been the thing holding everyone else back.
“Saint? You’re tracking again. Good.”
The nurse is a blur of starch and peppermint over the clipboard. The look of a person observing a science project that might explode but loves to fuck in secret, but loves to fuck in secret.
“Go away,” I rasp. “Before I find a way to make you part of the floor.”
She doesn’t flinch. They train them for this. “Dr. Wick will be in at six. Try to keep your heart rate down.”
She leaves.
The door clicks.
I stare at the ceiling and count the holes in the acoustic tile. Four hundred. I’m on four hundred and thirteen when the lock turns again.
It’s too early for Dr. Wick. And this door doesn’t open. It’s shoved.
