They didn’t have to torture their darling prodigy, did they? Not when I would simply crumble from within.
This room was everything I loved about my family. The food and furniture we made ourselves, from scratch. The clothes passed down from hand to hand. The history, which meant we were never alone. We carried our family not only in our phones, but in our mouths, against our skin.
But there was always something missing. Something as small as the right pill, and just as vital.
We were cruel. We were heartless.
Whatever happened to me in this room would hurt.
Which only meant that Sebastian and I had made the right choice. Our family needed to be pulled down, made powerless.
I had to protect Care from the Mortons, no matter the cost.
69
On my fourth day of captivity, Grandmother Elizabeth came through the door.
She was wearing an autumn coat of red and brown checks, like she’d come from a ramble in the forest. Her knitting bag was over her shoulder. She sat down in the overstuffed armchair.
I put down my Econ textbook, wondering what was in the bag. Needles and yarn? Or needles, knives, and thumbscrews?
I’m just meat.
Grandmother looked me up and down. “How are you this morning?”
“Well, thank you.” I glanced up at my small rectangle of skylight. The sky was blue, dotted with the puffy white clouds of approaching winter. Early afternoon. “A bit restless. I’ve climbed that wall a hundred times.”
“We’ll take a few holds out. How’s your head?”
“Passable.” I was imprisoned by my own family in a hidden room. “No seizures, if that’s what you mean.”
“Not to worry. You don’t need those pills anymore.”
I stared at her. I’d had four days to think about the pills. About the convulsions I didn’t remember having, in those first blurry days after the crash.
“They weren’t really for seizures, were they?”
Her slow smile confirmed my guess. “Clever Jessica. Have you heard of a class of drugs called empathogens?”
I shook my head.
“From the root wordempathy.” She reached into her knitting bag, and a tremor went through me. Saws? Scalpels? Forceps?
She pulled out the sweater she’d begun for me in the hospital. It was finished—scarlet, with black bands at the waist, cuffs, and collar.
I stood up, crossed the room, and took it from her. The sweater slipped over my shoulders like a gentle dream.
“Thank you, Grandmother.”
“You look lovely.”
“Empathogens,” I said carefully. “You gave me drugs to increase my…empathy?”
“Empathy, openness, sympathy, the experience of emotional communion. All those ordinary words for serotonin and dopamine. You must tell me, Jessica—what was it like?”
I moved away from her and sat down on my bed again. What little certainty I had left was crumbling. What if it hadn’t been the car crash that changed me? What if it hadn’t been Mozart?
What if it hadn’t been Hiromi?
