You’re young, Laurel. You’re resilient. You’re in protective custody. I wanted to believe that with time, Laurel was going to be just fine, but my half sister had been born and bred to take a seat at the Masters’ table. I had no idea if she was ever going to be okay.
In the weeks that Laurel had been in FBI custody, no one had been able to get any actionable information out of her. She didn’t know where they’d been holding her. She couldn’t—or wouldn’t—describe the Masters.
“Based on the level of deterioration on that merry-go-round, I would estimate that this playground was built between 1983 and 1985.” Sloane came to stand beside me. It had been Agent Sterling’s suggestion to bring another Natural with us. I’d chosen Sloane because she was the most childlike herself—and the least likely to realize just how psychologically scarred Laurel really was.
Sloane squeezed my hand comfortingly. “In the Estonian sport of kiiking, players stand on a massive swing and attempt to rotate it three hundred and sixty degrees.”
I had two choices: I could either stand here listening to every playground-related factoid Sloane could think of in her attempt to calm my nerves or I could talk to my sister.
As if she could hear my thoughts, Laurel pivoted, tearing her gaze away from the swing set and bringing it to me. I made my way toward her, and she turned her attention back to the swing. I knelt next to her, giving her a moment to acclimate to my presence. Sloane came and sat down one swing over.
“This is my friend Sloane,” I told Laurel. “She wanted to meet you.”
No response from Laurel.
“There are two hundred and eighty-five different species of squirrel,” Sloane announced as a greeting. “And that’s not counting any number of prehistoric squirrel-like species.”
To my surprise, Laurel tilted her head to the side and smiled at Sloane. “Numbers,” she said clearly. “I like numbers.”
Sloane gave Laurel a companionable smile. “Numbers make sense, even when nothing else does.”
I focused on Laurel as she took a tentative step toward Sloane. Numbers are comforting, I thought, trying to see the world through my little sister’s eyes. Familiar. To the men who brought you into this world, numbers are immutable. A higher order. A higher law.
“Do you like swings?” Sloane asked Laurel. “They’re my second favorite use of centripetal force.”
Laurel frowned as Sloane began swinging gently back and forth. “Not like that,” my sister told Sloane firmly.
Sloane slowed to a stop, and Laurel stepped forward. She reached out to trail her tiny fingers along the links of the swing’s chains. “Like this,” she told Sloane, pressing her wrist against the metal chain.
Sloane stood and mimicked Laurel’s motion. “Like this?”
Laurel lifted the swing and wrapped the chain carefully around Sloane’s wrist. “Both hands,” she told Sloane. As my four-year-old sister painstakingly wrapped the free chain around Sloane’s other wrist, my brain finally processed what she was doing.
Chains on the wrists. Shackles.
I’d wondered what Laurel saw when she looked at the swing set, and now I knew.
“Bracelets,” Laurel said, sounding as happy as I’d ever heard her. “Like Mommy’s.”
If I hadn’t already been on the ground, those words might have brought me to my knees.
“Mommy wears bracelets?” I asked Laurel, trying to keep my voice even and calm.
“Sometimes,” Laurel replied. “It’s part of the game.”
“What game?” My mouth was dry, but I couldn’t afford to stop talking. This was the closest Laurel had ever come to telling me about the way she’d been forced to live, about our mother.
“The game,” Laurel repeated, shaking her head like I’d just asked a very silly question. “Not the quiet game. Not the hiding game. The game.”
There was a beat of silence. Sloane picked up the slack. “Games have rules,” she commented.
Laurel nodded. “I know the rules,” she whispered. “I know all of the rules.”
“Can you tell Sloane the rules, Laurel?” I asked. “She wants to hear them.”
My sister stared at Sloane’s wrists, still wrapped in chains. “Not Laurel,” the little girl said fiercely. “Laurel doesn’t play the game.”
My name is Nine. That was one of the first things my sister had ever said to me. At the time, the words had sent chills down my spine because the group we were looking for had nine members. Seven Masters. The Pythia. And the child of the Pythia and the Masters, the ninth member of their sadistic little circle.
Nine.
“Laurel doesn’t play the game,” I repeated. “Nine does.”
Laurel’s tiny fingers tightened around the chain on the swing. “Mommy knows,” she said fiercely.
“Knows what?” I asked, my heart beating in my throat. “What does Mommy know?”
“Everything.”
There was something off about the set of my half sister’s features. Her face was strangely devoid of emotion. She didn’t look like a child.
Not Laurel. Her words echoed in my head. Laurel doesn’t play the game.
I couldn’t do this to her. Whatever she was reliving, whatever she was playing, I couldn’t send my sister to that place.
“When I was little,” I said softly, “my mommy and I used to play a game. A guessing game.” My chest tightened as a lifetime of memories threatened to overwhelm me. “We’d watch people, and we’d guess. What they were like, what made them happy, what they wanted.”
Behavior. Personality. Environment. My mother had taught me well. Based on the other games my little sister had mentioned—the quiet game, the hiding game—I was betting my mom had taught Laurel some survival skills as well. What I wasn’t sure of was whether the game that “Nine” played was another of my mom’s creations, designed to mask the horrors of their situation—and the chains—from Laurel, or whether that one was a “game” of the Masters’ design.
Laurel reached out a tiny hand to touch my cheek. “You’re pretty,” she said. “Like Mommy.” She stared at and into me with unsettling intensity. “Is your blood pretty, too?”
The question trapped the air in my lungs.