The door of the observation room opens. More lab coats pour inside. They’re pushing a sheet-covered gurney with brown leather straps dangling off the sides. The sight of it starts a slow, nervous fluttering in my stomach.
I rise to my feet, my heart rate increasing. I back against a wall, pressing my palms into the cold concrete. A draki somewhere down the line begins making a racket. Almost like he’s digging at the concrete floor.
“What’s going on?” I call out, hoping one of them will answer me.
Lia obliges—her tone apologetic—as if she were somehow responsible. “They’ve come for you. It’s your turn.”
I gasp. “My turn for what?”
“At the beginning, they take each of us … put something inside of us.”
“What thing?” I shout, pacing rapidly inside my cell, back and forth, back and forth, as if my quick movements can somehow carry me away from all this.
“I don’t know really … some little shiny metal thing. It hurts only for a second.”
Shiny metal thing?
I flatten my palms against the wall again and shake my head from side to side as if I can will it all to stop, will the enkros not to come for me. I hadn’t anticipated this. I didn’t think they would have time to do anything bad to me before I was rescued.
“No point fighting it,” Roc volunteers, his voice grim. “We all have to go through it.”
We all have to go through it.
Somehow that doesn’t hearten me. Terror rises up my throat as I watch the humans stop on the other side of my Plexiglas cell. I’m not supposed to go through this. Just twenty-four hours. That was the plan. Not this. This was never the plan. And now it’s supposed to be sooner. Will said they were coming. Where are they? Did something go wrong?
I might have been the pliable creature before, when I first arrived and was playing a role, but I can’t afford to be that easy victim any longer. I can’t be anything but myself.
I’m ready for them when they crack open the Plexiglas. I blast a path of crackling fire, intent on keeping them from reaching me.
They back away at first, but then come again, crouching low. Several times they try, edging carefully into the cell. Each time I reward them with fire, pushing them back out.
I pant loudly, hot smoky breath falling from my lips. I refuse to wonder how long I can keep this up. I just tell myself I must. I have to last until Will gets here.
Their faces are angry and red as they slide the Plexiglas closed and regroup. They glare at me, their determination to have me, get me, break me, no less bright in their eyes.
“She was easy before,” one says, his voice very close to a whine.
Easy? Right.
One finally orders, “Enough of this. Go suit up.”
My stomach clenches and I know what suits he’s talking about. The fire-resistant ones they wore into the simulated forest to stop the gray one and me from killing each other.
Two suited men return. Apparently they thought two would be enough to handle me. I tense, my thighs quivering in readiness. A low growl swells from my throat.
The others step back as the two suited men square off in front of my cell, each holding the cattle prods I remember so well from when I first arrived.
The Plexiglas slides open again and I blast them with fire, following the trail of flames. I surge between their bodies, intent on escape.
I can’t get past them though. They zing me. My every muscle seizes as the electric current runs through me. A scream strangles and locks in my throat. I can’t move. No matter how my mind commands my body to move, to go—I can’t.
I drop to my knees, the impact jarring me deep to the bones. Someone’s behind me. I hear the loud peeling of tape. A hand grabs a fistful of my hair and forces my head back. My scalp burns.
Spots dance before my eyes.
It’s the duct tape again, flattened over my mouth.
He releases my hair and I drop forward, dead weight. I will myself to move, to rise. Nothing.
They don’t bother to bind my wings. Nor do they tie my wrists. I guess after that electric jolt, they’re not too worried about me lashing out. Two men grab my arms and drag me. My feet twitch, struggling to push flat in order to gain purchase on the slick tiles.
The room spins. Faces fly past. People. Like me. I want to shout, I’m like you! You’re hurting someone who does all the things, big and small, that you do. Someone who thinks and lives and loves and hates. And hates …
Hates all of you.
Fire burns through me like a fast-spreading disease. My lips tingle beneath the smothering tape.
They fling me on the gurney like I’m nothing. Already dead. A corpse. Except if I were a corpse they wouldn’t care to do whatever horrible things they have planned. They wouldn’t need to stick some shiny metallic thing inside me.
My mind whirls, brain racing wildly, trying to think what it could be. What it will do to me.
They strap me in, bear me down with leather straps fastened at my ankles and wrists.
And as if that were not enough, a leather band stretches across my chest and hips. They adjust it, squeeze and pull so tightly I can hardly breathe through my nose. I begin to feel dizzy.
One of the lab coats peers down at me. “She’s strong. Make sure they’re tight.” He frowns and resets his glasses on the bridge of his nose. “You sure she can’t burn through the tape?”
“She didn’t last time.”
Fools. I didn’t try the last time. Now I have to try.
I gather up the smolder from deep in my chest, let it rise. I push the scald up my windpipe and try to let it fill my mouth, but it doesn’t work. It’s not right. The tape is too constrictive. I can’t work my facial muscles, can’t get my mouth wide enough. Frustration burns a different kind of fire through me. Helpless rage.
I can’t flex my cheeks like I need to. I can’t even part my lips wide enough.
Desperate now, I struggle against my leather straps. Useless.
One of the lab coats smooths a hand over my sweaty brow. “Easy there, girl.”
Like I’m some dog to be soothed. If I had use of my mouth I’d spit on him. Wait—no. Burn him to a crisp. It’s what I’m born to do. Why the pride always thought I was so important. But I’m not. I can’t even help myself. I turn my head, shaking off his touch. He clucks his tongue and glances at the others.
He continues in that placating tone, “This will help us to take care of you, make sure you’re safe …”
I try to guess what that means. Is it some kind of implant to monitor my vitals? To what extent I can’t guess. Who knows what technology they’re capable of? All I know is that I don’t want it in me. I can’t let them put it in me.
“She’s feisty. This one is going to need serious management.”
“If anyone can do it you can. You’ve got such a tender way with them.”
Soft chuckles accompany me as I’m wheeled from the room, and I know that the last thing this guy has is a tender hand.
I crane my head and try to follow the direction we take down halls, which blur past me, try to spot any ways out of here. We travel a long distance and then turn left. From there we don’t go very far.
I’m pushed through a set of double swinging doors that remind me of the ones in hospital emergency rooms you see on TV. The inside of the room is just as sterile and unfriendly as an operating room.
I’m rolled to the center of the room beneath several blinding-bright lights. Other lab coats wait here. I glimpse a wide rectangular window to my right. Several people crowd in there, more lab coats and even some ordinary-looking people, dressed like civilians.
They peer through the glass curiously, like spectators at a circus come to witness the freak. And I guess that’s all I am to them. My head turns anxiously, taking it all in, helpless but still searching, scanning for a way out of this.
I look up at the lab coat examining me. He’s old. Older than any other enkros I’ve seen. The hair is so white and sparse on his head that I can see the paper-thin skin of his scalp.
His touch on my arm is cold. He squeezes a bit as though testing the texture and density of me.
Terror holds me, twists around my heart, and … and then something else intrudes. A growing thread of emotion weaves through me. The emotion spirals from a gnawing ache nibbling at my mind to a powerful wrench in my gut. It’s worry. Plain and simple. Only it’s not coming from me … it’s not me at all.
My every nerve bursts, overcome and slammed with a sudden onslaught of emotions.
His name shudders through me in a sigh. Cassian. He’s close. His worry and anxiety wash over me in prickles that flash cold and hot. Are they coming? I come alive with this possibility. Suddenly I don’t feel so wretchedly alone strapped down to this table.
With a new burst of energy, I focus on the old man above me and the way the scalpel glints with menace in the unforgiving light. His gloved hand trails up my neck, leaving a wake of gooseflesh.
“Now,” he murmurs, “let’s see.” His fingers turn my head and feel their way through my hair, stopping above my ear.
I struggle, turning in the opposite direction. My head is forced back into place with hard hands as a thick leather strap is pulled tight across my forehead, cutting into my skin.
The old man’s touch grows firmer as he delves between my strands of hair … looking for something, it seems, on my scalp. “This spot looks perfect,” he announces.
Two other lab coats peer behind him, observing his ministrations. The old man glances over his shoulder, his every motion impatient and annoyed. “Jenkins?”
“Yes, Doctor,” a voice replies in absolute deference.
A loud whirring fills the air. It’s an angry sound, alive and threatening. I can’t move my head. My eyes roll wildly, trying to see what it is.
Jenkins appears next to the doctor, a shaver in his hand.
I moan against the tape as the cold teeth of the shaver are pressed to my scalp, just above my ear. In a mere moment, a small place is shaved clean. A tuft of red-gold hair floats before my eyes. Then there is silence as the device is shut off.
“There we go.” The doctor slides his spectacles farther up his thin nose.
Jenkins takes the shaver and steps hurriedly to the side, just out of my vision. He returns with a pair of tongs that hold a patch of gauze. The cotton is stained a yellow-orange with some kind of ointment. “Here you go, Doctor.”
He takes the tongs and lowers the gauze to my head.
I cringe, unsure what it is, but brace for discomfort. The gauze hits me, cold and wet, but painless. He brushes it against the n**ed flesh of my scalp in several sweeps.
“Almost ready.” The doctor hands the tongs back and returns into my line of sight with a scalpel in his hand. I inhale a sharp breath through my nose. He doesn’t speak, simply frowns as he concentrates on my head.
“This will just hurt a pinch.” His gaze cuts to mine and fixes for a moment, and I wonder if he suspects that I can understand him.
I jerk against the strap holding my head down, straining my neck.
“It will hurt more if you move.” He holds my stare with those chilly eyes of his for a long moment, and there’s no wondering. He doesn’t think I understand him. He knows. And this only makes him more of a monster. Defeat spreads through me.
He gives a nod, satisfied I won’t jerk around on the gurney anymore. And I won’t. The last thing I want is for him to slit my throat or lop off my ear.
The blade lowers.
This is the part where I hold my breath and tell myself those swinging doors will fling open with Will and Cassian and Tamra. That they’ll charge inside the room and cut me free of the straps restraining me. Will’s arms will wrap around me. His lips will press to mine.
That’s the way it should happen. That’s the way it’s supposed to happen.