by Rysa Walker
When I close the cabinet, a word has appeared near the center of the mirror, drawn in the condensation as if by someone’s finger:
PEEKABO
I step back quickly, nearly slipping on the damp tile. The door behind me is still locked, although I’m sure they have keys.
Is the word misspelled? Or did I just catch the steam graffiti artist before he or she could finish?
As I watch, a second letter o forms—PEEKABO becomes PEEKABOO. Then on the next line, the letters pop up one at a time as I watch: WELCOME TO THE WARREN!
The word triggers an Emily memory of a book about rabbits. Watership Down. The rabbits lived in tunnels called warrens.
A heart appears at the end of the welcome, then the entire thing vanishes, as though an invisible hand has wiped the slate clean. All that remains is a damp smear in the middle of the mirror.
I dress under the blankets again. Maybe hallucinations are an aftereffect of whatever drug Dacia made me inhale last night?
My heartbeat has almost returned to normal when the door opens—they don’t even bother with the pretense of knocking this time. It’s a different woman. Her name tag reads Bellamy, and she’s wearing a khaki shirt like the guy I saw on the TV. An odd-looking gun is holstered on the hip of her dark-brown pants. She doesn’t look friendly. She doesn’t even make eye contact.
“Come with me.”
I grab my phone and start to stick it in the back pocket of my jeans.
“Leave it. No personal items.”
I drop the phone on the bed and follow her into the hallway. Her hair is pulled back in a tight knot, and there’s a distinct military influence in her stride. She grabs my arm right above the elbow. I fight the urge to yank it away, since I’m guessing that would be seen as uncooperative, and fall into step beside her. Everything about her says no chitchat, so I don’t bother asking about Deo or where we’re headed. I just walk quietly and try to observe as much as I can about our surroundings.
Plain gray walls, with no paintings or other decoration. No windows. The floors are a slightly darker shade of gray. We pass a half-dozen doors numbered in the eighties, then turn right. Maybe twenty yards later, I see Timm-Whatever, my cheerful personal alarm clock. He’s in a cubicle off to the side, typing something into the computer, and doesn’t look up when we walk by.
Still no windows or exit doors. No exit signs, even.
As we pass Room 81, I hear a loud thud and the door vibrates slightly, like it was hit by a shoe or something. Then someone starts yelling. I can’t make out the words, but the voice is high-pitched, angry. Frightened.
“That’s . . . that’s a kid.” I pause and turn back for a moment.
“No,” she says, but I can’t tell if she’s disagreeing or saying it’s none of my business.
I glance at the door one more time. Thump. Thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump. The door is vibrating again, but as I look more closely, it’s not a normal vibration. Only the center third of the door seems affected. It seems to bulge into the hallway a fraction of an inch and then returns to normal.
Or maybe I just didn’t get enough sleep . . .
Bellamy yanks my arm. “Follow me now.”
We eventually reach a second computer station. Behind it is a woman, her eyes glued to a large wall-mounted monitor divided into four numbered squares. The images on the screen are identical—a room with two chairs facing each other across a table. The only difference is that the chairs in the rooms numbered 1 and 4 are occupied.
The woman looks up when we approach, avoiding eye contact with me as she hands Bellamy a clipboard. “We’ve got you in Testing Room 3,” she says.
“Standard entry tests, right?”
“Yeah. Just cover the checklist for now. They’ll either start differentiation after lunch or first thing tomorrow, since you’re getting a late start. Don’t rush it. This one is a 2A, so take whatever time and precautions you need.” The woman’s gaze passes over my face as she says the last part. Then she looks away quickly, as though she’s frightened or maybe disgusted.
I follow Bellamy. When we’re a few steps away, she stops and turns back. “Oh, get someone to check in on 81.”
“Again?”
The woman gives Bellamy a look I can’t interpret, but Bellamy doesn’t respond to the question.
The doors in this corridor aren’t numbered, but Bellamy opens the second one on the left. She nods toward one of the chairs, and I search for the camera as I sit. It’s mounted in the rear of the room, pointing directly at the table. I’m tempted to wave at the woman from the hallway, since I’m certain her monitor now shows Bellamy and me in square number 3. But that would probably be construed as smart-ass, so I keep my hands folded in my lap.
Bellamy extracts a small deck of plain gray cards from a drawer beneath the table and places them next to her. Then she picks up the clipboard and pen.
“Subject is Anna Elizabeth Morgan, age seventeen-point-nine-two. Race?” She waits a moment and then repeats the question. “Your race?”
“Oh. Caucasian.”
“Hispanic?”
Might as well get this over with. I set my mouth in a firm line and say, “I’m not answering any more questions until someone proves to me that Taddeo Ramos is safe.”
Bellamy sighs and places the clipboard on the table. “I have no information. My assignment is to conduct your entry tests. Once those are complete, you’ll be assigned a handler and you can ask her or him whatever questions you like. You have two options. Answer my questions or I will handcuff you and escort you back to your room—and if you resist, I will tase you first. Then we’ll start this process again tomorrow morning, at which point you’ll face the same two choices. Rinse and repeat until you decide to cooperate. The quickest way for you to get the information you want is to let me do my job.”
Her voice isn’t unkind or angry. It’s just bored, and very matter-of-fact. Monotone, even.
“So, I’ll repeat. Are you Hispanic?”
“To the best of my knowledge, no.”
She reels off a few more demographic questions, several of which aren’t relevant for me, since I have no idea what level of education my parents achieved. Then Bellamy puts the clipboard aside, peels off the first card in the deck, and slides it toward me. There are five colored circles on a gray background—red, blue, yellow, white, and black.
“In this test,” she says, “you will be asked to predict the color of the card before I draw it. Please respond with one of the colors in front of you. Do you have any questions?”
“I’m supposed to guess?”
“Focus on the card and make a prediction. What is the first card in the deck?”
“Blue.”
She draws the top card, looks at it, and puts it facedown in the open drawer next to her. I have no idea whether I’ve guessed right or wrong. Then she taps the deck and I make my next prediction. “Green.”
Bellamy huffs and taps the card in front of me. “Not one of the options. Please focus and try again.”
“Oh, sorry. Yellow?”
She puts that card facedown on top of the first one, and we move on. Occasionally she puts a card in a second stack, but most of the cards follow the first two.
When we complete the deck, Bellamy counts the shorter stack—which I suspect are my correct guesses—and jots something down on her clipboard. Then we do the whole thing again.
After that round is finished, she shuffles and slides the deck to me. “Now, I want you to draw a card and focus on the color. After I make a prediction, place the card faceup on the table.”
I comply. If she gets one correct—about one-third of the time, which seems a bit unusual—she pulls the card toward her. At the end, she writes something on the sheet and then pulls out another deck of cards. Shapes, this time.
“Couldn’t they just automate this?” I ask. “Seems like it would be pretty easy to have a computer program . . .”
“They could automate some of them. But sev
eral experts think that the machinery blocks . . .” She stops, apparently realizing that she’s been conversing with me as though I’m a human being. “It works better this way.”
Personally, I think these so-called experts have been reading too many Dresden Files books, but I keep that opinion to myself.
She taps the card on top of the deck.
“Star.”
And so it goes for the next hour and a half. Shapes, then numbers, then words. Then we move on to something that sounds a lot like remote viewing. I’m supposed to let my mind go blank and think of a location, then draw what I see.
I take the sheet of paper and pencil. “Just so you know, I can’t draw. Even my stick figures are unrecognizable.”
“Do your best. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”
But even as I’m telling her that my drawing abilities are crap, I have the sense that it’s not necessarily true. It used to be true. But I have this new memory of Molly and Taylor, sitting in someone’s kitchen, sketching a bowl of fruit. Molly’s good. Maybe even better than Taylor.
Another memory to shove inside the invisible fortress. At this rate, I’m going to need to add a few rooms. So many of Molly’s memories seem to be of things she did at the Quinn house.
As I stare at this blank sheet of paper, the only locations that come to mind are the house in Havre de Grace and the ruined building that was in the last sketch Taylor showed us, the one with the columns. I’m definitely not in that building, but the lack of windows or exits has me wondering whether I might not be below it. And who knows—Deo could be somewhere else entirely.
I’m tempted to draw that building, if only to shake things up a bit. But that might build expectations I’d never be able to match a second time.
So, with two minutes to go on the timer, I do a crude sketch of the outside of Bartholomew House. Home sweet home. It’s definitely not the location I’m seeing in my head, but they won’t know that unless they’ve found a way to read my mind without the Pop Rocks sensation I had before.
And they could be doing precisely that. Just because I had a warning with Dacia Badea doesn’t mean—
Bellamy comes back in. “Finished?”
I nod and push the sketch toward her. She adds it to her clipboard, her face completely blank, as usual. I’m tempted to ask her if that’s part of her job description. The ideal candidate will have a monotone voice and a face incapable of displaying human emotion.
“You have a little over an hour before someone picks you up for the second set of tests. We’ll stop by the cafeteria and you can grab some lunch to take back to your room.”
After Bellamy hands off the clipboard to the woman at the monitors, we turn down a different hallway. It’s quiet, just like last time, until we reach the end, where I start picking up sounds off to the right. They get louder when we turn, but it’s not a boisterous noise. It sounds a bit like a classroom doing group work . . . the low-level hum of many voices that are supposed to be keeping the volume down.
The many-quiet-voices theory is proven correct when Bellamy opens the door. A guard stands right inside the door, and the room is fairly crowded. Two guys who look a bit younger than I am go into a smaller room with sofas and what looks like a pool table in the back. A half dozen or so people are clustered around it.
What surprises me is the age of the people in both the cafeteria and the room beyond. I’d say twenty of the forty or fifty people eating at the tables are between five and twelve. The kids are seated in groups of four or five, monitored by an adult in a uniform like Bellamy’s. Another dozen or so look like they’re in their teens or early twenties, but the vast majority are female. The younger group seems pretty evenly split between boys and girls. The remaining people in the cafeteria are older, and most of them seem to be employees.
I take my time picking out food, surreptitiously scanning the faces on this side of the room. And I get the sense that a number of them are checking me out, too. Not the employees, but the others. They don’t all turn and stare, nothing obvious like that, but their eyes dart away quickly when I look in their direction. Twice I feel a mental tap, similar to the feeling when Dacia scanned me, and I struggle to keep my walls in place.
But I don’t see Deo.
He’s not here.
I jump and turn to Bellamy. “Did you say something?”
Even before she shakes her head, even as I’m asking the question, I already know better. That voice was inside my head. Not a voice I know, either—it’s a young girl.
And my walls are up.
Try Room 67. Tell him Pavla says he has nice zadek. So do you.
That’s followed by laughter and another girl saying, “Oh, you are so bad, Maria!” But that voice is fainter and not in my head. I spin around and see two girls in their early teens. When one of them realizes that I’m watching the two of them, she collapses into giggles again. The third girl at the table seems to be off in her own world.
I put a yogurt on my tray and go over to the salad bar, watching the nearby tables out of the corner of my eye as I pile toppings onto my lettuce at random. One of the few adults not in a uniform is sitting by himself at a table next to me. At first, I think he’s really old, because his hair is long, gray, and matted. A thick layer of salt . . . or maybe it’s sugar? . . . is scattered before him on the table.
As I step closer, he whips his head up and I realize he’s not as old as I’d thought. Maybe midforties? His pale eyes briefly lock onto mine. Then he looks back down at the table and uses his finger to write something in the pile of white granules in front of him.
NOT DEO
I take a step toward him, to ask what he knows about Deo, but he erases the two words and writes
HURRY UP BITCH
“Hurry up,” Bellamy says. She doesn’t actually say the word bitch, but it’s definitely implied by her tone. “I’d like to have time for lunch, too.”
The man stares at someone sitting one table over for a second, then runs his hands through the pile of white and begins writing something about tomatoes.
He doesn’t know anything about Deo. He’s simply pulling stray thoughts from people’s minds. From my mind, too, which has me worried about the structural integrity of my walls. It also makes me wonder briefly if he’s the phantom graffiti artist from my bathroom mirror, but I can’t imagine him drawing a curvy little heart at the end of a word.
“I’m nearly done,” I say to Bellamy. “Just let me grab a sandwich.” I’ve got more food on the tray already than I’ll ever eat, but the case that holds the wrapped sandwiches will get me closer to the three tables on the other side of the room, and one of them includes a group of teens.
I grab a sandwich without even looking, my eyes fixed on that table. There’s one guy with dark hair, but he’s too heavy to be Deo.
One of the men at the next table over catches my eye, however. His back is to me, but something about him is familiar. He’s tall, muscular, with light hair, and dressed in the same khaki-and-brown uniform as Bellamy.
“I said it’s time to go.” Bellamy is behind me now.
I’d really like to stay and get a closer look, but Bellamy’s moving her hand to the holstered taser. Damn, she must be really hungry, if she’s willing to tase me for cutting a few extra seconds into her lunch hour.
“I’m coming, okay?” As I say the words, the guy turns slightly toward me. I can still only see part of his face, but it’s enough that the resemblance clicks into place.
He looks like Daniel.
I have a different escort for the afternoon round of testing, although there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between her and Bellamy. Same uniform, same attitude, and pretty much the same response when I ask for information about Deo before the testing begins. The only noticeable change is that several of the afternoon tests are on computers. I guess the experts who thought technology and psychic abilities don’t mix lost a few battles along the way.
As before, I have no clue whethe
r I pass the tests or fail them. In a few cases, I can’t even tell what the test is trying to measure. All I know is that each time they ask me for an answer, I pull it out of thin air. I don’t see a blue card or a red card or any card in my mind, no matter how hard I focus. It’s pure guesswork every time.
Later in the day, they tape thin wires to my scalp and ask me to move various objects with my mind. I play along, but it’s all I can do to take them seriously. I don’t exactly doubt that some people can do these things. In fact, given my own abilities and what I’ve learned over the past few days, I’d say it’s entirely possible.
But even if some people are telekinetic, why would they assume that I’d voluntarily use that power during a stupid test? If I suddenly discover I can move objects with my thoughts, the first time they’ll have any indication will be after I find Deo, when I fling every object in the building into their path to block them as we run for the exit.
Assuming I ever locate an exit. We passed what looked like an elevator earlier, just down from the rooms where I was tested this morning, but I didn’t get a close look. This is the only large building I’ve ever been in that didn’t have at least a few signs pointing you toward the exits in case of emergency.
The afternoon session wraps up around six thirty. I follow my escort toward the cafeteria, confirming along the way that it was indeed an elevator I saw earlier. There’s a security panel next to it however, so I doubt it would work without one of those bracelets.
I’m not the slightest bit hungry given how much I piled onto my tray at lunch, and even if I was, there are leftovers back in my room. But I got more information about this place from five minutes in the cafeteria than I’ve gotten all day. And I’m really hoping I’ll get a closer look at Daniel’s doppelgänger. Although the more I think about it, the more I’m wondering if it isn’t Daniel himself. I keep remembering that weird exchange between him and Dacia at the beginning of the meeting at the police station. He lied about his eye color, and I don’t know which I find more puzzling—the fact that he lied about it, or the fact that she believed his lie. The lighting was less than perfect in the interrogation room, but she was only a few feet away from him.
