by Rysa Walker
I hear the faint noise of the cafeteria at the end of the corridor, but we stop before we reach it. “I thought we were going to the cafeteria.”
The woman doesn’t respond. She just gives me a guess-that’s-what-you-get-for-thinking look and waves her wrist in front of the security panel.
After the various tests today, I’d have sworn that the only psychic ability I have is my unfortunate knack for sweeping up psychic residue and hoarding it for future use. But there must be a tiny bit of intuition, some hint of precognitive awareness in the mix somewhere, because I quickly shift my thoughts about what I saw today in the cafeteria into my Recent Memories folder, then shove everything behind my second wall and raise every shield I can muster.
Dacia is curled up on a well-padded sofa, thumbing through something on her phone. Compared to the spartan testing rooms I’ve been in all day, the décor here is much more comfortable and welcoming.
Her smile when she sees me is far from welcoming, however. It’s closer to predatory. She’s discarded the power suit from our last encounter in favor of jeans and a sweater, similar to the one I’m wearing, although she fills it out much more dramatically.
That same little voice that told me she was here is whispering that I need to distract her—keep her off guard, maybe a little angry. Tell her more than she wants to know so that she has less reason to look closely at things I don’t want her to notice.
Dacia takes my arm from the guard whose name I’ve already forgotten. Bellamy II, I guess. The buzzing sensation starts instantly. “This will be quick. Ten minutes.”
Once the guard is gone, Dacia releases my arm and nods toward the sofa. “Don’t want to keep you too long. Because you are hungry . . .” Her voice rises, making it almost a question, like she’s unsure of that point. “Disappointed not to go to the cafeteria. Is the food really so extraordinary here?”
“No, the food actually kind of sucks. Still, beats hanging out with you.”
I sit down and she grabs my wrist. The buzzing . . . I’m not sure if it starts again or simply increases when she touches me. I pull my hand back but she tightens her grip.
“What happened to you saying ‘I’ll cooperate. I’ll do whatever you say, just don’t hurt him’?”
Her voice takes on a mocking tone. If I had any choice in the matter, I’d be slamming my fist into her face rather than cooperating.
“But you don’t have choice, do you?” She’s quiet for a second, and I feel her in my head, checking out the terrain.
Her brows crease with suspicion. “You have done . . . rearranying.” I don’t recognize the word as rearranging until she taps the side of her head. Her hand is still encased in a black leather glove. The effect of her pale skin against the single black glove is like Michael Jackson in reverse.
Dacia definitely picked that thought up. I get the sense it’s not the first time someone has made that comparison, and she doesn’t like it.
“Molly left,” I tell her. “Those memories are still being unpacked. You remember Molly, don’t you?”
She flinches the tiniest bit and I keep going. “That’s what you want to know, right? What I remember about Molly? I remember that she was trying to comfort you that very same night you woke up screaming, and now here you are, working with the man who beat her to death.” That catches her attention, and she cocks her head slightly to the side.
“Or do you want to know what I remember about you? That you’re from Romania, a little town on the Danube. That they came through your hometown, promised you a good job, working with a family. Watching their children. But you did well enough on their little card tests or whatever that they injected you with something. It didn’t take at first, and you wound up with Graham Cregg. But lucky for you, the magic potion eventually kicked in and now you’re out of that basement, out of the nightmare. Only Molly didn’t get out. Do you want to know about the other people I’ve hosted? How they died? Thank God they were all luckier than Molly. No one murdered them.”
“Shut up!” Dacia digs her nails into my skin. “You do not do the talking. I do not need you to tell me about your other phantom . . .” She waves her hands, like she can’t find the word. “The dead-in-your-head people.”
The phrase catches me off guard and I laugh. She can read my thoughts enough to know that I’m not making fun of her frustration—I actually think the description has a certain ring to it—but my tiny smidgen of approval seems to anger her even more. She’s combing through the files marked Abner now. The sensation is sort of like someone running their fingernail very lightly across your skin . . . it almost tickles and I want to brush it away. Except it’s inside my head.
I’m not even sure why she’d bother with Abner except to prove that she can do whatever the hell she wants. She races through the farm chores and swimming holes and other images from his childhood in 1940s Indiana. Next are the plumbing tips, how to wire an electrical outlet, and other odds and ends from his work, some of which he learned in the Navy, and the majority of which he couldn’t even use by the time he retired because he didn’t have a special license in those areas.
Mostly, however, Dacia is getting information about his dogs. Abner never married. Never had a family. His dogs were his life. The last one was a beagle mix named Bumper. She’s the reason Abner couldn’t move on. He had to be sure someone took care of Bumper. Only Abner had been dead for fifteen years when I picked him up on the park bench. I finally found an elderly neighbor who remembered him. Remembered that a family two blocks over had adopted Bumper after the police found Abner’s body in his backyard garden. She saw the kids taking her for walks for a few years, but then the dog either died or they moved away. The woman couldn’t remember which.
And that was the last time I heard Abner’s voice. His memories, the ones that Dacia is tearing through now, gradually accrued and I filed them away, but he was able to let go once he knew that Bumper hadn’t starved to death after his stroke. That someone had taken her in and cared for her.
Dacia’s probe shifts to Emily, but she’s only in that folder for a few minutes. Apparently she’s not a history buff. She glances at the others, but skips them and goes to Molly’s file, which is disordered and definitely not chronologically arranged like Abner’s memories.
A woman—Molly’s mother—laughing as she helps a younger Molly build a snowman.
Molly crying as Cregg forces her to cut her own leg in the main room of the cabin.
“Holes,” Dacia says. “There are holes here. Molly’s is not like the others.”
“Her memories are still unpacking. It’s . . . um . . . think of it as a zip file. The memories are there, but they aren’t extracted yet. There’s no . . . file structure.”
It’s not a bad analogy for what’s going on. But it doesn’t seem to satisfy Dacia.
She mumbles something. The only words I pick up are “what is this zip files,” then she starts rummaging again.
Playing a song from the Harry Potter movies on the piano at Porter’s house.
Molly falling off the swing and breaking her wrist.
Holding up her arm to ward off the blow as Cregg swings the base of the metal pipe toward her.
No . . . as Dacia swings it toward her.
“You?” I yank my arm away. Dacia’s nails carve shallow grooves into the underside of my wrist. The mental probe leaves my head so quickly that I can almost hear a pop. “But she tried to protect you!”
I can’t remember. Did Molly ever say that it was Cregg who killed her? And does it even matter if Cregg was the one forcing Dacia?
Was he the one forcing Dacia?
I lean forward and put my head between my knees, fighting against the queasy, dizzy feeling that came in the wake of our sudden disconnection. My arms are clutched tightly to my sides. Does she need skin-to-skin contact in order to read me? Or does that just boost the signal? Either way, I don’t want her to touch me again.
But when I raise my head, I can tell that Dacia’s
exhausted. She’s leaning back against the couch cushions, eyes closed.
When she finally opens them, they brim with loathing. “If Graham did not want you unharmed, I would find something heavy to hit you with.” The words are harsh, but her voice is flat. Tired. “And then you’d see that I made it quick for Molly. Quicker than he would have.”
Dacia is slightly unsteady as she stands, the way she was at the police station. She stares back at me when she reaches the door, and for an instant, her eyes seem . . . wounded, I guess. Did she actually believe that killing Molly was an act of mercy?
“Much quicker than I would for you.”
And with that parting shot, she leaves me alone to wait for Bellamy II.
The cafeteria is empty by the time we arrive, except for two uniformed employees talking at a back table and a few cafeteria workers cleaning up. The air smells like there might have been hot food earlier—chili, maybe?—but the only options available now are packaged sandwiches, bagels, cookies, yogurt, and such.
As we get closer, I see that one of the two uniformed employees is the guard who was with Dacia at the police station. His head jerks up when he sees me, and he exits quickly. There’s no sign, however, of the guy that I’m more and more certain is actually Daniel.
Back in my room, I unwrap the bagel I selected. One bite is enough to make me realize I should have grabbed another sandwich instead. It’s not that the bagel is awful, although the round shape is pretty much the only thing it has in common with the ones Joe makes at Carver’s Deli. It’s more that the bagel triggers a wave of homesickness. Joe wasn’t simply a boss. He was a friend. If there were extra hours up for grabs, I got first dibs because he knew I needed the money. If I helped him close up, he’d drop me at home rather than letting me walk at night.
Simply put, he was kind. I don’t get the sense that there’s much of that in this place. I miss Kelsey, I miss Molly, I miss Aaron, and most of all, I miss Deo. I’ve been here almost an entire day and I don’t seem any closer to finding him and securing his release than I was when I woke up on that gurney last night. Bellamy II refused to answer any questions when she locked me in. Her only comment was that someone would let me know when my next tests were scheduled.
My conversations with Sam and Kelsey echo in my head, and I know they were right. It was naive to think that I could waltz in and negotiate for Deo’s release, and it seems even less likely to happen now.
Before, I thought I was dealing with Dacia, Cregg, Lucas, and maybe a few other goons. Now, it looks like I’m dealing with an entire organization. How many of the kids I saw in the cafeteria are missing children? Were they snatched off the streets at random for testing? Or worse, as guinea pigs for the drug used in the Delphi Project?
And now I’m not even certain of things I thought I knew. Did Molly hide that it was Dacia swinging the pipe? Or did I simply jump to the conclusion that it was Cregg all on my own?
Does it matter? If Dacia wants to sit me down tomorrow for a second round of hide-and-seek, I’ll play her game, no matter what it costs me. Like I told Aaron, as long as they have Deo, they call the shots.
I toss the rest of the bagel into the trash.
“AN . . . NA.”
I’m stretched out on the bed, eyes closed, listening to another chapter in my book. Even though I don’t recognize the voice, every hair on my body is at attention before my eyes open.
Because Molly knows it all too well.
I spring upright and breathe a sigh of relief when I see that Lucas is not in the room with me. His voice is coming from the TV. Someone apparently cranked the volume way, way up when they came in to make the bed and empty the trash while I was at testing.
Actually, I must have dozed off. The clock in the lower right corner of the TV screen says 11:27 p.m.
The downside of Lucas being on the TV is that his face is larger than life, and that makes it hard to keep my expression that of someone startled awake, instead of someone who’s freaked out at seeing the man who killed my mom and raped me. Because even though I know Molly isn’t me, the dreams are so vivid and real that it’s sometimes hard to make that distinction.
He appears to be at the same desk as the Timm guy who woke me up this morning, but Lucas isn’t wearing a uniform—just a gray North Face jacket, unzipped partially to show a black dress shirt.
I turn down the volume, fighting a very strong urge to turn off the television entirely.
He gives me what he probably thinks is an amiable smile. “What you listenin’ to?”
“A book.” I grab the tablet and press the stop button.
“Well, duh,” Lucas says, still smiling. “Kind of figured that much, seeing that the Brit guy was saying he said and she said and what have you. You know who I am, right?”
“You’re Dacia Badea’s driver. I saw you in her car.”
Lucas’s eyes are a light-gray color that looks slightly exotic against his caramel skin.
That’s why he almost always wears gray. Someone told him it brings out his eyes. A Molly memory.
Those eyes are narrowed slightly now. “Just because you see someone driving a car doesn’t make him somebody’s driver. I don’t work for Daciana. Didn’t anyone ever teach you why it’s a bad idea to make assumptions?”
He raises his eyebrows, waiting for an answer.
Oh, dear God. Does he really think that joke is original or witty?
“It makes an ass out of you and me.”
“I see you’re both smart and pretty.” He laughs and settles into another smile.
That’s the one he thinks is sexy. The smile he practices in the mirror.
I get a flash of a cartoon shark, and another Molly memory comes roaring in. This one is from when she was seven or eight, before she was frightened of Lucas. Back when he bought her Webkinz and Beanie Babies whenever she visited her mom. Before she started connecting the number and shape of the perpetual bruises on her mom’s arms with Lucas’s fingers.
On that particular day, when Lucas smiled at Molly’s mom, Molly thought for the first time that the smile made him look a little scary. A bit like Bruce, the shark in Finding Nemo. And not fish-friendly Bruce, but Bruce when instinct kicks in and he’s about to munch on Nemo’s dad and Dory.
I keep my face blank and file that memory away with the others.
“Listen.” Lucas leans toward the camera, moistening his lips with a quick flick of his tongue. “You’ve got an appointment later tonight. I just got here early because I was thinkin’ maybe you might be interested in a little trade for some info about your friend. But that’s probably somethin’ better discussed in person.”
He winks, and the screen goes black.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I’m frozen in place for several seconds after Lucas’s face disappears. As soon as I’m able to pull in a breath, I run for the door, hitting the button that the nurse, Ashley, mentioned last night. I’m not sure what to expect—will someone speak to me through the security device?
“Yes, Anna?” The TV screen is on again. Lucas is sitting there, grinning. “If you’re looking for Timmons, we’re buddies. I told him to go for a smoke break, maybe Skype with his girlfriend. That I’d keep a very close eye on you ’til he got back. So it’s just you and me, sweetheart.”
“I was . . . looking for the nurse. A question about my medication.”
His expression makes it clear that he’s not buying it. “I’ll be sure to leave her a note.” He gives me the shark smile once more, and the screen is back to black.
I tear into the kitchen, looking for something, anything, that might be useful as a weapon. But everything is plastic, lightweight. No glass. Nothing heavier than the small tub of peanut butter. The most lethal tool in the entire place is a damned spork.
What I wouldn’t give for my pepper spray or my sock full of pennies right now. But I’ve spent nearly fifteen years in group homes. You learn to make do with what you have.
I drop the spork with the busin
ess end facedown on the floor and use a bottle of water from the fridge, cap down, to crack parts of the plastic away from the handle. It’s a half-assed shiv, but it’s a whole lot better than nothing. I shove it into the back pocket of my jeans and pull out the bag of apples and a few bottles of water—anything I can throw at Lucas that might slow him down long enough for me to get away.
Except . . . I’ll need his identification to open the door.
Fine, then. Anything that might slow him down long enough for me to jab this shard of plastic into his throat—something that would give me great personal pleasure—and take his ID.
Except . . . leaving aside how unlikely that is to work, would attacking Lucas improve Deo’s chances of getting out of here alive?
No. I really don’t think it would.
Closing my eyes, I reach into the file marked Molly. It’s nowhere near full yet, but I’m hoping I’ll find something, anything, about Lucas that might be a weakness.
If she’s got anything of that nature, I don’t find it. Lucas is strong and he’s mean. He’s not even all that stupid, just not half as smart as he thinks he is. Or half as good-looking.
Why, out of the ten people I’ve hosted, couldn’t at least one of them have been into martial arts or some sort of self-defense?
Haven’t checked Myron’s file . . .
I stomp that thought down and grind it under my heel. Nothing like panic to get you thinking of all possible ways to make a bad situation worse.
Okay. Deep breaths. Since I can’t overpower him, I’ll have to outwit him. He’s vain. If I flatter him, he’ll believe I’m interested. He thinks every woman is interested.
I’m well aware that anything Lucas tells me will probably be a lie, and there’s no way I’m bartering any favors for information. But . . . playing along, stalling for a bit, getting him off guard, might not be a bad idea.
