The Girl in the Box 01 - Alone

by Crane, Robert J.

  Old Man Winter gazed back at me. “If Wolfe was there, it was certain that he would cut through any agents we sent.”

  I felt my mouth dry out at the words he spoke, and my voice quivered, just a little, as I whispered my next question. “Then why did you let us go?”

  “Enough.” Ariadne’s words cut off his quiet reply, and she surged forward from her place behind him, putting a hand on my elbow and trying to escort me out the door. I restrained my impulse to flatten her. “You wanted to go, we helped you in exchange for your consent to test you—”

  “No.” I shook her hand off with almost no effort. “I need to know.” I looked back at Old Man Winter, and he did not shy from my gaze. He held his hand up to stay Ariadne.

  “Because you demanded it,” he said with slow, measured words. “And you are more important to us than a hundred agents.”

  The blue eyes forced a chill in me as he answered, and they followed me unceasing as Ariadne led me from the room. This time I did not resist her.

  Twelve

  I parted from Ariadne after a muttered curse under my breath, leaving her with a shocked look (again). She lanced back with a scathing reminder about the testing, set for early tomorrow, at which point I left. If I could blame my antisocial behavior on Asperger’s like some ridiculous TV character I would, but the truth is that I was trying my hardest not to think about the lives I had cost in my attempt to face off with Wolfe. And I was still struggling with who I could trust.

  Old Man Winter had said I was more valuable to them than a hundred agents, but the question I had to ask was ‘why?’ I walked back to the dormitories using the above ground route, and when I walked out the doors of the headquarters building the icy sting of the wind lanced my cheeks.

  I smelled that familiar scent hanging in the air again, that of a real wood fire, just like Mom used to build sometimes in our fireplace at home. We would actually make s’mores on it, like people in movies do when they’re camping, and one time she got mad at me for breaking the rules and stuck my hand in the fire. True story. It had healed by the next day, but it hurt like hell, the flesh nearly peeling off the bone. That time was for the audacity to ask about how people lived in the outside world, breaking rule #5. Oops.

  My eyes looked over the grounds and I found myself wondering what this place looked like in the middle of summer. Then my thoughts went back to the faces of those agents, in the garage when I met them, and I wondered what they did on a normal day, when they weren’t escorting me to my house. Some of them had families, wives, kids. I didn’t know a single one of their names.

  It was only about four in the afternoon, but it was already getting dark. The haze of clouds hanging overhead was only making it worse. Still no sign of the sun, just like if I’d never left home. The wind was bitter, bad enough that even I didn’t want to stay out for very long. After being cooped up inside for a decade, you’d think I’d want to spend as much time outside as possible – and I did, but there were limits, and apparently they were at three degrees Fahrenheit.

  I entered the dormitory building to find people going about their business in the hallways, passing me with the occasional nod. I wondered if these people – metas, I thought – knew the agents that got killed. I wondered if they worked here or if they were just here for study, like me. I wondered what their lives were like, their stories, and if any of them missed their parents.

  I opened the door to my room and didn’t even bother to do a thorough check before I lay down. I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, twisted the cap and drank it without replacing it from the tap. Who cares? What were they going to do, poison me? Bring it on. I was at their mercy – I didn’t trust them, but it wasn’t like I had anywhere else to go.

  Except I thought about Reed again, and about how I dreamed of him. I wondered if I could do it again. I put the water aside and lay down, thinking of him. I remembered his brown eyes, his hair framing his tan face, and I drifted off.

  It felt like I lingered in the dark for hours before he showed up, fading into view a little at a time. He looked around and saw me, a look of unsurprise on his face.

  “Hi.” I waved, feeling more than a little stupid.

  He lowered his head and shook it in something akin to deep disappointment. “You stirred up a hell of a hornet’s nest.”

  I blinked at him, and wondered for a second why I would be blinking when my eyes were closed and I was asleep. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean your showdown with Wolfe.”

  I looked away. “Yeah, I know. I got people killed.”

  “It’s not that!” Reed said, incredulous. “Directorate agents die all the time. Whatever you did when you fought Wolfe, he’s lost it. He’s over the edge now.”

  “He wasn’t before?”

  Reed exploded. “This is no joking matter! He was going to capture you before, when he was following his employer’s orders. Now he’s lost it and they’re panicking because he’s gone rogue. He wants to kill you.”

  “How do you know that?” Little tingles of suspicion started inside me; my stomach churned, hinting at a feeling of betrayal.

  “The people I work with have spies inside the group he was working for. You really pissed him off. What did you do?”

  I shrugged, numb at the revelation. “Made him bleed.”

  Disappointed, Reed’s hand found its way to his face. “Why did you go back to where you knew he could be?”

  I clenched my jaw and felt pain, and thought about whether I must have been doing it in my sleep. “Because I didn’t want to just sit here and stew in my fear of him. If you sit around and think about how much you’re afraid of something, it just makes it worse. I didn’t think he was that bad…I thought I could beat him.” I lowered my head. “I was wrong.”

  “You wanted to face off with Wolfe?” He shook his head. “That’s madness. You need to stay where you are, let the Directorate protect you.”

  “The Directorate can’t protect me. He went through their agents like they were made of whipped cream.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Sienna. I don’t think he can touch you so long as you stay there.”

  “I don’t want to stay here any more,” I said. “I’m ready to leave and join you.”

  He shook his head again. “Sorry, but you can’t do that. I can’t protect you right now, not from Wolfe. Soon, but not right now.”

  “I just…” I crinkled my eyes, closing them as tight as I could. “I just want to get out of here. Out of town. Away from everything and everyone.” I took a breath. “I read a book about towns in western South Dakota, and it had pictures; they were gorgeous, green and mountainous. I want to see mountains, Reed, and beaches, and anything but this gawdawful snow. It’s so dim and dark all the time and I hate it…”

  “This is not a problem you can run away from,” he said with a look of sadness. “Wolfe is relentless.”

  “He doesn’t know where I am now, and he can’t know where I am from here on if I’m careful. My mom dodged these people for years. He’s not a psychic and he’s not infallible.”

  “You don’t know Wolfe. He’s lived for thousands of years and he uses time to his advantage. You’re right: you’d likely make it out of the Minneapolis area, maybe even out of the state and the country, but he’d track you down eventually.”

  He wore a look of pity and I felt something sharp inside that woke up my defenses. I didn’t know Reed any better than the Directorate people. I composed myself, pasting a smile that was as fake as any I’d ever worn. “Fine. All right.”

  “I can tell you’re hurting…”

  “You don’t know anything about me,” I snapped. Not sure where that came from, but I had a suspicion.

  “Not much, but I can tell you’re blaming yourself for what happened to those Directorate agents.”

  “I have to go,” I replied, as brusque as I could make it. “I have to wake up. They’re going to test me in the morning.”

  “Just make su
re you—” His words faded as I struggled and forced my way out of the dream. I didn’t wonder until later what he was going to say.

  Thirteen

  I woke up just after one in the morning. Except for a few minor aches, my injuries from the battle with Wolfe had healed themselves without much sign of anything odd. I realized I had gone to bed without dinner and that I hadn’t eaten much lunch the day before either. I left my dormitory room (always fully dressed, remember?) and wandered the halls. I didn’t hold much hope that the cafeteria would be open at this hour, but I doubted I would have a problem stealing some food.

  Besides, was it really stealing? They would have given it to me if they’d been open. I came through the entrance to the cafeteria and found a few lights on, scattered throughout the place. Spotlights outside the massive windows showed snow was lightly falling outside. The smell of cleaning solutions hung in the air and when coupled with the dimness it gave the place the vague sense of what I’d imagine a hospital to feel like.

  A lone figure was sitting in the corner where the two glass walls met, staring out into the dark. I crept up quietly until I got close enough to realize it was Zack, then started to tiptoe away. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, least of all him.

  “I can see your reflection,” he called out. He turned, revealing a series of bandages over his nose with a piece of metal over it to hold it in place for healing. “I figured you’d be hungry sooner or later.”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “Hungry and tired, so I think I’ll just get something and go…”

  “Why don’t you sit down?” His eyes didn’t let me retreat. They were watching me and I felt almost as helpless as when Wolfe’s black eyes were on me. I felt myself lower into the seat opposite him and he stared back at me as I did. I had the nasty feeling I knew what was coming next, but like a scene in a horror movie you don’t want to watch but can’t look away from, I was stuck in place.

  “I want to talk about the basement.” He was still watching me. I didn’t like it. I hated it. I despise feeling trapped, and trapped I was. I hoped this would be quick – I hoped it was already over, actually, that maybe he didn’t see as much as I thought he had, that he’d not bothered to report it to Ariadne or Old Man Winter, and definitely not Kurt.

  “About the fight with Wolfe?” I tried to keep the hope out of my voice.

  “You know that’s not what I mean. Before him. What I saw…” His voice trailed off.

  I remained silent. In a failed effort to be casual, I focused really, really hard on my left middle fingernail and started counting backward from one hundred.

  “Sienna?” He repeated my name twice more in a bid to get my attention.

  “I don’t want to talk about this.” My voice was quiet, but firm. Maybe a hint of a crack.

  “You need to talk to somebody about it.”

  “No, I don’t.” I could feel myself get defensive, pissed. “I’m pretty much a full grown woman at this point, and I can make my own decisions about what I want to talk about and don’t, and this falls into the territory of ‘don’t’.”

  “You were locked in a house for over ten years and you never escaped? With your mother gone to work all day, every day?” He shook his head. “I’ve been asking myself since we met how a mother could keep a kid in check that long, even if they were the most passive, easygoing person on the face of the planet—”

  “I gather you’re saying I’m not—”

  “—let alone a stubborn, willful child that probably resisted from day one, just bucking for freedom any which way she could—”

  I pursed my lips. “You make me sound like a wild horse.”

  “Let’s go with that analogy,” he said, nodding, which broke our eye contact. “How does someone domesticate a horse?”

  “They break it,” I said with a hint of defiance. “Do I look broken to you?”

  “Looks don’t mean a thing. She did break you, didn’t she?”

  I blew air out my lips and stared out the window at the snowfall. “I broke rules all the time,” I said in a tone of forceful denial. “She wasn’t home during the day, and I could do anything I wanted—”

  “Except leave the house.”

  The wind outside kicked up and the snow started falling sideways. I hadn’t seen that before. “No, I didn’t leave the house, but I looked outside plenty of times.”

  He leaned across the table, making a bid to recapture my attention from the snow drifts that I allowed to distract me. “When she caught you breaking the rules, how did she punish you?”

  I was stronger than him – I could have knocked him out and broken through a window and been gone. Gone from the Directorate and gone from this state and gone from my sorry little example of a stunted life. Tomorrow I could be living somewhere else and no one would catch me.

  It was funny, because the cafeteria was hundreds of feet long and hundreds of feet wide, and the nearest table was ten steps away, and yet I felt like I was trapped in an enclosed space; it was just like…

  “Yeah.” My acknowledgment came out in a voice of surrender. “That was how.”

  In the corner of our basement stands a box. Made of hardened steel plates an inch thick, welded together, it’s a little over six feet tall, about two feet wide and two feet deep, when it stands long-end up. It opens like a coffin, along the longest plane. There’s a sliding door on that side, about two inches tall and four inches wide, just enough to see out of – or into – the box. There are hinges on one side and a heavy locking peg on the other.

  I knew when Zack saw it that he would figure it out. But it was worse when he opened it.

  “She didn’t let you out to…do your business?”

  I shook my head. But he already knew the answer to that, because the smell inside it was horrific; it made the whole basement stink of rot when it was open.

  “How long did she leave you in there?” His eyes still appeared unreactive.

  I laughed, a dark, humorless bark that rumbled through me, keeping my emotions in check behind a facade of false bravado. “Which time? There were so many. As you mentioned, I am somewhat stubborn and defiant. I was in there at least once a week. Usually for smarting off; Mom didn’t like that much.”

  “How long?”

  I shrugged. “An hour or two, most of the time – with the door closed on the front, so it was completely dark. And that, honestly, wasn’t so bad. It was the times when I was in there for days, those were the ones when it was bad—” The times when my stomach screamed at me because it was sick of nothing but the water that was piped in from a reservoir by a small tube. The times when I started to get lightheaded and had to sit down, where I just felt weak and near dead by the time she let me out.

  If she let me out.

  He grimaced, the first sign of emotion I’d seen from him since the conversation began. “What about the longest time?”

  I paused, and an insane sounding laugh bubbled out of my mouth. I felt a stupid, pasted-on grin stretching my face. “A week, I think.”

  His voice had grown quiet, but it was undergirded by a curiosity. “When was that?”

  Silence owned me, but just for a beat. “Let’s see. After I ate something and showered, I lay down to sleep – you know, horizontally, because trying to sleep curled up in a ball inside it sucks, just FYI – and I woke up and you and Kurt were in my house. So…a few days ago.”

  This time the silence was stunned. “She left you…after locking you in?”

  I nodded, hoping he wouldn’t ask the dark, piteous question I’d been asking myself lately. “And I haven’t seen her since.”

  Fourteen

  That ended Zack’s questions, thank God. He said some more things after that, but I missed pretty much all of it. My head was buzzing and I couldn’t focus. I forgot that I was hungry and as soon as I could get away from him I did, leaving him in the cafeteria. He extracted a promise from me that we would talk more soon, and I didn’t argue because I didn’t have the energy.
r />   Ever been in a fight that gets really emotional, and you may have been feeling absolutely wonderful five minutes earlier but suddenly you’re just exhausted? That was me; all my energy was shot and I dragged myself back to my dormitory. I crashed on my bed, but I didn’t fall asleep. Instead I thought about Mom again; of the last time I saw her, when she shut the door on me, even as I was screaming, hammering my palms against the steel and begging her not to – and then she peered at me through the little sliding door, her eyes looking into mine, and she said something different than the hundreds of other times she’d put me in.

  “Whatever you may think, I do this all for your own good.” I wasn’t in a position to pay attention at the time (I was as distressed when I went into the box as a cat being dunked in water – I’ve seen it on TV) but her look was different than usual. Less spiteful. Less vengeful. Less pissed. I might have seen a trace of sadness in her eyes, though I didn’t recognize it at the time.

  Then she shut the little door and left me in the darkness.

  I thought about her again, concentrating hard, trying to focus on her as I drifted off to sleep. I awoke the next morning, an alarm going off beside the bed. I hadn’t set it, but it was blaring. I looked at the clock and realized it was timed so I didn’t miss my appointment with Dr. Sessions. Someone from the Directorate must have done it, fearing (probably rightly) that I didn’t much care if I made them wait. Probably Ariadne. That bitch.

  I thought about blowing it off, but the truth is I was curious. After all, they kept telling me I was meta-human, and I believed it, but I wondered what other abilities I might have. I was hoping for flight, because that would be cool.

  When I got to Dr. Sessions’s office, he was sitting behind his desk, looking at something. When he heard me enter he turned and pushed his glasses back up his nose and looked through them at me. “There you are.” He began nodding and picked up a tablet computer that sat next to the laptop on the desk. “Have a seat; I need to have you fill out this questionnaire before we begin…” He handed me a clipboard and pen, then turned to walk away. I gave him a quick smile of thanks, which caused him to back away. I sighed internally. Even when I wasn’t trying to, I could drive people away from me.