by Camilla Monk
My father sounds angry. “What happened today will not happen again.”
“She was perfectly stable when I saw her on Monday. The implant is still in place, but when I tested her tonight, her dopamine and serotonin levels were abnormally high.” Bentsen’s tone grows accusing. “Are you certain you gave her her treatment?”
“Yes.” That’d be Stiles. He sounds so relaxed, as if this entire nightmare was normal.
“Have we considered the possibility of a dosage error?” Bentsen insists.
“There was none,” Stiles replies.
“I find that hard to believe . . . In any case, what is done is done. The IV will stabilize her. After that we—”
The deep bass of my father’s voice cuts her off. “Dr. Bentsen, can you operate on her here, in the castle?”
Operate? I shake my head weakly. I don’t want her near me . . . I want to know what happened to me, what they’re hiding.
My father’s suggestion makes Bentsen angry. She’s almost shouting now. “Certainly not! We’ve discussed this already. That sort of surgery is not . . . that’s not the way.”
Silence falls in the room. All I can hear is the frantic rustle of the butterflies’ wings. They’re desperate to escape.
When my father speaks again, I feel each word rasp across my skin, low, threatening. “You promised me results. And today she relapsed, hacked into our systems, and tried to escape. All this in less than fifteen minutes. No more experiments. Do what needs to be done.”
I see a pale smudge stagger back. Dr. Bentsen. “No,” She repeats. “Find someone else.”
“Are you certain of your decision, Dr. Bentsen?”
“I won’t do it. I specialize in neuroplasticity. I don’t lobotomize patients,” she hisses.
My fists bunch, and my body strains helplessly against the straps. Lobotomize . . . Is that what my father is asking? I want to scream, escape, but all I can manage is a broken moan, and my limbs won’t move.
Footsteps echo toward the stretcher, and a shadow leans over me. Stiles’s soft drawl fans against my cheek. “Shhh . . . it’ll be over soon. Now, be a good girl.”
Across the room, Bentsen is still arguing with my father; angry whispers drift my way that I struggle to piece together. “There would be significant risks . . . if anything happens, she might never be able to hold a spoon again . . . I know you want more than just a listless body to call your daughter!”
A listless body? Isn’t that what I am already? Stiles’s hand is resting on the stretcher like I’m not even here. I’m furniture. Horror blooms inside me, spills in my veins. The butterflies are still there, calling to me. I need to rise, to fly away too, but my body is too heavy and I can barely curl my fingers. I lie helpless, cool tears rolling down my temples.
“Joshua.” I try to focus on my father’s voice as he approaches the bed and talks to Stiles. “Dr. Bentsen will leave us tonight. See her out and take care of the rest. I want this solved in the next twenty-four hours.”
“Understood.”
With this single word, Stiles moves away from me and walks to Dr. Bentsen. I can make out his arm at her back as he leads her out. An ominous presentiment seeps into my bones . . . Stiles . . . she shouldn’t go with him. I want to call her, tell her, but the whimper that makes it past my lips isn’t enough.
They’re gone now, and I’m alone with my father. He reaches next to my stretcher to turn off a lamp. His silhouette barely outlined by the light coming from the doorway, he too becomes a shadow. Like the butterflies.
I gulp and concentrate all my efforts on speaking. “Why . . . are you doing this?”
He kneels by the stretcher in a rustle of fabric and places his hand over my sternum—over the pendant. His palm is warm, and I desperately want to believe he’s going to save me, free me.
“I gave you everything I couldn’t give your mother, Island, and I’ll give you even more. An entire new world. But I can’t make you happy if you fight me.” I feel his thumb caressing the smooth amber. “It can’t work like that.”
My mother? Thoughts collide in my head. She died when her car crashed into a gas station. He told me I was there, that I was wounded too. Did he . . . was there a doctor for her too? Did he lie to her too?
“I don’t understand . . .” I whimper.
He rises to his feet and bends to place a kiss on my forehead. “There’s no need to.”
I strain against the straps keeping me prisoner. “Wait . . . Please!”
But he doesn’t look back, and after the door slams closed, I’m alone in the dark.
•••
I must have slept. I feel dizzy as my eyes flutter open. The butterflies have vanished, and I’ve given up, having no sense of time in this silent and pitch-black room where I’ve been buried alive. I test my restraints, allowing some of the fog to clear in my brain. Like an electric shock, the panic returns tenfold, contracting my muscles. My father and Stiles . . . they did this! I was reading about the destruction of the Poseidon Dome, and then I saw myself on all these web pages saying I’m dead, and they won’t tell me what’s going on! They drugged me, locked me up!
And Bentsen said—oh God—she said she wouldn’t lobotomize me. Was she being serious? Does that mean someone else will? Nausea swells at the back of my throat at the idea of someone gouging out parts of my brain to turn me into “a listless body.” Soft clanks echo in the dark as my body starts trembling uncontrollably on the stretcher. I don’t want this . . . It can’t be real. It’s like those dreams when I’m in an elevator and it falls, and I wake up the second my chest heaves from the sudden weightlessness. I’m going to wake up in my bed. Fighting the tears stinging my eyes, I squeeze them shut and will the nightmare to end. I’m going to wake up. I know I am . . .
The creak of the door opening sends my pulse into a frenzy. Light spills into the room, so bright it blinds me. Ghosts glide toward me. I recognize Stiles’s voice, murmuring to a man in black fatigues to take me. I struggle against the straps holding me in place and croak, “No, wait! Please . . . J-Joshua!”
He heard me. The moment the plea bursts from my lips, a shadow drifts toward me. His face comes into focus, but instead of blond bristles, it’s brown curls haloed by the light. I can make out the meek smile I know so well, and for the first time, it dawns on me that it’s not real; it never was. Morgan shakes his head. “Oh, baby, I knew you couldn’t behave that long.”
A sob shatters my voice. “Please . . . don’t let them take me!”
He moves away, and I register rustling coming from the general direction of the instruments tray. I crane my neck frantically to see what’s going on. When he reappears in my field of vision, there’s something in his hands, and they’re descending toward me, ever closer, blurry.
My hands curl into fists, and my legs jerk in vain. I let out a series of incoherent wails. “No, no . . . please! Pl—” The word ends in a long howl, swallowed by the tape he smooths over my mouth.
“Much better,” he jokes before trailing the back of his knuckles across my cheek. I feel everything, every single hair, every square millimeter of contact between our skin. I writhe in a desperate effort to escape his touch.
“No, no, no . . . You’re not going anywhere, baby,” he coos as he leans closer, enough for me to make out the jagged edges of a scar on his eyebrow . . . the eye patch. He’s not wearing it. The area where his eye should be is shadowed, but I glimpse a mangled eyelid sunk into his empty eye socket. My stomach heaves with the need to throw up. His fingers glide to my temple and tap it delicately. “They’re gonna clean up everything in there . . . I guess you won’t remember me when you come back, but maybe we can start over. It wasn’t so bad, you and me, right?”
All I can produce is a muffled moan of terror. What is he talking about? I just don’t want him to touch me—please, anyone, make him stop!
But his hand won’t go away, skittering across my jaw, my neck. My heart rams against my rib cage in panic when his finge
rs curl loosely around my neck, his voice down to a trembling whisper. “I’m going to wait for you, and when they bring you back, I’ll tell you about my sister. Do you want to hear about Poppy?”
I pant and whimper under the tape, my chest constricting with each agonizing breath. I don’t want to hear anything; I don’t want his hands, his voice.
“Morgan.”
My body jerks in surprise. I don’t recognize that stone-cold tone, but the drawl is familiar. Stiles is calling him from the other end of the room. The light above is blinding me, blurring my vision: I can’t see where he is. I screw my eyes shut and wait for Pirate Morgan to heed the call and get away from me. He does, his fingers trailing one last time along my clavicles before he retreats in darkness. Yet his absence brings me no relief. The stretcher clanks and moves; I’m being carted out of the room.
EIGHT
FEAR OF HEIGHTS
There’s at least one person who cares: while his colleagues went outside to get the helicopter ready, one of the guards put thick socks and boots on my feet. I’m still wearing yesterday’s jeans and sweater, but a fleece cover has been thrown over me, which this unexpectedly caring captor is adjusting around my body. I wish I could see his face, but like half of the men, he’s wearing a ski mask that covers his nose and mouth. All I can see is a strip of ebony skin and watchful black eyes.
I swallow the lump in my throat and look away; like Stiles’s kindness, the sliver of humanity I’m trying to grasp at is likely a figment of my imagination. Each breath I take through my nose because of the tape on my mouth, the painful hold of the straps securing my limbs to the stretcher: those are real. They’re a constant reminder of what my father ordered them to do.
I hear the lobby’s doors groan before a rush of icy air sweeps over me. Beyond the warm glow of the chandeliers, I see white stretching under a pink dawn. Someone unlocks the stretcher wheels and starts pushing. I pant fast and hard through my nose. They’re taking me.
In the courtyard, the snow has been shoveled; there’s nothing to hinder our progress toward the helicopter. When I see the blades hover above me like black wings, I can’t hold back my sobs. I whimper, hiccup in vain against the tape. The tears streaming down my cheeks seem to turn to ice almost as soon as they touch my skin.
Within minutes, I’ve been loaded in the back of the aircraft, and four men have taken their places on a row of seats facing the stretcher. At least two of them carry assault rifles, something I’ve never seen around the castle. Were those purposefully hidden from me? Before the doors slam shut, I catch the blur of Stiles’s brown coat as he climbs in the front, next to the pilot. I try to grip the sides of the stretcher and breathe my terror out as the cabin starts to vibrate and the roar of the rotor grows deafening. We’re taking off.
All I can see of our journey is the morning sky through the window, turning a fiery shade of pink as the sun rises. I don’t know where we’re going or how long it is before I turn my head to look at the men my father paid to do this to me. The black guy who took care of me back in the lobby is looking at me, and so is the guard sitting next to him, I think. I’m not sure. My eyes are swollen with tears, and I need to blink those back, over and over, for their faces to come into focus.
I stare vacantly at the second guy, my brain like molasses as I try to pinpoint what it is about him that makes my skin prickle like that. It’s his eyes—dark blue eyes, I realize, seconds before I notice the smoke. One of the men yells something in Afrikaans as an acrid white cloud quickly fills the cabin. Oh my God . . . what’s going on? What’s wrong with the helicopter? The fear of imminent death pumps in my veins, and I shake frantically on the stretcher. We’re going to crash!
The next second is a blur during which the blue-eyed guy grabs one of his colleagues and slams his head against the wall. The guard quickly recovers and lunges back at him, raising the assault rifle he was carrying. Steadfast, his adversary grabs the barrel with both hands, and they start fighting over the rifle. The tape mutes my screams when gunshots crack in the cabin, the bullets clanking in the cart beneath me. I’m on the verge of a heart attack.
Twenty seconds ago, I thought I was on my way to be lobotomized on the orders of my own father. Ten seconds ago, I thought my luck was complete shit, and I’d die in a helicopter crash after all. Now the smoke is choking me while the black guy wrestles their remaining colleague, and I’m certain I’m gonna get shot dead. On a stretcher. In a fricking helicopter! In the midst of the confusion, I see a flash of brown. Stiles is trying to move to the back to stop the two men. A black-gloved hand rises through the smoke, holding a knife. It slices through black fatigues right before blood splashes all over my clothes. I arch against my restraints in complete panic until I’m sure my spine will break and . . . I’m free.
The straps have snapped. No. Something sliced through them—the bloody knife I glimpse in the hand of the blue-eyed guy, inches away from me. The smoke swallows him back almost immediately, and I recognize Stiles’s arm, choking him. Amid a concert of groans and hoarse shouts, I count at least another gunshot, followed by a deafening crack—an explosion? Before I can make sense of the chaos surrounding me, icy wind rushes inside the aircraft. The double doors at the back of the cabin have been blown open, and I’m staring wide-eyed at the ground, miles under our feet. I curl up on the stretcher and shield my head, paralyzed by fear. I’m so sure the cart I’m still lying on is going to roll out from the helicopter, and I’ll be ejected and fall to my death like a stunt dummy.
When an endless couple of seconds pass and the cart keeps shaking under me yet stays in place, I’m able to process that it’s, in fact, secured to the wall. The smoke clears, and it appears that the two guards who were attacked are either dead or unconscious. Stiles is wrestling the black guy while the blue-eyed one is . . . right next to me. I try to sit up and crawl away from him, but his arms clamp around me, lifting me from the stretcher.
For a split second, I look straight into the blue eyes searching mine, and I feel like I’m drowning. I can’t think, can’t move a muscle as he hauls me away. Reality rushes back like a punch in the face the moment I feel my body tipping back and being sucked out. I’m falling. We’re falling. Sweet goddamn baby Jesus, that psycho jumped!
My heart stops, and cold seeps through my bones as we tumble toward the ground. The wind bites my cheeks, numbs my fingers. My clothes are whipping around like they’re about to be torn off of my body. I blink and see trees, white everywhere, before I squeeze my eyes shut and grip his shoulders so hard my fingers might snap. Time stretches infinitely, the world is upside down, and I’m gonna die. Around my waist, his hand reaches for something and gives a sharp tug.
All of a sudden, I’m pulled straight up, and the free fall stops—that bastard had a concealed parachute! Vertigo makes my head spin as we glide, swivel above the trees, and at last, the reality of what’s happening hits me fully. I’m several thousand feet above the ground, his grip around me the only thing that keeps me alive. Adrenaline blazes through my system, and I’m going to be sick. A dark arc in my peripheral vision tells me that at least another man jumped.
“Lift your legs!”
My captor’s shout draws my attention to how close the pines and the ground now look. Below us, a road stretches into the horizon.
“Your legs! Island, lift them! Wrap them around my waist!”
His bark jolts me into compliance. My legs jerk up, and I anchor my ankles to his thighs. Seconds afterward, trees flash past us, and we hit the ground. It’s his body that takes the impact of landing, my legs safely wrapped around him as he instructed me to.
We collapse together on a bed of fresh snow, in a field, maybe. I can’t stop the trembling of my limbs as he frees us from the parachute. It’s like my brain has yet to land, and I can’t fully process what just happened. A few yards away, the other guy has landed too with a soft rustle. With my body now free, the fight returns to me, pulses in my veins. I try to squirm away from the blue-eyed guy
, but he pins me under him. My arms fly to shield my face when he makes an attempt to touch it.
“It’s going to be all right, biscuit. Let me take this off,” he says breathlessly.
Biscuit . . . The moment of surprise as the pet name registers and I try to place his accent is all it takes for him to rip off the tape. I yelp before any further protest dies on my lips when he pulls off his ski mask. Under me, the black parachute tarp suddenly feels liquid, alive, as if it might suck me in. For a second or two, all I can do is stare. I’m aware of the blood pounding in my temples as I take in every detail of the face I already know. The deep-set eyes whose color I can think of a thousand names for, the aquiline nose, the square jaw. The short chestnut hair. My eyelids flutter. It’s not him. None of this is real. If I look up, I’ll see snow falling, and I’ll be back at the Christmas market. This time the nightmare will end. It has to. How long can one dream last anyway?
All of a sudden, the storm in my mind is silenced. By his mouth. On mine.
His lips are so warm . . . is what I think for half a second before renewed panic sets in, and I claw at his face to free myself. “No! Don’t . . .” The word rape is on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t say it. I don’t even want to go there.
He lets me go with an expression of surprise. “Island, it’s me.”
Me who? How does he know me? I have no idea what’s going on, and I’m suffocating, struggling for oxygen in rapid pants. My hands slip on the tarp spread all around us and tangle in nylon cords as I scramble away from him. “Stay back! Don’t touch me!”
The hurt and incomprehension transforming his features seem genuine, like he doesn’t get why society frowns upon predators who randomly kiss unsuspecting prey. “Island . . .”
Strong hands clasp around my shoulder to block my escape. “Time is running out, lovebirds. Our ride is here.”
