At least they’d finally consented to let us have visitors. They’d been keeping us isolated, poking and prodding and running tests. Finally, they all seemed to have given up in confusion.
Hallam and Marlena were in the room with us now. They hadn’t brought “the children,” because they hadn’t thought we’d be so active and healthy yet. The phrase blew my mind. There were children—as in, more than one. Marlena and Hallam had a new baby girl. And there was Chance. Palomino (nicknamed Mina) had stayed home with both of the kids.
Mina was my younger brother’s ex-girlfriend. She was Chance’s surrogate mother.
Marlena assured us that they would all be in tomorrow to see us. Jason and I wanted to leave the hospital now, but the staff wasn’t letting us.
Hallam shrugged. He’d put on a little weight since the last time I’d seen him, but it made him look good—healthier. The last time I’d seen him, we’d been living underground for years, hiding out from Kieran and Eve. I supposed it wouldn’t take much to look healthier.
“Basically,” Hallam said. “Everything fixed itself.”
Jason and I exchanged a look.
“I know that sounds unbelievable,” said Marlena. “But that is what happened.”
I shook my head. “No. We did something...”
“We weren’t supposed to wake up,” Jason said. “Never.”
He was right. I remembered... No. I didn’t remember anything.
Marlena shrugged. “You know, right after it happened, I did wonder if you two had something to do with Kieran and Eve’s disappearance.”
“They’ve been in a coma, Marlena,” said Hallam.
“I know,” she said. “But if anyone could have defeated Kieran and Eve, it would have been them.” She gazed at us expectantly.
Jason furrowed his brow. “I can’t remember.” He glanced at me. “But we were together.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And we weren’t supposed to wake up.”
We were both quiet.
“We’re glad that you did,” said Marlena. “We wanted you back so badly.”
“The world is functioning?” Jason said. “After losing the influence of Kieran and Eve, I would have thought...”
“That it would be chaos,” I agreed. “But the hospital seems to be running okay.”
“Things have been very balanced, actually,” said Marlena. “The world has been better. Not the idyllic, fake happy time the way it was with Kieran and Eve. There’s still been conflict.”
“But no war,” said Hallam. “A decrease in violent crime.”
“The government’s stable,” said Marlena.
I felt a twinge of panic. We had done something. And we’d woken up now, and I had a feeling we’d undone it. I just wished I could remember.
“But this can’t be what you’re most concerned about,” said Hallam. “Obviously, you must want to know about Chance.”
Jason had asked about his safety first thing but hadn’t asked any follow-up questions. He wasn’t really used to being a dad, I didn’t think. He hadn’t spent much quality time with his son in the boy’s short life. I had taken care of Chance briefly when he was a baby, but because my life always seemed so dangerous, it had made better sense for him to live with Mina. Neither of us had seen Chance in almost five years.
“Is he really big?” I asked, feeling strangely shy. “Is his hair still bright red?”
Marlena grinned. “Yes and yes.”
I did some quick math. “He’s got to have started school? Are there schools again?” Everything had been a mess for quite some time after a solar flare had knocked out power up and down the east coast. Civilization had come to a screeching halt.
“There are schools,” said Hallam. “And he’s attending one. He colors a lot, from what I can tell. Maybe he’s actually learning something.”
Marlena rolled her eyes. “Oh, Hallam, he’s learning his letters and numbers and things. He’s only five.”
Jason swallowed. “Maybe I shouldn’t see him.”
“Jason, he’s your son,” I said.
Jason wouldn’t look at me. “I’d like to see him, I guess, but I don’t think he should see me. I’d rather I didn’t... do anything to screw him up any worse.”
Marlena shrugged. “Well, it’s too late for that, I’m afraid. He’s been to see you in the hospital a million times. He knows who you are.” She turned to me. “Both of you. He knows that Azazel took care of him when he was a baby. I’ve held him up to look down on both of you. If he knows you’re awake—”
“Which he does,” said Hallam. “He begged us to take him along when we came tonight.”
“He’s going to want to see you,” said Marlena.
Jason looked stricken.
Marlena took his hand. “Jason, you aren’t going to screw him up. Everything is better now.”
“You don’t have your powers,” said Hallam, “and no one else does either. There’s no longer any danger. Every threat has been extinguished. The Sons are all gone. The Order of the Fly is disbanded. Kieran and Eve left. You two can finally have a normal life.”
Jason and I both looked at each other. Did we dare believe that?
* * *
Jason and I didn’t want to go to sleep, so we stayed up long after the hospital had dimmed the lights in our room, talking in low voices. We knew that we had done something that had stopped Kieran and Eve, and that there had been some reason that we weren’t supposed to wake up from our coma, but we couldn’t remember much else.
For his part, Jason had some strange memories of something about wolves and grandmother’s houses. He said he thought he might have been dreaming about Natural Born Killers or something.
I remembered a little bit about a dream where the two of us had children. But we’d done something bad to them. Other than that, the only thing I remembered was that right before I’d woken up, someone had stuck me with a needle that had been in Jason’s arm.
I had dreamed that, but it seemed to have been real. I remembered pulling it out before the doctors had shown up. Jason and I searched the floor and found it. We passed it back and forth, but it was impossible to know whether I’d actually been stuck with a used needle or not. And it didn’t really explain anything, anyway. Was that what had woken me up? Why?
One thing was for sure. I had woken up first, and Jason had come to a few moments later.
There were a lot of unanswered questions, and despite what Hallam had said, not a bit of it seemed normal.
“Look, we’ll get through whatever this is,” Jason whispered from across the room. “We always do.”
“I know,” I said. “You and me against the world, right?”
He laughed softly.
“Besides,” I said, “it doesn’t seem that bad, actually. We’re awake. We’re healthy as horses. It seems good.”
“I know,” he said. “For some reason, I have a real problem accepting that anything in my life could possibly be good.”
I made a face in the near-darkness. “Me too.”
“I know that I love you,” he said, “and that as long as I have you, everything will be okay.”
“I love you too.”
“Maybe we should try to sleep,” he said.
I snuggled into my pillow and found myself yawning. “Okay,” I said. “I guess I could get behind that.”
It didn’t take too long before I was sucked into a dreamless sleep, deep, dark, and relaxing.
When I awoke, I was moving. Someone was wheeling my bed down a corridor. I tried to sit up, but someone wearing a hospital mask and cap pushed me back down.
“Stay still, Miss Jones,” said the person holding me down.
“What’s going on?” I demanded. “Where’s Jason?” I struggled and twisted until I saw that Jason was behind me, also being wheeled in his bed.
“Your case is very unique. You’re being transferred to a specialist. Please lie back, or we’ll have to sedate you.”
Jason looked like
he was still asleep. Which surprised me, because Jason wasn’t a heavy sleeper. Being trained by the Sons of the Rising Sun meant that he stirred at the first sign of danger.
“We already had to sedate your boyfriend.”
I gulped.
“Trust me, this is for the best. The specialist will be able to treat you better than this hospital.”
But we didn’t need treatment. We were fine. Everyone had been astonished at how fine we actually were. I didn’t like this. Not one bit.
I pushed at the arms holding me, managing to sit up. There was a sharp prick in my neck.
Everything started to get fuzzy...
CHAPTER TWO
I fought to the surface once. I was in the back of some kind of vehicle. I could tell because of the bumps on the road. I tried to sit up.
“She’s fighting off the sedation already,” said a voice, panicked.
Another prick in my neck.
“Goddamn it, I wish they didn’t process it so fast,” said another voice. “We’re almost out.”
And then I didn’t hear anything else. I was sucked down into nothingness.
When I finally did wake up, my head hurt and my tongue was thick and dry in my mouth. I lifted my eyelids to find myself in a small, windowless room. It was bare. Gray walls. No furniture except a cot in one corner, where I lay. I wasn’t in my hospital gown anymore. Instead, I’d been dressed in a gray one-piece jumpsuit, like something Michael Myers wore in Halloween . I fought off the immediate association—my high school boyfriend, Toby, dressed as Michael Myers, come to capture and rape me all those years ago.
But it hardly mattered. Fear was rising in my throat, hot and bright. I put my feet down on the gray carpet and got up off the bed. I stood in the middle of the room and turned in a circle.
There wasn’t much to see. There was a garish light fixture in the center of the ceiling, beaming down fluorescent light on me. But there were no light switches that I could see. The walls of the room were smooth and empty. Across the room, there was a toilet, a small sink, and a shower stall. It didn’t have a curtain, but rather a glass door. In all four corners, I saw mounted cameras.
I was being filmed?
What the hell was going on here? I had known there was something fishy about the idea that we were being taken to a “specialist.”
We.
Where was Jason?
There was a door at one end of the room. It was metal, gray burnished metal, with a black door knob. I darted for it, expecting it to be locked.
But the doorknob turned, and the door opened.
I stepped into a hallway. More cameras. Mounted to the ceiling every four feet or so. They glared down at me like unblinking eyes.
The hallway was just as bare and empty as the room I’d been in. The same fluorescent lights beamed down on me. To my left, the hallway dead-ended. Just a blank, gray wall. To my right, it stretched out until it came to another metal door.
I turned right and began to walk, struggling to control my breathing. Where was I? What was this place? How did I find Jason? What if I couldn’t find Jason?
There were doors along the hallway, spaced out every few feet or so. I tried them. They opened into rooms like the one I’d been in.
But all of them were empty. The cots sat in the corners, bare of covers or sheets.
Was this a prison? A hospital?
Finally, I reached the end of the hallway, and I opened the door there.
I emerged into a large room. It looked institutional and blank, like everything else. It was shaped like a hexagon, a door against each six sides. There were four or five round gray tables set up in the center. A woman was sitting at one of them. She was reading a book. She tucked her long dark hair behind one ear.
“Hello?” I said.
The woman looked up, startled. Then her gaze settled on me, and she smiled. “Oh, hello. You must be the new one they brought in earlier.”
New one? I rushed over to her. “Did you see them bring me in?” Never mind who exactly “they” were for now. “Was there someone with me? A man?”
“We never see them bring in the new ones,” said the woman. “They lock us in our rooms.”
They did what? Okay, maybe now was the time for question number two. “Who are they? Where are we?”
The woman cast a nervous glance at the cameras. “New ones always ask questions like that.” She shook her head. “It’s better if you don’t.”
“Why?” I said.
The woman wouldn’t meet my eyes. “They watch. They know.”
“Who are they?”
“They run this place. They feed us. They keep us here. That’s really all we know. And you don’t want to try to find out more. Trust me, don’t ask .”
I took a step back, glancing around the room with a growing sense of horror. This wasn’t good. Okay, maybe that was an understatement. This was horrible. I needed to find Jason.
The woman was smiling again. “I’m Emma Palmer.” She offered me her hand.
I ignored it. “I need to find the man I was with.”
“Well, he’s probably in one of the other wings,” she said.
Did the doors along each side lead to wings like the one I’d come from? I looked around at each of the metal doors. Six doors, equally distanced around the main room.
“He might have not have woken up yet,” said Emma. “They usually heavily sedate anyone who comes in.” She got up from the table and put her hand out again deliberately. “What’s your name?”
Why was this woman insisting on being so polite? “Azazel,” I said. “Azazel Jones.” But I didn’t take her hand. Instead, I went to one of the other doors and threw it open.
“Azazel,” said the woman. “That’s an interesting name.”
I rolled my eyes. Yeah, it was odd. Some people also didn’t think it was very feminine. And try getting people to spell it right. Trust me, nightmare. “Jason,” I yelled.
“Oh, he’s probably not in that wing,” said Emma. “There are only four of us now, and we’ve all had our own wings for a while. That’s Boone’s wing. But don’t yell. He sleeps late, and he doesn’t like it when people wake him up.”
I closed the door. “So, what wing do you think he might be in?”
“Well,” said Emma, “the only other open one, besides the one you just came out of, is this one.” She pointed. “Your friend’s probably down there.”
I rushed to the door, yanked it open, and sprinted down the hall, opening each door and yelling for Jason as I did so.
He was in the last room of the hallway, just like I’d been. He bounded out of the room and grabbed me in a hug.
Terrified, I hugged him back.
“We’re okay,” he whispered in my ear. “We’re together, so we’re okay.”
I tried to calm down, but I felt dangerously close to crying. I was so confused.
Jason released me, and I turned to look down the hallway. Emma was standing at the end. She waved. “Hi there. I’m Emma Palmer. What’s your name?”
* * *
“Hey,” said an annoyed teenage girl as Jason yanked open the door to her room. She was young, probably no more than thirteen. Her hair was in a sloppy ponytail, and she wore the same kind of gray jumpsuit we all wore. “What are you doing?”
I was following Jason as he explored the wings off the main room. Thus far, they’d mirrored our wings. Most of the rooms were empty except for the room at the end. The other wing we’d looked at had been Emma’s. She’d called after us that there was nothing to see and that we were being rude. Jason was ignoring her as much as I was.
“Sorry,” Jason muttered. He turned and started back up the gray hallway towards the main room.
I followed him.
So did the teenager. “You guys are new, huh? I wondered why we were all locked in our rooms like that. It wasn’t time for drawing blood, so it didn’t make any sense.”
I turned around to look at her. “Drawing blood?”
“Seriously?” said the girl. “Can I come? It sucks cock in here.”
I grimaced. She was too young to be saying vulgar stuff like that.
“You can’t get out of here,” Emma said. She was standing at the end of the wing, twisting her fingers together. “You have to stop this. There’s no way out. You’re going to make them mad.”
Jason pushed past her.
Emma let him, but she put herself squarely in the path of the girl. “Don’t follow them, Grace. They’re making trouble. You’ll get in trouble too.”
“Eat shit and die, Emma,” said Grace, shoving Emma out of her path. She doubled her pace to catch up with me. “So, how are you going to get out, huh?”
Jason stopped in the center of the main room. He turned in a circle. “Are all of these wings the same?”
“I told you they were,” said Emma.
Jason looked at Grace. “Are they?”
“Well, yeah,” said Grace. “I mean, you can get to the library and the gym from Boone’s wing—”
“Which one is that?” asked Jason.
Grace pointed.
Jason flung open the door. We trooped inside. This wing did look exactly the same as the others except for one important difference. At the end of the hall, there wasn’t a blank, gray wall. Instead, there was a door. We hurried down the wing and through the door.
We emerged in a room about twice the size of one of the bedrooms. It was similarly gray and dull. There was a television bolted up in one corner. It was the kind that was a combination DVD player. Beneath the TV was a shelf of DVDs. There were two gray couches set up in front of the TV. They looked like something from a college dorm—functional, bland, and uncomfortable. They were a little worse for wear, torn at the edges, a hint of stuffing peeking out. The room also sported two large shelves of books. On the far wall, there was another door.
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