by Eva Chase
The redhead shuddered and slumped. The larger guard hefted her slack arm over his shoulder and half walked, half dragged her away. The other followed, rubbing the bite mark on his arm and muttering under his breath.
“In,” my guard ordered. This time he didn’t just tap with the baton but jabbed, straight to the ribs. The next time, he’d turn the current on. I suppressed a grimace and stepped into my room.
The door grated shut behind me. The lock thumped into place. I exhaled a ragged breath into the stale air. Sat down on the thin mattress of the twin bed. Looked at the bedside table, where the last book I’d borrowed from the library was sitting askew on top of it.
But I was still seeing the determined thrash of the redhead’s body. Still hearing her howl echoing in my ears.
She’d fought like I had, when they’d first brought me down here—when I’d heard the upper door clang shut and known they never intended to let me out. The memory shivered through me. A ghost of the adrenaline from that moment crept, bitter, into the back of my mouth.
She’d learn better. It took some longer than others, but we all did. Most of me hoped, for her sake, she was a fast learner.
But as I picked up my book, a small sense of protest coiled around my heart. Don’t stop fighting. Don’t let them break you. Not you too.
The redhead was in the Facility’s recreation lounge three days later when I walked in on my morning rotation. My eyes snagged on her bent head the second I stepped through the doorway. She was sitting at one of the tables at the far side of the room, poking at one of the wooden puzzle boxes. Her narrow shoulders were hunched, but in a posture that looked more defensive than diminished.
She was playing along, but they hadn’t sapped her spirit completely yet.
The long, messy waves of her dark red hair hid most of her face, but I could see enough to tell she was even younger than I’d guessed the other day. Younger than me, maybe not even quite out of her teens, not that I’d gotten a whole lot of chances to practice guessing age in the last seven years. A smattering of freckles dappled her pale nose and cheeks.
Between that and her sharp chin, she should have read as “cute” or at most “pretty,” but the hitch in my chest said otherwise. Maybe it was the hair, or those striking blue eyes, or the strength that emanated from her wiry frame, but as far as I was concerned, she was gorgeous.
Not that I could do anything about that observation.
I yanked my gaze away and wandered toward the TV area. There were cameras hidden in all four corners of the room and two guards stationed near the door. I didn’t need any of the Facility’s staff noticing my interest. The less they knew about what went on inside my head, the better.
We subjects rotated into the lounge ten at a time. Right now, two of the older guys were watching some Clint Eastwood flick on one of the TVs. Two of the younger subjects were perched on the edge of the couch around the other set, hammering at their Nintendo controllers. The video game system had made a big splash when the staff had brought it in a couple years back.
I could have asked to take the next turn, and they’d have shrugged and passed a controller over when they finished this level. But the digitized images darting around on the screen made me feel a little queasy if I stared at them too long. No one even really talked while they were playing. We were stuck in here with each other, and people gravitated into their own small groups, but none of us ever stopped being wary. You never knew who else was watching and listening.
You never knew what the person you were talking to might be capable of, if you hit on a sore spot you hadn’t known was there.
Darryl ambled over to join me. Pushing forty, with gray already flecked through his shaggy dun-brown hair and short beard, he’d been in the Facility since long before they’d hauled me down here. He’d taken one look at my sorry-ass sixteen-year-old self back then and, for some reason I still didn’t totally understand, had taken me under his wing. I was grateful for it, though. He’d probably saved me an awful lot of pain. He was the closest thing I had to a friend.
“Jason,” he said with a nod of greeting.
“Hey.” I gave him a brief smile. “What’s new?”
He grinned back. The question was kind of a joke, because our lives in here stayed pretty much the same, but if anyone noticed a significant change, it was usually Darryl.
“Not much,” he said in a low voice. “Unless hamburgers for lunch is your idea of a big deal. I guess it fills a blank.”
He shot me a pointed look, but I’d already caught on. We all had our talents, even if we mostly kept quiet about them. Darryl’s special knack let him sense when he was being watched, whether directly or on camera. It was thanks to his subtle gestures and comments that I knew where all the cameras in the common areas were located—and which sections of the Facility had small gaps in coverage.
There’d been one corner of the cafeteria that wasn’t totally in range. But the security had fixed that gap, it sounded like.
“Good to know,” I said. And too bad. It was nice having a few spots where you knew you could exchange a few quick words without being under surveillance, even if we had to use them very sparingly.
“And of course there’s the new girl.” Darryl tipped his head toward the redhead. “If you somehow managed not to notice her.”
His wry tone suggested that he’d already seen me eyeing her. “Have you talked to her at all?” I asked.
“Nah. She’s giving off vibes that’d make me hesitant to give her a nudge with a ten-foot pole. It’s always hardest in the beginning. You remember.”
Yeah, I did. I peeked at the girl sideways. She’d worked the side off of the puzzle box, but now she was just swinging it back and forth on the hinge, not bothering with the rest. Passing the time.
Darryl was right—she did have a vibe. The strength I saw in her was more than just physical. A faint quiver of energy radiated from her movements. My gut tightened.
She had power locked up somewhere in there. I’d bet a lot of it. How would the researchers use her if they figured out how to tap into it? She couldn’t have any idea what she was up against.
I’d seen a couple dozen new faces around the Facility over the years. None of them had stirred a protective instinct in me. Of course, none of them had been so beautiful they made me lose my breath. None of them had contained a talent potent enough that I could feel it from across the room.
Maybe it was time I paid forward some of the generosity Darryl had extended to me and took a newbie under my wing.
But I had to keep it subtle. I didn’t want my interest drawing more of the staff’s attention to her.
I shifted my focus back to Darryl. “Did you get through the King book?” We had an unofficial book club of sorts, recommending titles back and forth from the Facility’s well-stocked library.
“Hell, yeah. You were right—that one was absolutely freaky. I don’t know what’s going on in that man’s life for him to come up with shit like that.”
I laughed, but not for the first time I wondered what Darryl would think if he knew exactly how my sixteen-year-old self had gotten the Facility’s attention. “No nightmares, I hope.”
He scoffed. “I’m not that sensitive a soul.”
“Want to play something? I could grab Scrabble or the chess board.”
Darryl glanced across the room. I was sure it didn’t escape him that the shelves with the board games stood just behind the table where the new girl was sitting. The corner of his mouth curled up, but all he said was, “Sure. You go ahead and get the Scrabble board.”
I made my way over to the shelf, my skin prickling with increasing awareness of the redhead’s presence the closer I got to her. She didn’t so much as look up. I knelt down by the shelf just a few feet to her left. My gaze found the game I was looking for in a second, but I stayed there, prodding the boxes as if searching through them.
“My name’s Jason,” I said, quietly enough that I didn’t think the cameras o
r the guards would pick up the words. “So they just brought you in, huh?”
She didn’t respond. Didn’t even show she’d heard me. Well, it’d been a stupid question anyway. Obviously they had. I groped for the right thing to say.
“I know how tough it is, getting used to things down here. But there are ways to get through it without completely losing yourself.”
Nothing. I grasped the Scrabble box and tugged it out. “My friend and I are going to play a game. If you want to talk, now or later, just come over and ask if you can join us.” If it looked like she’d made the first move, no one would be suspicious of my motives.
I straightened up. The redhead still hadn’t moved, other than her fidgeting with the puzzle box lid. Her mouth was set in a tight line. I could tell, as clearly as if she’d yelled it at me, that she didn’t have any intention of taking me up on my offer.
Her shoulders were still hunched and her arms ropey thin, but looking at her from the corner of my eye right then—damn, I’d swear she was the strongest person I’d ever met.
That thought crossed through my mind, stark and certain, and her head jerked up. She stared at me, her blue eyes so wide and startled that it took all my self-control not to gaze back at her. Then they narrowed.
“Shut up,” she snapped under her breath, and leaned over the puzzle box again.
I had to look straight at her then, but her expression didn’t give anything way. My heart thudded. I pushed myself forward as if she’d just muttered at me randomly, but I hardly felt the floor under my feet.
She hadn’t been responding to anything I’d said. She’d reacted as if she’d heard what I was thinking.
Which, given the place we were in and the reason all of us had been brought here, meant she’d probably done exactly that. She’d read my mind.
I set down the Scrabble box on the table Darryl had sat down at. Before I could pull out a chair for myself, one of the guards called out to me.
“5-81, come here.”
Shit. I walked over, doing my best to look confused by the request. “Yes?”
The guard raised his chin toward the redhead. “What did she say to you?”
I relaxed incrementally. If he was starting with that, he hadn’t realized I’d been trying to strike up a conversation. He thought she’d snapped at me out of the blue.
“I couldn’t really hear her,” I said. “I was just grabbing the game—didn’t mean to set her off.”
The guard hummed to himself. “You’re better off staying away from that one, all right? So far she’s been nothing but trouble.”
“Yeah,” I said, letting my gaze rest on her for just a second. I’d spent most of the last seven years doing my best to avoid trouble, but suddenly there was nothing I wanted to do more than dive right into it.
Burning Hearts Chapter 2
Lisa
They thought I was a liar. And just like so many other people I’d had to be around, they weren’t shy about saying so. I kept my head low as the medical-type people in their starched lab coats exchanged glances, but I had ears.
“She’s got to know more than she’s telling us.”
“How can we get it out of her without provoking her again?”
I’m right here, I wanted to scream at them. My fingers curled into the scratchy folds of the wool blanket that covered the bed of the little room they’d set me up in.
But it was shouting back that had gotten me in this situation in the first place. This time, let them stew. I was keeping my mouth shut. They already knew what I thought of them. I’d used up my entire vocabulary of swears five times over in the first day they’d dragged me into this place. And I had a whole lot at my disposal.
“Lisa,” the woman said now, in a soothing voice that was way too sugary for me to believe. Her perfume was sugary too, cloying honey and rosewater. “We just want to help you. We’ve seen your records. So many times you’ve lashed out at people without provocation. It got you kicked out of two schools. It almost got you sent to juvie. Don’t you want to start moving in a better direction?”
I shrugged.
“Maybe you tried to tell people before,” the man said. His voice was less sweet but still carefully even. “But they didn’t believe you. Sometimes things happen to us that are difficult to explain. But everyone who works here knows that strange things can happen in the world. We’ll believe you.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. They kept going on about “strange things” and all that, but nothing in my life had been strange. It’d just been horrible. People didn’t like me. They liked to say so, in explicit detail. What more did these lab freaks think there was to it?
The woman took over. “Did you see something that no one else seemed to notice? Or maybe you heard something? Or you could have just had a feeling you knew something without understanding why.”
I shook my head. “There’s no big mystery,” I said. “People pretended they didn’t know what was wrong, but they’re assholes. They know what they did.”
Why those people had enjoyed taking their jabs at me so much, I didn’t know. But that was how it’d been for years. Make some nasty remark they knew I’d hear. Act innocent when I called them on it—with words or with my fists. Make me look like a crazy person. After the first couple times, I guessed I’d just started to look like an easy scapegoat.
They’d wanted to think I was psycho, so I started giving them psycho. Why make an effort to stay in line if people are going to shit all over you anyway?
I studied my hands, the ragged fingernails the people here had clipped and cleaned sometime while I’d been knocked out. Three years of street grime washed right off me. They probably expected me to be thankful for this prison of a room with its bolted door and four blank walls.
“She’s a tough one,” the woman said.
“We’d better talk to the boss,” the man said, talking over her. He cleared his throat. “All right, Lisa. Why don’t you think some more about what we said? If anything occurs to you, we’ll be available to talk whenever you need.”
I needed to be out of this fucking place. But I could already tell there was no chance in hell of them giving me that.
It was unnerving how clean the whole place was. I’d been in gyms before, and they were supposed to smell like sweat and heated plastic. The still air in the fitness room I got dropped off at in the middle of the afternoon didn’t hold any scent at all, except maybe a faint hint of ozone.
“I don’t care what you do, but I want to see you moving,” the guard by the door said. I folded my arms over my chest and glanced around the room. My eyes caught on a familiar figure jogging on one of the treadmills. The guy who’d tried to talk to me in the recreation room yesterday. Jason, he’d said his name was.
He was running at an impressive clip. A sheen of sweat shone on his well-muscled arms, which that thin, fitted T-shirt showed off to great effect. As I watched, he raked a hand back through his sandy blond hair and picked up his pace even more.
His arms weren’t the only part of him with excellent musculature on display. That sculpted ass, flexing as he hit his stride—
Okay, Lisa, whoa there. There was appreciating from afar and then there was gawking. The last thing I wanted was him catching me at it and taking it as encouragement. He might have seemed nice enough yesterday, but that didn’t mean much. I couldn’t trust anyone here. I was safest if I kept my distance from all of them.
The guard tapped my back with his baton. I’d learned my lesson about the batons a couple days ago. Ducking my head, I made for the mats next to the weight benches, on the opposite side of the room from the treadmills. Staying in shape while I was here definitely couldn’t hurt. I’d like to be ready for any opportunities that presented themselves.
Not that trying to fight my way out had gotten me very far the first three times.
I got down on the mats and positioned myself for several rounds of push-ups. In between each set, I leaned back on my heels and
stretched out my arms. When my biceps were throbbing with an endless burn, I flipped over onto my back to move on to sit-ups.
My attempt at avoiding Jason hadn’t worked. I’d just made it to my first set of ten when he ambled by me to the nearest weight bench. He didn’t look at me, but he passed so close his calf grazed mine.
“So you can read minds, huh?”
What the fuck was he talking about? I glared at my knees as he hunkered down on the bench, planning on ignoring him, but then it occurred to me that he might take my silence as agreement.
“You’re crazy,” I muttered, exhaling out of another sit-up. My abs were already starting to ache. Not a good sign for Plan: Break The Hell Out Of This Place Through Strength Alone.
Jason chuckled, low and warm. I had to admit his voice was almost as appealing as that body. “Am I? Look at me.”
How was looking at him going to make him any less crazy? I ignored him, launching myself into another set of sit-ups without bothering with the stretch. About five in, my stomach painfully informed me that I’d made a very bad decision. I gritted my teeth and kept going.
“It’s okay,” Jason said. “I won’t tell anyone. You don’t have to talk to me. It’s just kind of amazing to be able to ‘talk’ to someone here without having to worry about the staff overhearing. Especially someone who—Shit. How much exactly can you hear? This might take some getting used to.”
Just how crazy was he? I threw myself forward into one last crunch and swiveled around to look at him.
Jason was lying flat on his back, pressing a substantial-looking barbell up over his chest. The muscles in his arms stood out, big and taut. He was staring straight up at the ceiling, his mouth pressed into a tight line as he hefted the bar.
A tight, closed line. But somehow he was still talking.
“Good,” he said. “I get why you’d have the impulse to pretend, but I am really hoping I can help you here.”
