“In a metal cage, like everyone else. Stacked three high, in a cargo bay on the prison transport. I didn’t have room to stand up for more than two weeks.”
I shrug as I rinse my rag again. “Well, obviously they treat the ladies better.” I’d rather be unconscious during the trip than packed in like sardines with a bunch of other prisoners.
But Jack still looks puzzled. “Well, however it happened, I’m glad you’re here. I’ll be right back to help you roll him over.” He pulls the sheet up to cover the woman he’s just finished with, then he pushes his cart—containing a basin of clean water and a basin of soapy water—toward the setup area, where he will drain and refill them for the next donor.
“Were you frowning at him?” I whisper to Beau as Jack walks away. There’s no response. Maybe I am imagining the whole thing. “I mean, I wouldn’t blame you. He was obviously flirting, and I’m quite the catch.”
Okay, so maybe I’ve been pretending that Beau is actually interested in me, even though he’s never really seen me, and if he can hear me, he probably has much bigger things on his mind than a crush on his caregiver, considering the position he’s in. But a girl can dream, can’t she?
There’s little else to do in zone twelve.
Beau’s lips twitch again—up, this time—and my heart jolts in my chest. “You are listening, aren’t you?” I lean forward to whisper, pretending I need a better look at something on his arm. “In that case, I feel like I should apologize for the fact that I’m about to wash your junk. Again. That’s probably not how you usually get to know women, huh?”
Another lip twitch, and my heart is racing now. “Are you’d doing that on purpose? Don’t break my heart, Beau. Tell me you’re in control of those twitches. Do it again for me, okay? Please?”
I stare at him, my hands hanging limp in the basin of soapy water, my rag forgotten while I wait. Suddenly this moment seems vitally important. I don’t even realize I’m holding my breath until his lips twitch again, and an exhalation explodes from my throat. “Oh my god…” I breathe.
“What?” Jack says, and I jump, startled to realize he’s back. I didn’t see or hear him make his way back across the main floor, despite the rattling of his cart. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I whisper. “He can actually hear me, Jack! He’s been smiling—sort of—on command!”
“Seriously?” He frowns down at Beau. “How do you get him to do it?”
“He’s not a puppy performing for treats, Jack. I just ask. Beau?” I turn back to the man on the bed in front of me, while I wring out the rag and begin washing the long, hard length of his thigh. “Will you smile for Jack?”
For a second, nothing happens, and again I’m afraid that I’m reading meaning into what are actually random facial tics. But then his lips turn down for just a second, and I laugh out loud.
“That looked more like a scowl than a smile,” Jack says.
“Yeah. I don’t think he likes you.”
“Well, he clearly likes you.”
My face feels oddly warm at the thought.
“Ms. Mathern? Mr. Newsome?” Dr. Herrington says, and I look up to see him crossing the main floor toward us. “Is something wrong? You’ve been congregated around that donor for quite a while.”
“No.” I drop my gaze as I hurry to finish Beau’s leg. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“You’re not here to flirt,” Dr. Herrington snaps, and my hand goes still while my heart thuds against my sternum. For a second, I think he’s figured out what I’m doing. That Beau has started responding to my voice. But when I look up again, I see that he’s scowling at Jack, having mistaken the object of my attention. “If I find reason to believe the two of you are involved in a physical relationship, I’ll be forced to report that,” Dr. Herrington says. “And Officer Tinsley will have you dropped off in gen pop before you can even take a deep breath.” But he’s only looking at Jack, as if his threat doesn’t apply to me.
“Sorry, sir,” Jack says. “It won’t happen again.”
“See that it doesn’t.” Finally, Herrington turns to me. “Are you almost done here?” He taps on Beau’s headboard and nods to himself as he reads, as if to confirm something he already knew. “He’s due upstairs this afternoon.”
“What for?” I ask, before I can think better of it. The operating rooms are upstairs.
“Someone’s requested his liver. Half of it, anyway. So?” Dr. Herrington double taps the headboard, to close the file. “Are you done?”
“Almost. I just need Jack to roll him over for me.”
“Well then, get moving.” Herrington heads back toward the suite of offices without another word.
“Is it just me, or did his threat seem a little unilateral?” I ask, as Jack carefully rolls Beau onto his left side, so I can wash his back. “Herrington doesn’t seem to think I’d be sent to gen pop along with you.”
“And you probably wouldn’t be. The truth is that there are more female inmates than male inmates here because the guards are mostly straight, and they like pretty scenery. They keep Logan and me around to do the heavy lifting, but we’re much easier to replace, considering that the prisoner population of Rhodon overall is heavily male.”
Yet Penny, the girl I’ve replaced, was sent to gen pop.
I finish with Beau’s back, then I help Jack lay him down gently. “Well, I’m sorry I got you in trouble,” I say as I drop my rag into the basin. “But I think I’m right about poor Mr. Desmond, here. I think he can hear us.”
And if that’s the case, he just found out he’s about to lose another organ.
I can’t imagine what hell he must be living through, a prisoner locked up not just on Rhodon and in zone twelve, but in his own damn mind, as well.
5
BEAU
No! I scream as the male orderly—Kat calls him Jack—rolls me onto my back. No! Not again! They can’t just keep taking parts out of me!
But they can. That’s what the butcher and her team do.
Kat straightens the sheet to cover me—I can tell it’s her by the soft feel of her hands and by her gentle touch—and wheels rattle as Jack rolls some kind of cart away from me. Which means that Kat is about to move on to the next donor, as well.
I have to get her attention. I have to show her that she’s right; I’m still in here. And I’m still capable of escape. If she’ll help me.
I have to make some kind of effort that she can’t dismiss or misinterpret. I need her to truly see me. Which means I have to open my eyes. But my eyelids feel like they’re made of iron, thanks to whatever Herrington is dripping into my veins.
My entire frame goes tense with the effort to open my eyes, but Kat doesn’t notice. She’s busy covering my feet. If I had control over my vocal chords, I’d be grunting with the effort I’m putting into this, and the fact that I can’t makes me want to shout in frustration. Yet I can’t do that either.
But finally, as the wheels of Kat’s cart start to squeal, my right eye sluggishly opens. My left eye follows an instant later.
The pain is instant and intense. My eyes haven’t been opened for anything more than a quick pupil check by a doctor—and that brief glimpse of Kat—in who knows how long, and the bright daylight feels like needles shoved right through my corneas.
I can’t see much of anything yet; the world is a big, bright blur. But the woman-shaped smear of color—Kat, surely—is near my head and moving away. She’s not even going to notice—
Then she stops, suddenly, and relief washes over me as she turns to stare down at me.
I blink—it’s still not easy—and the world starts to come into focus. And for the second time, I see her face. Much more clearly, this time.
“Oh my god,” she whispers. “You’re awake.”
I want to nod, but I can’t move my head. Just keeping my eyes open is an exhausting effort.
I want to kill whoever’s done this to me.
“Have you heard me, all those times I’v
e been talking to you?” she whispers.
I blink again. That’s all I can do.
Kat looks across the room, obviously assessing the risk of being seen talking to me again. She looks nervous, but beneath that fear, there’s a stubborn cast to the set of her jaw. To the line of her brows, dipped in silent determination. This woman is as strong on the inside as I’ve ever been on the outside.
“Blink once for yes,” she whispers. “Twice for no. Can you do that?”
I blink once, and her smile lights me up like a bonfire burning in the cage of my breast. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful. I want to touch her. I wish I could move my hand solely for the purpose of gripping her fingers.
“Do you know where you are? What’s happening to you?”
I blink twice. I’ve heard bits and pieces about my condition and location, but not enough to put the whole thing together.
“You’re on the prison planet Rhodon, in zone twelve. According to what I’ve been told, all the general population zones are in the southern hemisphere, but we’re on the northern half of the planet, where they do…other things. This zone is a medical facility set up for the harvesting of organs. I take it you didn’t volunteer for this?”
Two more blinks, and now the panic burning in my veins is met with the cool comfort of her gaze. Of her full attention.
“I didn’t think so. I…um. I don’t know how, but I’m going to try to get you out of here, before it’s too late.”
When will it be too late? When they’ve taken my lungs? My brain?
I strain to move my arms. My legs. But it’s like my limbs are made of iron.
“But I don’t think I can manage that before your next procedure.” Her frown deepens as she takes another brief glance across what feels like a very large room. Not that I can see anything but the very high ceiling. “Tonight they’re going to take part of your liver. But the good news is that you don’t actually need the whole thing. It’ll grow back. And your recovery period will give me a chance to figure out how the hell I’m going to pull this off. So, don’t panic, okay?”
Don’t panic. About the butcher coming to cut me open again.
What if they decide to take more than my liver, since they have me open anyway? What if I don’t come back from the operating room?
“I…um… I have to go,” Kat says, and I fight to shake my head. To beg her to find some way to stay with me. To help me regain the use of my limbs, so I can get myself out of here. “But I’ll see you tomorrow,” she assures me. “Assuming you’re back from the recovery room. So try to relax, okay? If they figure out you can hear me, they’ll sedate you again.”
And for the first time since the moment she first spoke to me, Kat’s voice fails to sooth me.
After Kat moves on to other “donors”—I have yet to hear anyone refer to me as a patient—I fall asleep, exhausted by the effort of communicating with her. And from trying to fend off an overwhelming sense of terror over my own helplessness.
Sometime later, the jostling of my hospital bed wakes me up, as I’m being wheeled…somewhere.
“I swear, this guy weighs a ton,” a man says from near my head. I don’t recognize his voice, but I’m pretty sure it belongs to an intern. The prisoners who work here all speak softly, as if they aren’t really allowed to talk, and the doctors probably don’t push beds around.
“Well, you better get used to moving him,” a woman says, and the echo of her voice changes as I’m wheeled into a smaller room. “All his bits are going to be spoken for pretty quickly. He’s at the peak of health, and he’s a universal donor.”
Fuck. Panic rages like a storm inside me, but I can’t force a single one of my muscles into motion. I can’t even make my eyelids twitch. Not that that would help. If they found out I could hear them, they’d probably just push more drugs into my IV.
A soft motor whirs, and the floor jolts beneath me. I’m in an elevator.
“Fortunately, the more they take out of him, the less he’ll weigh, right?” the male voice says, and the woman laughs.
I want to punch them both in the face.
“He’s more likely to lose weight from inactivity,” the woman says a second later. “Give him a few more weeks, and he’ll shrivel to half the size he is now. And there’s no amount of amateur physiotherapy by a convict that can stop that.”
“Speaking of which, have you seen the redhead?” That’s a new voice. A man. I hadn’t realized there was a third person with us. I hear the whisper of doors sliding open, and my bed begins moving again. “She’s a hot little thing. Off limits, though.”
“Says Tinsley?” the male intern asks. “He’s not my boss.”
“Says Doc Borden. No one touches the redhead.”
Good. It hadn’t occurred to me that anyone might try to touch Kat, but I’m not surprised to hear it. This is prison, after all, and she’s not missing any of her parts. If the rest of her is as pretty as her face, she must be quite an attractive temptation.
But I have no idea why the butcher would personally come to Kat’s defense.
“Oh shit.” The male intern sounds surprised. “She’s one of those?”
“Then she’ll be gone in a couple of months anyway,” the woman says, and I try to swallow. I try to make my vocal cords work, so I can demand to know what they’re talking about. Why Kat will be gone in a couple of months. What the “those” are, that she’s one of.
But my voice will not obey my commands any better than the rest of my body.
The quality of light shining through my eyelids changes as I’m wheeled into another, brighter room. This room smells like antiseptic, and I can hear people moving all around me. The chatter ends as a new voice—the butcher—begins giving instructions in a clear, efficient tone. Someone pulls the sheet from my body, and someone else begins swabbing my abdomen with something cold.
Then the butcher—Dr. Borden—orders several kinds of medication to be administered.
Just as I begin to panic, the world goes dark.
The first thing I’m aware of is pain. But it’s a vague, cloudy kind of pain that has no specific focal point. The kind that wraps around you like a big, fuzzy, horrible blanket. Because I’m still sedated. Probably still coming out from under the general anesthetic. Though I doubt they’ll let me fully wake up.
I want to open my eyes, to see where I am, but I have a vague understanding that I shouldn’t. That it would be stupid even to try. Though my drug-addled brain can’t quite remember why—
Oh yeah. I can’t let them see that the current dose of whatever’s in my IV doesn’t work the same on me as it evidently does on everyone else.
“His pulse is spiking,” a male voice says, moving closer along with a set of footsteps. “He must be coming around enough to feel pain. I’m going to give him another—”
The pain is more localized this time. It’s sharper, deep in my abdomen, but also on the surface of my skin. That must be the incision. The throbbing pulses along with my heartbeat.
It’s quiet around me now, and there’s little light bleeding through my closed eyelids. It must be nighttime. Or maybe they just keep the lights low in the recovery room.
I wish Kat were here to talk to me.
No, I wish neither of us were here. I wish we were anywhere in the galaxy but here.
“How’s he doing?” The butcher’s voice pulls me from a mercifully deep sleep.
“Hang on a minute, and I’ll ask him,” another female voice says. It’s the intern who wheeled me in here earlier today. Or yesterday. I really have no way to judge the passage of time, when my eyes won’t open and every passing minute seems to stretch and warp like an image in a funhouse mirror.
“Har, har.” The butcher actually sounds amused.
“His vitals are fine. His pulse and his blood pressure spike occasionally, but that only puts them in the range of normal-human, instead of super-fit-body-builder, so I don’t see any reason for concern.”
“Good. I’
m scheduling him to be moved back to the main floor first thing in the morning. And I’m penciling you in for a bottle of Chardonnay and a movie in bed.”
“Whose bed would that be?” The female intern’s voice rises as she flirts.
“Mine. Unless you’d rather we stay in your quarters tonight?”
“Nah. Your rooms are nicer. My shift’s over in fifteen minutes. I’ll meet you there in half an hour.”
“Make it an hour. I have one more exam scheduled.”
“This late?” The intern sounds surprised.
“Our little redhead isn’t feeling very well.”
Our little redhead? Do they mean Kat?
“Sounds about right. Fine, then. An hour.”
Is Kat sick? Does that mean she won’t be working tomorrow? I need to see her. I need to hear her voice. As pathetic as it sounds, without her company, sparse as it is, I’m pretty sure I’ll lose my mind, locked up here in my own head.
6
KAT
The table beneath me is cold against my bare thighs, and the paper gown does little to fight off the chill of this sterile metal room. There’s nothing hanging on any of the walls. There’s nothing on the countertop—not even a jar of cotton swabs or an anatomical model of the human heart, both of which my family doctor on my homeworld had in his exam rooms. I’m a little surprised by the lack, considering that this is where they treat sick staff members. I would have thought UA would find their own employees worthy of a few creature comforts.
The door slides open. “You must be Ms. Mathern,” Dr. Borden says as she steps into the room, and my heart leaps into my throat.
“That’s what they tell me.” I try to control my racing pulse. “I thought… Well, I assumed I’d be seeing Dr. Herrington.”
“He’s off duty.” She taps a panel by the wall, and the door slides shut, closing me in with the doctor the rest of the staff calls “the butcher” behind her back.
Glass Cage Page 5