by Tarah Benner
He was carrying me — strangling me — and every step he took caused me more pain. My whole body felt as though it were being stabbed all over by a thousand knives, but the wounds did not bleed. They merely punctured the skin enough to leave tracks of angry skids and burns, occasionally hitting with such force that they bruised me down to the bone.
Why did he not understand that he was hurting me? Why hadn’t I passed out?
The pain was too much — worse than I’d ever experienced. It was nothing the HALLO tags could have prepared me for. The hallucinations the HALLO tags produced were tangible: flames that charred you, chemical ice that froze and blistered the skin, or water that filled your lungs and drowned you. This was just pain in its rawest, most basic form. There was no way out — no way to fight it — because it had no source. It was everywhere at once, breaking me down with every step Amory took.
I became aware of soreness in my hands and wrists. Beating my fists against his back, kicking and screaming and crying, I tried to tell him to stop.
The light pulsating sensation in my head had escalated to a constant throttling, as though I were experiencing repeated whiplash in the middle seat of a car.
I thought I might be sick. I retched, but my stomach was empty. I continued to dry heave, and the spasms escalated.
Shaking uncontrollably, I tried to yell out.
He was killing me. Amory was killing me. Something deep in the recesses of my brain shut off, and I felt myself losing the fight.
Why was he taking me from the atrium in the first place?
I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand why he would take me away from my bed and the food and the routine of it all. Twelve times a day, I experienced the joyful moment of déjà vu — a whispered clue to something I used to know. That was all I needed.
I didn’t care. I didn’t want to go back, and I didn’t want to leave with him. I just wanted it to stop.
And then it did.
CHAPTER TWO
The voices started as no more than a faraway rumble of activity I couldn’t discern — a theater of excited people waiting for the show to start. Then, little by little, the voices pulled apart like drips of honey. The spatters of conversation began to take shape.
“It was terrible. I’ve never seen her like that. I’ve never seen anybody like that.”
“Yours was pretty bad.”
“I don’t remember it being that terrible. She was almost . . . a different person.”
“She’s been there a lot longer.”
“Only two months.”
“That’s all the time they need, I guess.”
One of the voices belonged to Amory. I recognized the other voice, too, but recalling its owner required a deep dig into the dusty corners of my brain. I squinted against the bright light fanning around the edges of my eyelids. My head hurt. I didn’t want to open my eyes just yet. I didn’t want to face where I was or what had happened.
Lying there, I could feel the hum of motion beneath me and the muffled rush of wind. I was in a car, and I could sense there were other people around me: Amory and the other boy who had spoken. Not opening my eyes, I allowed myself to be lulled into a dreamlike state by the gentle movement of the car.
Two cool fingers touched the side of my neck, ghosting over my skin like a raindrop and feeling my pulse. The person next to me sighed loudly.
“I don’t know why she hasn’t woken up yet.” It was Amory.
“That’s fine. We’d probably have to knock her out again when we get there. If she’s as messed up as you say —”
I grimaced. I didn’t like the sound of that.
“I don’t want to sedate her.”
“We have to.”
“You don’t know that,” he said angrily. “She might wake up and be fine.”
“I was there when she woke up from getting her tonsils out. Trust me. She’s not going to be fine.”
Tonsils. When had I had my tonsils out?
A memory resurfaced, slowly at first, and then faster and more vivid. I was twelve when I got my tonsils removed, and Greyson had been there when I woke up.
Greyson. That was the other speaker. Why was he here? I didn’t understand.
After a while, the car stopped, and I felt Amory’s arms lift me bodily from the car. The cold air stung my face, but my bare arms in the thin white scrubs had been covered by something warm and heavy — his jacket. Why did I have his jacket?
As soon as the cold stopped, I knew we were inside. I heard the floor groan under the combined weight of Amory and me as he carried me to a room and laid me on a soft bed that smelled ancient.
“She doesn’t need that.”
“It’s for her own good,” said a much deeper, unsympathetic voice.
“You know I don’t agree with this,” said Amory.
“That’s fine.”
The third person took another step toward me, and a moment later, I felt the hard stab of a needle in my arm.
Something was missing.
There were no voices, but I could feel the presence of several other people in the room — their eyes watching me.
Unsteady light flickered behind my eyelids, and I forced myself to open them.
What looked like a rundown old motel room came slowly into focus: the fake wood paneling, the ugly brown bedspread that smelled like pine-scented cleaner, cheap perfume, and stale cigarette smoke. The concerned faces of Greyson, Amory, and Logan hovered above me.
Logan. I was surprised I recognized her at once, but here she was. She didn’t look right, though. She was too pale, rail thin, and wrapped up in a blanket on the chair next to the bed, though the room wasn’t cold.
They were all watching me expectantly.
“Haven,” Amory breathed. He looked relieved but did not reach out to touch me. Up close, I could see the dark shadows under his eyes and the way his mouth strained to pull up around the edges into a smile.
Realizing what had happened, I sat up with a start, jerking my head around like a caged animal. I pulled myself awkwardly into a seated position. One of my hands was tied above my head, bound to the headboard with a piece of cloth.
“Hey, hey. It’s all right.” Amory’s hand jerked on the bedspread, as though he wanted to reach out to squeeze my arm but thought better of it.
“Where am I?”
“Somewhere safe,” said Greyson.
Something about seeing Greyson put me at ease. His caramel-colored skin and warm brown eyes were as familiar as my own, but I didn’t understand why. I knew him, but I didn’t.
“We removed your CID,” Greyson continued.
Amory shot him a deadly look.
Shoulder aching, I reached up with my free hand and lifted my hair to feel the tender skin on the back of my neck. There was a new bandage and, underneath, the bumps of a fresh incision sutured together. It hurt a little. Something inside me seemed to break, and my eyes filled with tears.
“That wasn’t your decision to make,” I said. My voice shook.
I felt broken and violated. Most of all, I felt confused.
“Haven, we got you out of that PMC brainwashing facility.” Logan’s voice was strained with worry. “You’re safe now. Amory risked his life . . .”
“That wasn’t your decision, either!” I yelled.
“What do you —”
“I was fine!”
“They were torturing you,” she said.
“They were teaching me.”
“Teaching you what?”
“Logan,” Amory said in a warning voice. “Stop. She’s been drugged.”
“No, I haven’t!”
I had been drugged, but I was in control.
Logan was undeterred. “Teaching you what?”
“I was finally making progress!”
Why was I screaming?
Now that I was out of there, I knew that these people had been my friends. So why did everything feel so wrong?
Burning hot resentment filled my vei
ns, and the small room suddenly felt too crowded. I hated this room. It made me feel dirty and trapped and estranged.
I took a deep breath, trying to ease the fear that the whole place might crash in on me at any moment.
No. These people were not my friends. They were pretenders. They had taken me away just when things were starting to improve.
“Haven, there’s something else,” said Amory, reaching out to touch my leg, but I jerked it away, pulling my knees up to my chin and glaring at him.
“Do you really think now is a good time?” Greyson muttered under his breath.
“She deserves to know.”
“Know what?” I growled.
Amory took a deep breath. “We’re at war.”
My eyes flitted between Amory and Greyson. “Who?”
“The rebels have crossed the border to fight World Corp and the PMC. We’re trying to draw attention to what’s going on so the people here will turn against them. If we can get the documented people involved, it will be an easy win. If we can’t —”
“You’re not going to win,” I said automatically.
Amory stopped talking. He was looking at me as though he’d misheard.
The three of them exchanged an anxious look.
“What?” asked Greyson.
“If you try to fight World Corp International, you will die.” I took a deep breath. “You’re on the wrong side.”
CHAPTER THREE
It doesn’t matter what side you’re on. Being a prisoner anywhere is pretty much the same.
With the rebels, the treatment was slightly better, but it didn’t feel humane. I stayed tied to the bed in that dark room, shaking and sweating. Amory told me I was going through withdrawal, and I believed him. Nothing would stay down, and I felt dizzy, nauseated, and disoriented for three days.
Greyson and Amory took turns guarding me, and I glared at them through the haze.
After the effects of the little clear pill had worn off, they explained that I had been held at the facility against my will. I didn’t know if I believed them. I couldn’t shake the horrible feeling that the three people who told me they were my friends were just as bad as the man whose face rippled above the water as I was drowning in my nightmares.
The food they brought me wasn’t anemic and tasteless like the food at the facility, but I told myself they were feeding me well in an effort to lower my defenses and coax me over to their side.
There were days it felt as though it was working. I ate as though I was starving, and the way they looked at me, maybe I had been. After a few days, I felt stronger and more alert.
One day, I overheard Amory and Logan arguing in the hallway, and I thought for a while that they were debating whether or not to kill me.
In the end, Amory seemed to win, but he still wasn’t happy. He left for a while, and when he returned, Greyson blindfolded me and tied my hands.
He packed up our scant possessions from the room, and they put me in a van. We drove for a few hours, maybe longer. I lost track of time.
When the van finally stopped and Amory slid the door open to let me out, I could smell pine trees. The cold, fresh air filled my lungs and revitalized me, and I allowed myself to enjoy the warmth of Amory’s gentle hand on my back as he guided me through the woods. I counted my steps from the van so I would know how far I was from the road, but I was disoriented, and I had no idea what direction I was walking.
I could hear someone splitting wood and the sounds of dozens of people moving around, so I knew they had brought me to a rebel camp. Since it would have been nearly impossible to cross the border with a hostage in the backseat, I surmised that we were still in the New Northern Territory.
Amory’s hands touched my shoulders to steady me and reached behind my head to untie the blindfold. When he pulled the fabric away, the camp came into view: a rough circle of about forty tents clustered in pockets of trees. There was an enormous bonfire burning in the middle of the clearing, and rebels in black milled around fetching water, preparing food, and carrying firewood. No one paid us any attention.
He led me to a tent tucked farther back in the woods than the others, with a crude sign staked in front of it that read “Auxiliary Supplies.”
Amory cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Roman thinks it might be best to keep you away from the others until . . . until you recover.”
A sharp pang of irritation hit me, souring my words. “Recover from what?”
“I didn’t mean . . .” He scratched his head, looking lost for words. “Just until . . . you’re back on our side.”
I scoffed. “Then you may be holding me hostage for a long time.”
“Is that what you think?” Amory sounded genuinely hurt. I wasn’t tempted to feel any remorse until he drew back the tent flap and I saw he had pushed all the supplies to one side of the tent and made me a pallet on the other.
I glared at him.
Anger flashed in his gray eyes, and he pushed me inside. “Sit down.”
I sank cautiously down onto the tarp with my hands bound in front of me, resting against an enormous bag of flour.
Amory’s hands gripped my ankles and yanked them toward him. I felt a flash of alarm and tried to pull away, but he just grabbed a length of rope from the floor and bound my feet together.
By the time he was finished, my humiliation was burning a hole through the tent flap.
Amory looked red around the ears, too, though I couldn’t think why he would be embarrassed. What had he expected? Wasn’t this how you treated a prisoner?
He backed away from me crouched on his heels, his eyes dancing with a challenge. He expected me to break — to say I was on their side and could be trusted. I knew it would be smarter to act as though I had succumbed to Stockholm syndrome or something and was back on their side, but I couldn’t do it. I had been confused and powerless for too long. Now that I finally had a clear head, I wouldn’t let people control me anymore.
I raised an eyebrow at Amory. He could tie me up all he wanted — starve me if he liked. I didn’t care. I didn’t trust them, and I wouldn’t feign trust. I would escape on my own, though I had no idea how or where I would go.
With a grunt of irritation, Amory got up. He grabbed the sleeping bag from the pallet on the floor. With a loud unzipping sound, it came apart as a blanket, and he threw it over me unceremoniously. When I pulled my chin up over the sharp zippered edge, I was alone in the supply tent.
Within three days, I had memorized the rhythm of the camp. Chores started before sunrise, and the crack of splitting firewood echoed through the trees. I could hear people huffing toward the mess tent with buckets of water and the groggy murmurs of people milling around in their tents.
When the sun came up, a bell tolled across camp, and the woods went quiet as they all gathered for a meeting. Then the camp was bustling again as everyone went off to do their daily chores. Some hunted, and others stayed behind to wash clothes, cure meat, and clean weapons. The bell tolled again at noon and a third time for supper.
At sundown, I heard the murmur of Amory and the other guards outside preparing to fan out around the perimeter to watch for approaching PMC. Sometimes I just listened to the guards pacing in the snow.
It wasn’t much, but the routine kept me from going insane.
I barely had any visitors, apart from Roman, who brought me my meals in silence and took me out to the woods to use the bathroom. I wasn’t sure why he was tasked with taking care of me, but perhaps the others thought him less likely to let his guard down around me. They didn’t want me to escape.
I hadn’t seen Greyson or Logan since we’d left the motel. Amory was the only one who visited me, not out of necessity, but because he wanted to.
Every day at noon without fail, he would appear with two plates of food and sit with me while we both ate our lunch. It was only half an hour, sometimes less if there was a lot of work to be done, but at least it was human contact.
Part of me was inclined t
o feel grateful since I knew it was the only time Amory really had that was his own. From the dark purplish shadows under his eyes and his raw, wind-stung cheeks, I knew he was kept busy on lookout duty from sundown to sunrise.
The other part of me felt distrustful. If he was really my friend, why wouldn’t he untie me? I did think of trying to escape, but as I turned the idea over in my mind, I realized it would mean certain death. I had nowhere else to go.
During those first few days, Amory tried to maintain a strained, one-sided conversation. He told me stories from the farm, and I knew he was hoping to jog my memory. But the things he brought up were mostly foreign to me. I could only see snapshots of memories, and even those might have been figments of my imagination.
I couldn’t remember much about Amory and Logan and Roman. Other than their names and a vague familiarity, I didn’t know them at all.
The memories of my life before the Collapse were there — accessible if someone referenced an event or a person from my past — but they were oddly dulled and fuzzy if I just tried to think back.
Amory asked me questions about my childhood — about Greyson — but I was silent, obstinately refusing his attempts to connect. When he talked, I just sat there, trying to mask my fear and confusion.
At first, he acted as though it didn’t bother him, though I knew it did. For a while, he could keep his voice bright and optimistic.
But as the days went by, I could tell my silence was beginning to wear on him. Amory was slipping away.
He talked less, ate quickly, and left. He seemed to grow older and deflate a little each day I ignored him.
Whether I was breaking him or he was breaking me, I couldn’t tell, and it didn’t matter. It was equally horrible for both of us.
After ten days, I had grown restless and impatient. Amory, Roman, and the others showed no signs of letting me go, and it was clear they didn’t plan to kill me. They would probably keep me there forever if I let them.
I realized the only way they would untie me and let me roam around free was if they truly believed I had begun to remember them. That meant I had to earn their trust.