The killer stood beside her. He was wearing his camouflage suit, the one she’d peeled from his skin before his body was even cold. The hood was down and the camouflage system was deactivated so that the suit was dark. It matched his eyes. They were dark brown, so dark they looked almost black, drinking all light in.
Behind them, further down the hall, stood Dr. Volkov, his gray cardigan the same as it had been at the lake, a bag of duck feed in one hand.
Not real. She shook her head.
Something moved in the corner of her vision and she flicked her gaze to look at it.
It almost looked like a man, except for all of the ways it was definitely not human. It crept across the floor on all fours, arms and legs too long, bent at odd angles. His body was thin and dark, like a skeleton that had been on fire, all its flesh burned away.
What the fuck is that?
She tried to draw away from the thing but the restraints held her down, even though she didn’t give up her struggles when it burned against her skin. She was already burning. She looked down and saw flames licking at her body.
Maia and the others turned, following her line of sight.
There’s nothing there, they said, in unison. Except, the voice that came from their throats was her own.
Stephanie closed her eyes.
She forced herself to lie perfectly still, in the middle of the bed, where the restraints burned the least. She focused on her breathing. In. Two. Three. Four. Out.
She told herself to ignore the pain that wormed its way through her body, ignore the phantom sensations that burned her skin.
Ignore the sound of her own voice, coming from outside herself.
It’s not real.
She turned inward, to the corners of her mind, where she’d hidden with Maia when the killer had taken over and fended off her attacker.
Please, make it stop, she begged for relief. Pain enveloped her, refusing to loosen its grip. Her body jackknifed of its own accord, trying to throw the pain away.
She wanted to die.
She’d been right. It wasn’t just the emotional pain of being captured, but the physical pain of the experiments. Death was better than this.
The thought brought her some small measure of comfort. The corporation was not her family, but the others were. The Succubi and the Predators alike. And she’d released them, she was sure of that much at least. The ones who had died were no longer suffering.
She felt vindicated.
That was enough to help her bear it.
* * *
It felt like days had passed. No, weeks.
She lifted her head weakly. Her eyes were dry and itchy, like they’d been open for a long time. She blinked them slowly. She made out a figure in another bed. One of the Succubi who had stumbled past her while she’d been fighting Spencer. What was his name? Conner.
She could only just make her eyes focus enough on the face in the next bed.
She scanned the room for other blurry forms tucked under the blue sheets. It was hard to tell but she thought it was just the three of them.
The others had gotten out.
A smile twitched at her mouth. Her face felt dry, like it might crack if she smiled too much.
She blinked again. Slowly.
Opened her eyes. They felt like they were lined with sand.
Blinked again.
This time, her eyes stayed shut.
* * *
The next time she woke, she was sitting cross legged on a cloud, playing bridge with Maia.
I don’t know how to play bridge, she told her.
Neither do I, Maia shrugged.
So, why are we playing?
Don't ask me. I’m dead, remember?
* * *
A shadow filled the room slowly, creeping in from the doorway. It flooded across the floor, inky black.
That’s not how shadows move. Stephanie frowned.
It was like water.
Slowly, the pool of shadows got deeper, rising up around the bed.
She was going to drown.
Her breath came faster.
Panic settled in and she tugged at her restraints, pain washing over her at the contact. She tugged again. She had to get out of there.
“Help,” she tried to scream. Her voice came out in a tiny squeak, barely audible. She cleared her throat and tried again.
“Somebody help me!”
Spencer Evans walked into the room, shadows swirling around his legs in small waves as he pushed his way through it.
“Hi, Stephanie,” he said.
She tugged at her restraints again, letting out a low whine as the pain lanced across her body.
“Sorry about the high setting,” Spencer Evans said.
He pulled a chair out from near the wall, turning it so that the back of the chair faced her. He straddled the chair, leaning one forearm along its back. He rested his other hand on his leg, elbow cocked out to the side.
He didn’t seem to notice the shadow swirling at his feet.
“So, how are you doing?” he asked casually.
“What the hell, Spencer? I thought you said you wanted to help me.”
“We are helping you, Stephanie. The data we’ve gathered in the last few days alone puts us so much closer to a cure.”
“You’re the one who’s sick, Spencer.” She shook her head. If this was his idea of helping, she’d hate to see the way he treated his enemies.
“You’ll thank me one day. When you’re healthy again.”
She felt her lips twist into a sneer. “Remember on the way back from Ecrune... What was it you said to me, again?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Stephanie.” The shadows had crawled up to his knees by then, rising steadily. He still didn’t seem to notice they were there.
“You wanted to run away with me.”
He rose an eyebrow. “I didn’t realize your hallucinations extended that far back.”
She laughed. It tasted like salt. “Come on, Spencer. Do you really think Dr. Kelsey is going to buy that? She’s a smart woman.”
He shook his head. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But she could see from the uneasy way his eyes flicked to the side before meeting hers that he knew. He knew exactly what she was talking about.
“The thing I could never figure out was what our new cover was going to be. You said you didn’t have to pretend to be my uncle anymore. What did you want to be? My brother? Sure, I guess the age gap isn’t that big... How old are you again?”
“I’m thirty-five now.” A muscle jumped in his jaw.
“Eleven years... Wow, you must have been young when you joined us. Did you even make it to graduate school? Or has this been your whole life? Like mine. That man I killed upstairs, did you know they recruited him from high school? Paid for all his education. All he had to do was sign away his soul.” She’d brushed past that memory when she was choking him.
“You still think we’re evil, huh? Are we doing the devil’s work?”
She watched the shadows cover his lap.
She shook her head. “I bet you didn’t want to be my brother.”
“You’re disturbed.”
“When did you start thinking of me like that? When I was, what? Thirteen. And you were twenty-four. Or did it come later? When we were on assignment together, seeing each other every day. Remember the clothes on Ecrune? It must have driven you crazy, all that skin right in front of you and you weren’t allowed to touch any of it.”
“What are you trying to play, Stephanie? You think the research will stop if Dr. Kelsey thinks I wanted to sleep with you?”
“No.” The shadow was up to his chest now. Soon, it would cover the bed and she wondered what would happen to her then.
Spencer Evans stared at her.
“I just wanted to tell you something,” she said.
“For god’s sake, what?’
“If you’d asked me about a month earlier,
I would have said yes.”
The shadow swept over her and she was surprised that it didn’t hurt.
Chapter Forty-Four
She woke up in the middle of the night.
The ceiling was dark above her. The air was cool.
She listened, waiting for something. What new horror would she meet today?
She’d lost track of how much time had passed. Weeks?Months? It couldn’t have been years.
She hadn’t eaten real food the entire time. They were feeding her through one of the tubes.
The thing she was waiting for didn’t seem to be coming. She lay perfectly still, wondering what had woken her. She could hear the sounds of the other Succubi breathing in the dark. Slow, rhythmic. Sleeping.
It didn’t feel like one of the experiments. Her head felt clear. Devoid of fog for the first time in... she really didn’t know how long.
Maia? She searched her mind. Killer?
Had the corporation finally managed to make them disappear?
Despair washed over her.
She was alone.
She’d never been this alone before. She’d always had someone to turn to. Caroline. Then Maia. Ivan.
Her throat felt like it closed over suddenly, when she thought of him. She choked on a sob.
He wasn’t coming.
If they’d gotten out, he would have found a way to come back for her.
He was dead.
The Succubi she’d told to run were probably dead too, all but the two who shared her hell.
She felt like a hole had been torn in her stomach.
It was worse than when she’d looked out at the space where Sanctuary should have been and found nothing but darkness. Then she’d just felt empty. There hadn’t been this ragged edge of raw nerves rimming the wound.
She wanted to puke but there was nothing in her stomach.
She dry-heaved, retching. Tears streamed across her temples, running into her ears and her hair. She turned her head, trying to wipe her face on the pillow but the restraints sparked pain through her.
She lay on her back, pinned beneath the weight of the restraints. Mucus ran across her face. She choked.
Somewhere in the room, she heard one of the others stir. Then another. Then another. She’d counted wrong. There were four of them.
“Hello?” Somebody cried out.
She tried to stop sobbing long enough to answer but it just made her cry harder. What was the point of it all? What was the point of even being born if this was how her life was going to end?
The lights flickered on. She closed her eyes against the sudden brightness.
Booted feet crossed the room. More than one set.
She felt someone approach the bed. They stood over her in silence, then slowly removed her restraints.
She opened her eyes. It was a soldier. Hair short. Uniform dark. She didn’t recognize him.
He helped her move to a sitting position. She was so weak, she could barely hold herself upright. She slumped forward, exhausted.
Tears streamed down her face. Mucus dripped from her nose. She was too tired to make a sound. Too tired to sob or cough as the tears wracked her body. There was no point in fighting it.
The soldier disconnected the tubes from her body and lifted the neural net from her head. A chunk of hair was caught in the web and he ripped it from her scalp, swearing when he saw blood.
She didn’t move.
Didn’t ask where he was taking her when he moved her to a stretcher.
She collapsed, listlessly.
The tears dried up.
She was too tired to even cry, she realized, as sleep took her under again.
They’d finally broken her.
Chapter Forty-Five
The first sense that came back to her was her sense of smell. The room smelled cold and sterile and, for a moment, Stephanie was back on a space ship, a handsome man with cruel eyes standing above her.
The second sense that came to her was sound. Running water. Soft and gentle, the same sound repeated on a loop, like an ambient soundtrack.
Then touch. She felt the sheets stretched over her body, soft, light. The absence of restraints was almost a pleasurable sensation in itself. She’d never thought about the absence of pain as a sensation before, but there it was. The bed was firm beneath her, cradling her body.
Her eyes shivered open.
The light was soft. A pale gray. She’d seen that shade of light on Ecrune once, right before dawn. She’d woken up early to... she couldn’t quite remember why she’d been up that early.
She frowned.
Where was she?
The room itself was sparsely decorated. The bed she lay on was in the center of the room. A white armchair sat beside the bed. A large window took up one side of the wall, overlooking a mountain stream. She couldn’t tell if it was a real window or a view screen, but then she’d never been very good at telling the difference between what was real and what was not.
One tube fed into her arm.
A sound, like a bell chiming in the distance, came to her ears. A current went through her, every muscle in her body contracting and releasing.
What the hell is going on? Maia? Are you there? Is it another experiment?
She felt her heart rate pick up, breathing accelerating. Where were the others? There were three of them. She’d heard them right before she was moved. Where was Maia? The killer? Dr. Volkov?
Her mind was oddly silent.
Her anxiety tipped into panic. Had the corporation found a cure? What would they do to her if they weren’t doing research?
She imagined them peeling her mind apart, brainwashing her into loyalty. Like trying to add an extra egg to a cake after it had been cooked.
Another sound came, a low ding.
Calm flooded over her. The mattress felt softer, like she was floating, and the light turned golden warm.
Not a sedative, she thought, I’m allergic.
But she wasn’t allergic to sedatives, was she? She was allergic to the corporation’s concoction - something to relax you.
The door opened
A young woman came in. She had blonde hair and blue eyes. Her cheeks were full again, rosy. Her eyes shone.
Caroline?
Stephanie blinked. “How did you get here?”
“You got me out, remember? You organized everything.”
She shook her head. It must have been another hallucination. “You died.”
“No. I was in the first wave that got away. Before they sent a team of soldiers in to get you and the others out. I was so scared, Stephanie. We thought the corporation would burn the place to the ground before the soldiers got there. Or that you’d get hurt in the crossfire when they came in. I can’t believe how lucky we were. They managed to get there within three days of us getting out. Some new fast ship they’ve been developing on Cetus.”
Ana’s planet? She’d rescued them? Stephanie shook her head. It wasn’t a hallucination. It was a dream. The sedative must have sent her straight to sleep and she was dreaming.
She decided to go with the dream. It had been so long since she’d felt anything like hope or happiness.
“What about Ivan and Ellie?” she asked.
The young woman moved closer, leaning over the bed to peer into Stephanie’s face.
“I am Ellie,” she said, frowning. “Are you okay?”
She didn’t know how to answer that.
“What did they do to you?”
She didn’t know how to answer that either. It hadn’t made any sense from the inside. All she knew was that it had hurt.
She stared up into Ellie’s eyes. She looked so much like Caroline. She wondered if there was a mini version of herself running around somewhere, and if there was, would she want to meet her? She was suddenly glad that there hadn’t been that much contact between the batches, other than the select few from batch two point five who were sent to fill the void in their bunks.
“You know, I tho
ught you were sent to spy on me,” she laughed. She’d hated sharing a room with Ellie. Her presence a constant reminder that Caroline was gone and the corporation was watching her.
“I probably was,” Ellie shrugged.
“That’s not what you were trying to do though. All you wanted was a sister.” She felt something grow tight in her chest. The empty space where her heart had been seemed to swell, painfully.
“You didn’t do a bad job, all things considered, rescuing us.”
“Where are we?”
“We’re in a facility right now, on Cetus. I think it’s a rehab center, actually, or an aged care facility.”
“The corporation?”
Ellie shrugged. “They arrested who they could.”
“Do you think we’re safe?” She was starting to think this wasn’t a dream. What if everything she said was true? What if they had gotten out? What if she’d only been experimented on for a couple of days? It seemed impossible.
Rogue Memory Page 21