Alone: The Girl in the Box, Book 1

by Robert J. Crane

  ~

  Thirteen

  I woke up just after one in the morning. Except for a few minor aches, my injuries from the battle with Wolfe had healed themselves without much sign of anything odd. I realized I had gone to bed without dinner and that I hadn’t eaten much lunch the day before either. I left my dormitory room (always fully dressed, remember?) and wandered the halls. I didn’t hold much hope that the cafeteria would be open at this hour, but I doubted I would have a problem stealing some food.

  Besides, was it really stealing? They would have given it to me if they’d been open. I came through the entrance to the cafeteria and found a few lights on, scattered throughout the place. Spotlights outside the massive windows showed snow was lightly falling outside. The smell of cleaning solutions hung in the air and when coupled with the dimness it gave the place the vague sense of what I’d imagine a hospital to feel like.

  A lone figure was sitting in the corner where the two glass walls met, staring out into the dark. I crept up quietly until I got close enough to realize it was Zack, then started to tiptoe away. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, least of all him.

  “I can see your reflection,” he called out. He turned, revealing a series of bandages over his nose with a piece of metal over it to hold it in place for healing. “I figured you’d be hungry sooner or later.”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “Hungry and tired, so I think I’ll just get something and go…”

  “Why don’t you sit down?” His eyes didn’t let me retreat. They were watching me and I felt almost as helpless as when Wolfe’s black eyes were on me. I felt myself lower into the seat opposite him and he stared back at me as I did. I had the nasty feeling I knew what was coming next, but like a scene in a horror movie you don’t want to watch but can’t look away from, I was stuck in place.

  “I want to talk about the basement.” He was still watching me. I didn’t like it. I hated it. I despise feeling trapped, and trapped I was. I hoped this would be quick – I hoped it was already over, actually, that maybe he didn’t see as much as I thought he had, that he’d not bothered to report it to Ariadne or Old Man Winter, and definitely not Kurt.

  “About the fight with Wolfe?” I tried to keep the hope out of my voice.

  “You know that’s not what I mean. Before him. What I saw…” His voice trailed off.

  I remained silent. In a failed effort to be casual, I focused really, really hard on my left middle fingernail and started counting backward from one hundred.

  “Sienna?” He repeated my name twice more in a bid to get my attention.

  “I don’t want to talk about this.” My voice was quiet, but firm. Maybe a hint of a crack.

  “You need to talk to somebody about it.”

  “No, I don’t.” I could feel myself get defensive, pissed. “I’m pretty much a full grown woman at this point, and I can make my own decisions about what I want to talk about and don’t, and this falls into the territory of ‘don’t’.”

  “You were locked in a house for over ten years and you never escaped? With your mother gone to work all day, every day?” He shook his head. “I’ve been asking myself since we met how a mother could keep a kid in check that long, even if they were the most passive, easygoing person on the face of the planet—”

  “I gather you’re saying I’m not—”

  “—let alone a stubborn, willful child that probably resisted from day one, just bucking for freedom any which way she could—”

  I pursed my lips. “You make me sound like a wild horse.”

  “Let’s go with that analogy,” he said, nodding, which broke our eye contact. “How does someone domesticate a horse?”

  “They break it,” I said with a hint of defiance. “Do I look broken to you?”

  “Looks don’t mean a thing. She did break you, didn’t she?”

  I blew air out my lips and stared out the window at the snowfall. “I broke rules all the time,” I said in a tone of forceful denial. “She wasn’t home during the day, and I could do anything I wanted—”

  “Except leave the house.”

  The wind outside kicked up and the snow started falling sideways. I hadn’t seen that before. “No, I didn’t leave the house, but I looked outside plenty of times.”

  He leaned across the table, making a bid to recapture my attention from the snow drifts that I allowed to distract me. “When she caught you breaking the rules, how did she punish you?”

  I was stronger than him – I could have knocked him out and broken through a window and been gone. Gone from the Directorate and gone from this state and gone from my sorry little example of a stunted life. Tomorrow I could be living somewhere else and no one would catch me.

  It was funny, because the cafeteria was hundreds of feet long and hundreds of feet wide, and the nearest table was ten steps away, and yet I felt like I was trapped in an enclosed space; it was just like…

  “Yeah.” My acknowledgment came out in a voice of surrender. “That was how.”

  In the corner of our basement stands a box. Made of hardened steel plates an inch thick, welded together, it’s a little over six feet tall, about two feet wide and two feet deep, when it stands long-end up. It opens like a coffin, along the longest plane. There’s a sliding door on that side, about two inches tall and four inches wide, just enough to see out of – or into – the box. There are hinges on one side and a heavy locking peg on the other.

  I knew when Zack saw it that he would figure it out. But it was worse when he opened it.

  “She didn’t let you out to…do your business?”

  I shook my head. But he already knew the answer to that, because the smell inside it was horrific; it made the whole basement stink of rot when it was open.

  “How long did she leave you in there?” His eyes still appeared unreactive.

  I laughed, a dark, humorless bark that rumbled through me, keeping my emotions in check behind a facade of false bravado. “Which time? There were so many. As you mentioned, I am somewhat stubborn and defiant. I was in there at least once a week. Usually for smarting off; Mom didn’t like that much.”

  “How long?”

  I shrugged. “An hour or two, most of the time – with the door closed on the front, so it was completely dark. And that, honestly, wasn’t so bad. It was the times when I was in there for days, those were the ones when it was bad—” The times when my stomach screamed at me because it was sick of nothing but the water that was piped in from a reservoir by a small tube. The times when I started to get lightheaded and had to sit down, where I just felt weak and near dead by the time she let me out.

  If she let me out.

  He grimaced, the first sign of emotion I’d seen from him since the conversation began. “What about the longest time?”

  I paused, and an insane sounding laugh bubbled out of my mouth. I felt a stupid, pasted-on grin stretching my face. “A week, I think.”

  His voice had grown quiet, but it was undergirded by a curiosity. “When was that?”

  Silence owned me, but just for a beat. “Let’s see. After I ate something and showered, I lay down to sleep – you know, horizontally, because trying to sleep curled up in a ball inside it sucks, just FYI – and I woke up and you and Kurt were in my house. So…a few days ago.”

  This time the silence was stunned. “She left you…after locking you in?”

  I nodded, hoping he wouldn’t ask the dark, piteous question I’d been asking myself lately. “And I haven’t seen her since.”