We earned curious glances, but nothing more. My hands weren’t bound, and I was dressed in my regular clothes. If anything, I probably looked more like the privileged child of someone important—progeny worth protecting, coddling even. Oh, hello, irony.
As soon as we reached the polished black-and-white floor of the lobby, my escorts took a sharp left at the koi pond in the center of the room, heading for a narrow hallway tucked to the side of the massive mahogany registration desk.
At the end of the hallway, we went through a set of swinging wooden doors and ended up in a significantly less posh section of the hall. Linoleum floors, thick yellow paint on the walls, the faint smell of old food, and rolling carts full of folding chairs stacked on either side. A service corridor, most likely.
One short trip up in a battered and small elevator to the third floor, and we’d arrived. To where, exactly, I wasn’t sure. But Dr. Jacobs was there waiting, as the doors rolled back.
He reached in, past my guards, and hauled me out, his hand tight enough to bruise my forearm. “What took you so long?” he hissed at me, flecks of spit landing on my cheek.
“We stopped to sightsee,” I snapped, pulling my arm back. As if I’d been even remotely in control of our arrival time.
He released me, shaking his hand as if touching me had in some way contaminated his skin. I’d never seen him this agitated. Normally, the angrier he was, the more pleasant he got. When the man smiled, it was absolutely terrifying.
But this…this reaction was something else.
As the guards exited the elevator and fanned out in what proved to be another service corridor, I studied Jacobs, rubbing my forearm. He wore an outdated suit (that still screamed money) beneath his pristine, white lab coat, his cheeks were flushed, and his forehead was damp with perspiration.
Either he was coming down with a deadly disease (fingers crossed!) or this was Dr. Jacobs being nervous. I wanted to enjoy his misery, but if he was worried, I wasn’t sure what that meant for me. His thoughts were too jumbled and buzzy with adrenaline for me to read.
He reached into a white plastic bag resting on an abandoned room service cart behind him, pulled out a bundle of bright red fabric, and thrust it at me.
I took it reluctantly. Unfolded, it proved to be a sweatshirt with UW–MADISON in big white letters across the front. The letters were soft around the edges from wear, and the cuffs were ragged. This was definitely not new.
I glanced at him in question, and he held up an equally battered backpack. Not mine. This one was dark blue with a tiny, yellow Minion figure dangling from a keychain attached to the hook strap at the top. From the shape of the bag, it appeared to be full of books or something equally weighty. That was…strange.
“It’s not ideal, I realize,” Dr. Jacobs said. “But it will have to do. We had a fully detailed and tailored navy uniform all ready for you, but the location was not—” He cut himself off.
Ah, the venue change from this morning. Evidently Jacobs had assumed we’d be at a military base of some kind. That, or he’d gotten bad intel. Either way, that explained his foul mood and the delay while he scrambled for a Plan B.
“Just put it all on.” Jacobs dropped the bag at my feet, where it landed with a solid thud. “These, too.” He fished a small, familiar-looking package from his lab coat pocket: tinted contact lenses, the same brand I’d worn every day for years.
He tossed them at me, and I caught them automatically.
But when I hesitated, still trying to piece together what was going on here, Jacobs waved a hand at me, as if that would cause some kind of magical transformation, instant wardrobe shift, and I felt a flash of anger.
I’d crossed a lot of lines in pursuit of my goal, and I’d given up a lot of things; rather, I’d had them taken from me. Freedom, individuality, basic human rights (assuming I was entitled to them). Changing my appearance on command was a relatively small straw by comparison, but it felt like the last one. I was not a toy, not a lab monkey to be dressed up and paraded around for the mockery and pleasure of others.
But I was so close to the end, just minutes away from the meeting that would change everything. What was one more violation if it got me closer to my objective?
Gritting my teeth, I turned my back on Jacobs and the guards. I pulled the sweatshirt over my head first. It smelled faintly of bonfire smoke and spicy deodorant, but not unpleasantly so. And it was about three sizes too big; my arms swam in the armholes, and the hem dropped halfway down to my knees.
I ignored the backpack at my feet for the moment and concentrated next on carefully tearing open the packaging on the contact lenses. I was used to doing this at the bathroom counter with a mirror in front of me, so it took me an extra few seconds to figure out how to juggle the packages and then get the lenses in my eyes without a guide.
Eyes watering fiercely, I bent down and scooped the backpack off the floor and jammed the empty lens packaging in a front pocket that was empty but for what appeared to be a half-eaten granola bar. Lovely.