“That tube in my coffin. You made it attack me?”
“So many malfunctions,” he says. “Other husks far worse than yours, some far better. Broken valves, frozen hinges, corrupt controllers…the centuries have not been kind to the Cherished. I hope the newer ones are in better condition. We’ll see soon enough.”
“Answer my question.” My voice doesn’t sound like my own: it is cold and hard, the edge of the spear blade turned into sound. “Did you make that needle stab me?”
“Of course I did,” he says. “You murdered me.”
Again with that gibberish. I’m the only one that woke up like that. And he…wait, his words earlier…
“You mumbled that the needle jammed,” I say. “What would have happened if it hadn’t?”
His red eyes bore into mine. “Pain in the brain, little circle girl. A slow demise was your prize. I wanted your death to last, as did mine.”
He tried to kill me. Me, no one else. A malfunction is the reason I am alive.
“Where are we, Brewer?” I ask. “What is this prison?”
He laughs again.
“Prison? For a leader you are wrong-wrong-wrong quite a lot, are you not?”
“What else was I wrong about?”
“You said I am no god. And yet I am your eternal protector. You and yours are alive because of me.”
I shake my head. I will not play games with this creature.
“Protector? You just admitted that you tried to kill me. And your kind attacked us, took one of us away.”
The black face leans forward. The red eyes swirl faster, narrow to slits. “Which one? And where was he abducted?”
He pretends he doesn’t know? More games.
“She, not he,” I say to the monster. “Bello. Taken by your kind. In the Garden.”
A wicked hiss slides out of its hidden mouth. “Bello? That’s not fair, it’s not fair! I will fix that, oh yes I will. You said the Garden? You must mean the orchard. The only way there is through the empty section, but I sealed that off.” He looks off, thinking. “The scepter in your coffin room. I never did get it out of there, not that I wanted to touch my own murder weapon. Theresa must have used it.”
The tool we’ve been using to open doors…that’s what someone used to smash in little Brewer’s skull.
The monster’s eyes again settle on me. “Is anyone in the orchard now?”
I shake my head. “Everyone is out. I won’t tell you where.”
“I’m not the one you need to hide from,” Brewer says. “They know you are awake. It had to be Aramovsky, that insightful man. That’s not fair, that’s not fair!”
I turn to the tall boy standing behind me. Aramovsky’s mouth hangs open. His tongue is moving, as if he’s trying to say something but can’t quite remember how to speak.
I again look at the monster. “There is another Aramovsky?”
The monster nods slowly. “Oh, yes. I know that bastard only too well.”
“And we know another Brewer,” I say. “There was a boy in a coffin…in the room where you tried to murder me.”
My words drip with venom, with raw fury. All the pain I felt, it’s because of this creature.
“Coffin?” The red eyes narrow, the thick folds of jet-black skin at the edges deepen. “Why do you call it that?”
“Because that’s what they are. Many of us died in those boxes.”
The monster pauses. He seems to calm down a bit. He nods again.
“Perhaps coffins is a fitting name after all. At least for the boy named Brewer. I waited for him for so long, but you killed him.” He starts to bob back and forth, slowly picking up speed. “They cracked open his husk—what you call his coffin—and they slaughtered him. He was helpless. They didn’t care. After that I tricked them, gas fools the lass, and I locked them out. They couldn’t get me they didn’t dare because I would kill them like they killed me and I wanted them to suffer wanted you to suffer damn them to hell they are the demons and I will get them oh yes I will get them and make them hurt in the worst way, they—”
“Shut up,” I snap. I don’t want to hear any more of his deranged rambling. I have the spear: he must listen. “Tell us where you took Bello. And where are we? What is this building? Are we buried underground?”
The bone scraping comes again, louder than before. He laughs so hard that some of his black wrinkles flop around like rolls of fat.
I am tired of being laughed at. I glance at Bishop, see him snarling—he’s tired of it, too.
The monster’s laugh abruptly changes to another cough, this one far worse than the first, a grating sound that reminds me of when I awoke with all that dust in my throat and lungs. The way Brewer shakes, it looks painful. It takes him a few moments to recover.
His eyes are now more black than red.
“You haven’t figured it out yet,” he says. “You’re not a very good leader, Em. You’re just a circle, wasn’t that their words? How they belittled your acumen. How foolish they were, remember?”