He shook his head warningly. “Don’t do it. Don’t get mixed up in that, especially since her arrival means you’ll move up soon. Besides, they’re not going to send her back to her cell.”
There was an ominous note in his voice he wouldn’t explain, and against my better judgment, I kept my distance for the rest of the day. When morning came—still with no contact from Adrian—I resolved to sit with Renee and not give in to peer pressure. That plan was delayed when one of Duncan’s regular tablemates invited me to join them. I stood there uncertainly, holding my tray as I glanced between Renee and Duncan’s tables. Going to her seemed like the right thing to do, but how could I turn down the first chance at bonding with the others that I’d had in a while? Resisting my better instincts, I headed toward Duncan’s table, vowing I’d remedy things with Renee later.
Later never came.
Apparently, after a day of letting her resentment seethe within her, Renee couldn’t take it anymore and snapped during third period, going off on an even longer tirade than yesterday about our instructor’s closed-minded propaganda. Security hauled her off, and I felt a wave of sympathy that she had to endure purging two days in a row so soon out of solitary. Duncan met my eyes as she was led from the room, with an I told you so look on his face.
When lunchtime came around, I expected a last-minute change to the menu to reflect one of Renee’s favorite foods and add insult to the injury of her punishment. The posted menu showed the same thing that was listed this morning, however, and I wondered if she’d gotten off the hook or simply had the unfortunate luck to already have chicken strips as one of her favorite foods. But when Renee entered the cafeteria, long after the rest of us were seated and eating, I forgot all about the menu.
Gone was that defiant glint in her eyes. There was no sparkle to them at all as she stared around in confusion, looking as though she’d never seen this room, let alone any cafeteria, before. Her facial expression was equally bland, almost slack-jawed. She stood just inside the doorway, making no attempts to enter or get food, and no one bothered to help her.
Beside me, a detainee named Elsa caught her breath. “I thought that might happen.”
“What?” I asked, totally lost. “Was it a bad purging?”
“Worse,” said Elsa. “Re-inking.”
I thought back to my own experiences, wondering how that could be worse, since we were all re-inked at some point here. “Wasn’t she re-inked already when she got out of solitary?”
“A standard re-inking,” said another of my tablemates, a guy named Jonah. “Obviously, that wasn’t enough, so they super-sized it—maybe a little too much. It happens sometimes. It gets the message through to them, but it leaves them kind of dazed and forgetful about ordinary life for a while.”
A feeling of horror crept over me. This was what I’d feared, why I’d worked to create a magical ink that would fight the effects of the Alchemists’ compulsion. I’d seen that lifeless stare before—in Keith. When he’d been fresh out of re-education, he too had acted like a zombie, unable to do anything except parrot back the rhetoric the Alchemists had drilled into him. At least by that point, however, Keith had been able to handle the daily functions of life. Had he initially emerged that wiped? It was awful to behold. Even more awful was the fact that no one showed any sign of helping her.
I was out of my seat in a flash, ignoring the sharp intake of breath from Duncan behind me.
I hurried over to Renee and took hold of her arm, guiding her inside the room. “Come in,” I said, focusing on her so that I wouldn’t have to see I had the attention of every single person in the room. “Don’t you want to get some food?”
Renee’s gaze stared blankly ahead for several seconds and then slowly turned to me. “I don’t know. Do you think I should?”
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
A small frown appeared between her eyebrows. “Do you think I am? If you don’t think so …”
I steered her toward Baxter’s window. “I think you should be whatever you want to be,” I said firmly. She said nothing to the chef when we reached him, and as usual, he wasn’t forthcoming, so it was on me. “Renee needs some lunch.”
Baxter didn’t respond immediately, and I almost wondered if he might not act unless she specifically asked for food. If so, we could be standing here for a while. But after a few more moments of indecision, he turned away and began making up a tray of chicken strips. I carried it to an empty table for her and pulled out a chair, gesturing to her to sit. She seemed to respond well to a command like that, even unspoken, but made no attempts to do anything on her own once I sat down opposite her.
“You can eat if you want,” I said. When that elicited nothing, I changed my wording. “Eat your chicken, Renee.”
She obediently picked up a chicken strip and began working her way through the tray while I looked on with a growing sense of dread. Dread—and anger. Did the Alchemists really think this was a better alternative than someone questioning authority? Even if the most severe of the effects wore off over time, it was still sickening that they could do this to another human being. When I’d discovered I was protected from re-inking, I’d thought I was home free in that regard. And it was true: I was. But everyone around me, whether they were friend or foe, was at risk if the Alchemists went overboard with their re-inking. It didn’t matter if this extreme of an effect was a rarity. Even if it only happened one time, that was one time too many.
“Drink your milk,” I ordered when I realized she’d finished the chicken and was just staring at her plate again. She was halfway through the carton when the chimes rang. “Time to go, Renee. That sound means we have to go somewhere else.”
She stood as I did, and I looked up to see two of Sheridan’s henchmen approaching. “You need to come with us,” one of them told me.
I started to comply and then saw Renee’s helpless expression. Ignoring my escort’s urging, I turned to her and said, “Follow along and do what the others do. See how they’re putting their trays away now? Do that, and then go with them to the next class.” One of the guards tugged my arm to move, and I resisted until I saw Renee nod and join the others with her tray. Only then did I let the duo lead me out, and they didn’t look pleased at all by my small act of defiance.
They led me to the elevator and then down one level, to the floor where purging took place. I wondered if not finishing my own lunch would make that experience more or less unpleasant. To my surprise, though, we walked past the usual door and kept going to the end of the hall, where I’d never been. We passed closets labeled respectively as kitchen and office supplies and then continued on to doors that were ominously unmarked. It was into one of these that they took me.
This new room looked like the usual purging ones, save that the chair had strange arms on it. They were larger than the ones I was used to but still had restraints on them, which was all that mattered. Maybe this was the new upgraded model from wherever they got their torture devices from. Sheridan was waiting in the room for us, holding a small remote control. The guards strapped me into the chair and then, at a nod from her, left us alone.
“Well, hello, Sydney,” she said. “I must say, I’m disappointed to see you in trouble.”
“Are you, ma’am? I’ve been in purging a few times this week,” I replied, thinking of how the others had been incriminating me recently.
Sheridan made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “That? Come on, we both know it’s just the others playing their games. You’ve actually been doing remarkably well—until now.”
A spark of my earlier anger returned. Sheridan and the other authorities were well aware of when someone legitimately stepped out of line compared to when that person was simply being ganged up on. And she didn’t care.
I swallowed my rage and put on a polite face. “What exactly did I do, ma’am?”
“Do you understand what happened to Renee today, Sydney?”
“I heard she was re-inked,” I said carefully.
“The others told you that.”
“Yes.”