2
THE FIRST FACE I SAW when I opened my eyes was my own.
The wall in front of the iron bed was mirrored. So were the walls to my right and left—there were five mirrors, or six maybe. I smelled nothing, heard nothing, saw nothing but me.
During the past several months? I hadn’t spent much time looking in mirrors, for reasons. Now that I was forced to, I couldn’t quite believe that the girl I was seeing was me. My dark, thick hair was parted in the middle, and it hung limp and dull over thin shoulders. My lips were almost the same color as my skin—that is to say, white. There were angles to my face that I’d never noticed before. Or maybe they hadn’t existed before. I was looking at a ghost, a shell, a stranger. If my parents saw me, they would never know who I was.
But they never did see me. That was part of the problem. That was why I was here.
“Yeah, we look like shit,” said a voice.
Said my voice.
But I hadn’t spoken. My lips hadn’t moved.
I bolted upright, looking at my infinite reflections. They stared back, looking panicked and wary at once.
“Up here.”
The voice was above me. I craned my neck—the ceiling was mirrored too. I saw my reflection in it, but this one, this reflection, was smiling at me. Even though I wasn’t smiling.
So. I’d finally lost it.
“Not yet,” my reflection said, looking amused. “But you’re close.”
“What—what is this?” A hallucination?
“Not a hallucination,” my reflection said. “Guess again.”
I dropped my gaze for a moment, glancing around the room. Every other reflection turned when I did. God, I hoped I was dreaming.
I looked back up at the reflection above me. The girl in the mirror—me, I guess—tilted her head slightly to the left. “Not quite. You’re in that kind-of-unconscious-kind-of-not space. Which should make you feel better about your sanity.”
Marginally.
“Also, you should know that there are sensors monitoring our pulse and heartbeat, so it would be better for both of us if you’d lie back down.”
I swung my head, looking for the monitors, but didn’t see any. I listened to the girl anyway.
“Thanks,” she said. “That Wayne guy comes in and examines us whenever our heart rate spikes, and he really creeps us out.”
I shook my head, the papery pillowcase crinkling with the movement. “Don’t say ‘us.’ ?That creeps me out.”
“Sorry, but it is us. I’m you,” my reflection said, arching an eyebrow. “I’m not exactly your biggest fan either, you know.”
I’ve had weird dreams. I’ve had weird hallucinations. But weird didn’t even begin to touch this, whatever this was. “So, what are you? My . . . my subconscious or something?”
“You can’t talk to your subconscious. That’s stupid. It’s more like—I’m the part of you that’s aware even when you don’t know you’re aware. She’s been giving us a lot of drugs—a lot of drugs—and it’s dulled our—sorry, your—awareness in some ways and heightened it in others.”
“?‘She’ being . . . ?”
“Dr. Kells.”
The machine beside me beeped loudly as my heart rate spiked. I closed my eyes, and an image of Dr. Kells rose in the blackness, looming above me, so close that I could see tiny cracks in her thick layers of lipstick. I opened my eyes to make her go away, and saw myself instead.
“How long have I been here?” I asked out loud.
“Thirteen days,” the girl in the mirror answered.
Thirteen days. That was how long I’d been a prisoner in my own body, answering questions I didn’t want to answer and doing things I didn’t want to do. Every thought and memory was fuzzy, as if they were smothered in cotton; me, locked in what looked like a child’s bedroom, drawing picture after picture of what used to be my face. Me, extending my arm obediently while Wayne, Kells’s assistant in therapeutic torture, drew my blood. And me, the first day I woke up here, held captive by drugs and forced to listen to words that would change my life.
“You’ve been a participant in a blind study, Mara.”
An experiment.
“The reason you’ve been selected for this study is because you have a condition.”
Because I’m different.
“Your condition has caused pain to the people you love.”
I’ve killed them.
“We tried very hard to save all of your friends. . . . We just couldn’t get to Noah Shaw.”
But I did not kill Noah. I could not have killed him.
“Where are they?” I asked my reflection. She seemed confused, then looked at the mirror on my right. Just a normal mirror, I thought, but then the glass went dark.
An image of a girl, or something that had once been a girl, materialized out of the blackness. She was kneeling on carpet, her black hair falling over her bare shoulders as she leaned over something I couldn’t see. Her skin glowed bronze, and shadows flickered over her face. She was blurred and indistinct, as if someone had spilled a glass of water over a painting of her and the colors had started to run. And then the girl lifted her chin and looked directly at me.