Chapter Thirty
Diana opened her eyes what felt like a minute later but couldn’t have been because it was pitch-dark. She sat bolt upright up in the bed. The sound of rushing water seemed like it was roaring in her head and her heart pounded painfully against her rib cage. She tried to catch her breath.
Shapes came into focus and she remembered. She was in the mill. Shadows danced in the windows and the makeshift walls that surrounded her seemed flimsy, easily breached.
As she panted for air, the room seemed to spin. She curled into a ball. She shivered, as much from anxiety as from the cold, and her fingers tingled. She knew she was making herself sick, gulping air and hyperventilating.
Counting slowly and deliberately, she regained control of her breathing. The mound at the foot of the bed, dark against light bedding, turned out to be the leather jacket she’d ordered from OtherWorld, the one Ashley had borrowed what seemed like a lifetime ago. She reached for it and pulled it to her. Dug her fingers into one of the pockets and found her medication.
With shaking hands she pried open the container and shook the pills into her palm. They seemed to glow in the half-light. There were just six left. She’d have to ration the remaining pills. She broke one, swallowed half, and fed the rest back into the container.
She put on the jacket, then lay back, bunching the pillow under her head. She counted the familiar items she could just make out in the dark. One, the tall, tapering post at the foot of her bed. Two, the bedside table that had once stood by her parents’ bed. On that, the bouquet of wilted roses, her welcome home. Three, four—the tiny red lights that glowed from where she knew there were keypads beside the doors at both ends of the loft.
When her breathing had eased and the edges of her world had gone warm and slightly fuzzy, she resisted the pull of sleep. She stood and stepped to one of the windows. Four stories down, dull moonlight lit the mirrored surface of the still water that backed up behind the dam.
She crept to the edge of the wallboard screen and peered out. Under her bare feet, the uneven wide pine floorboards felt dry and splintery in places, worn smooth in others. Soundlessly she crossed from one end of the loft space to the other, trying each of the doors.
Returning to bed, she nearly tripped over a leg of the metal rack with its IV bag still hanging from it. A little red light glowed as, even now, a camera watched over where she now slept, where Ashley had been held unconscious for days. She recalled Jake’s remark: They can see in light or dark. She imagined her own infrared image glowing fluorescent green and wondered if either of the two geniuses was aware of her movements. They’d thought that it was perfectly okay to keep her sister unconscious for days on end, just as long as they hadn’t “hurt” her while they regrouped. When there was the mere possibility that plan B was going awry, Jake had been all too eager to “abort the mission”—as if in real life you could just reset your score to zero, or simply get up and leave the game.
Shaking with rage, Diana struck out. In slow motion, the metal rack toppled, rubber tubing flailing in the air like an angry snake. She grabbed a pillow from the bed and held it to her face, muffling a cry.
Had Daniel and Jake stayed up nights thinking up ways to bring her in? That limousine she’d seen on her street, like the one she’d seen parked in the mill’s loading dock. The delivery van that had pulled into her driveway but hadn’t delivered anything. Had those been them?
After Daniel’s supposed death, she’d trusted Jake. He’d set up her computers. Her video surveillance. They shared the e-mail account and used its drafts folder as a drop for shared information. Jake had assured her that it was far safer to communicate that way than to broadcast messages across a network.
He had access to every mail message she sent. He could easily have discovered that she’d registered her avatar for the improv event at Copley Square. She’d been telling him she was feeling stronger, almost ready to venture out, so he would have been expecting her to do something like that.
She crept back into bed, shivering. Jake had been there, along with Ashley, to pull Diana back from the brink when she was wallowing in grief. When she still couldn’t move on, he’d brought her news that Daniel’s remains had been recovered. But he’d played her for a fool. He must have known that there was no way she could fly back to Switzerland with him. He hadn’t gone to Switzerland alone; he hadn’t gone there at all. She wondered whose ashes she had been given, or if there were any ashes at all in the urn he’d supposedly brought back along with documentation that was essential for Daniel to be declared legally dead so she could collect the insurance settlement.
That had been months before Daniel claimed he’d returned to the States. Was his tale of crawling to safety and recovered memory a fantasy too? She was determined to find out.
More important, why were they doing this—what was at stake now that made them risk exposure in order to bring her in? All she knew for sure was that instead of watching her back, all the while Jake had just been watching her.
Two could play that game. Diana spent the rest of the night awake and thinking. She ran scenarios for the next day through her head, doubling back from dead ends and branching to account for the unexpected. By morning she was exhausted and stiff with cold. If there was heat, she didn’t know how to turn it on. The sky had turned light and she was still alone.
She headed to the makeshift bathroom. As she sat on the toilet, she eyed the modular shower stall. A hot shower would have been heaven, but she knew she’d never be able to let down her guard long enough to step naked into what looked like an upright coffin, especially not with that security camera staring down at her from the ceiling.
She snagged a washcloth and one of the pale blue towels stacked on the floor and sniffed them. A sponge bath would have to do.
Later, she dried off and put on clean underwear from a stack of neatly folded items that she recognized as her own. She put her jeans back on. It seemed easier to get into them. No wonder. For five days she’d barely eaten.
She found her fleece turtleneck pullover among the clothes folded in the little bookcase. Over that, she wore Nadia’s leather jacket.
When she reemerged, the door to the passageway that connected to the silo stood ajar. She padded across the floor and peered out into the stairwell. On the floor were her red boots. When she went to pull them on, inside one of them she found a handwritten note: Follow the tape.