Lily didn’t have much experience with hate. She didn’t even hate her dad for abandoning her, even though no one would have blamed her if she did. But as she watched Lillian finish her bitter speech and fall back against the pillows, she realized that she hated her. Lillian looked so pathetic, but Lily couldn’t help hating her. In fact, she’d never hated anyone or anything as much as she hated this evil other self in the big white bed.
“And what are you going to do to keep me here? Tie me up? Put me in a dungeon?” Lily asked, trying her hardest not to think how similar her vicious tone, even the cadence of her sentences, was to Lillian’s. A thought dawned on her. “You said you brought me here for a reason. You need me, don’t you? You need me so much, you can’t even stop me from leaving.”
“By all means, go,” Lillian said with a calculating smile. “Run along.”
Lily turned and walked away from the bed, marveling at her own audacity. She had no idea where to go. She felt light and strange, like her blood had filled with cold bubbles and her belly with slippery rope. Her vision shrank in from the sides, collapsing until all she could see was the door. Lily lunged for it, praying that she didn’t faint first.
“Lillian!” Juliet cried.
“Let her go,” Lillian said. “She needs to go.”
“She could get hurt out there. It’s too dangerous,” Juliet said, incredulous.
“She’ll be back.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you can’t run from yourself forever.”
*
Half blind and numb with shock, Lily stumbled past the guards, through the gate, and down the steep hill of the Citadel toward the strange city. She heard people calling out to her, telling her to stop, pleading with her to come back to the safety of the keep, but she was too overwhelmed to respond. All she wanted to do was get away—to get as far away from this waking nightmare as possible.
As she walked, she told herself that what she was experiencing had to be some kind of hallucination. Something happened to her when she’d had that seizure, she decided. Maybe she’d never even woken up this morning.
The more Lily thought about it, the more convinced she was that none of this was really happening. Tristan hadn’t cheated on her. They’d never had a fight or ended their friendship. She’d never gone down to the water or agreed to come to this strange place. None of this was real.
Lily paced down a cobbled street and headed into the heart of the strange city. She wasn’t really paying attention to which way she went; she was just following a vague sense inside her that told her when to turn or continue straight ahead. She talked to herself sternly the whole way, convinced that this was all some fever dream she couldn’t wake up from, probably because the doctors had drugged her.
“That’s it,” Lily said loudly, making several pedestrians stop and stare. She lowered her voice but continued to mumble to herself, trying to keep panic at bay. “When I heard that voice inside my head, the one that said it would be frightening, it was just the doctor warning me before she gave me a shot. She was telling me that the drugs were going to do this to me. That’s all.”
No matter how real it felt, she knew that she would wake up eventually and the meandering streets that she now wandered through, with their tall, latticed towers of vegetation, and their tinkling sounds of running water, would all disappear.
Lily’s wild eyes bounced from one strange sight to another. Colonial-style carriage houses and brick townhouses, right out of her version of Salem, were interspersed with modern wood-beam and glass buildings that had a tent-like feel. A few steps down, she saw spiral-shaped domes that had gardens growing on side tiers, interspersed with glass windows. They looked like hives that housed plants instead of honey in their combs. Lily glanced into the glass windows of these hive houses and saw only more greenery inside. They were multifaceted greenhouses that were growing things both inside and out.