He turns to me.
“If you don’t want to see her sliced into little pieces, then you better start talking, and fast. And every single word that comes out better be true. I will know if you’re lying.”
I know he isn’t playing games, and I can’t bear to see him hurt Katarina again. If I talk, maybe he’ll be merciful. Maybe he’ll leave her alone.
It comes out so fast I barely have time to order my thoughts, so fast I barely know what I’m saying when I say it. I have one intention, but it’s a murky one: to tell him everything I know that he can’t use against me or the other Loriens. I tell him pointless details about my previous journeys with Katarina, our previous identities. I tell him about my Chest, but I don’t give its burial location, claiming it was lost in our journey. Once I start talking I’m afraid to stop. I know that if I pause to measure my words he will smell my deceit.
Then he asks me what number I am.
I know what he wants to hear: that I am number Four. I can’t be Three, or else they would have been able to kill me. But if I’m Four then all he’ll need is to find and kill Three before he can begin his bloody work on me.
“I am Number Eight,” I say finally. I am so scared I say it, with a desperate, cringing sigh, that I know that he’s fooled. His face falls.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” I croak out.
His disappointment is short-lived. He begins to beam, victorious. I may not be the number he wanted, but he got my number out of me. Or what he thinks is my number.
I search out Katarina’s eyes, and though she is barely conscious, I can see the faintest hint of gratitude in her eyes. She is proud of me for giving him the wrong number.
“You really are weak, aren’t you?” He stares at me with contempt. Let him, I think. I feel a surge of superiority over him: he was dumb enough to believe my lie.
“Your relatives on Lorien, as easy as they fell, at least they were fighters. At least they had some bravery and dignity. But you . . .” He shakes his head at me, then spits on the floor. “You have nothing, Number Eight.”
At that, he raises his arm with the blade and thrusts it, deep into Katarina. I hear the sound of bone cracking, of the knife pushing through her sternum, right into her heart.
I scream. My eyes search out Katarina’s. She meets my gaze for one last instant. I will myself past my chains towards her, struggling to be there for her in her last moment.
But her last moment goes fast.
My Katarina is dead.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Weeks turn into months.
Some days they don’t feed me, but my pendant keeps me from dying of thirst or starvation. What’s harder is the absence of sunlight, the endless immersion in darkness. Sometimes I lose track of where my body ends and the darkness begins. I lose sense of my own existence, my own borders. I am a cloud of ink in the night. Black on black.
I feel forgotten. Incarcerated, with no hope of escape, and with no information that can lead them to the others, I am useless to them for now. Until they’ve killed the ones before me, until my extinction date.
The urge to survive has gone dormant in me. I live not because I want to but because I can’t die. Sometimes, I wish I could.
Even so, I force myself to do the work of staying as fit and limber and as ready for combat as I can. Push-ups, situps, games of Shadow.
In these games of Shadow I have learned to play Katarina’s part as well as my own, giving myself instructions, describing my imagined attackers, before I respond with my commands.
I loved this game before, but now I hate it. Still, in Katarina’s honor, I continue to play.