She pointed to the steps. Feeling like I was swimming through a bizarre, disturbing nightmare, I climbed up them clumsily and stepped between the ropes. I stood uncertainly on the canvas, giving it a couple of experimental bounces.
The crowd roared as my opponent stepped into the ring. Clamping my jaws shut so I wouldn’t scream, I stared in horror. It was a guy, and he was almost as tall as Mr. Butcher’s prizewinning wonder horse. He was probably as broad, too. Maybe weighed about the same. This was who I was supposed to fight.
Time to die, I thought.
23
FIGHTING GOES AGAINST THE GROUP work ethic, so it’s strongly discouraged in the cell. However, I’d had a lifetime of not taking kindly to people teasing Careful Cassie for being a lily-livered chicken. So I braced my feet and scanned my opponent for weak spots.
Um, apparently none. And that was the last semi-coherent thought I had for quite a while.
As soon as the bell dinged, the guy lunged at me. He was huge, but I’m fairly nimble, so I ducked and tried to punch him in the kidney. In an instant, he spun the other way and gave me an uppercut to my jaw that lifted me clean off the ground, then laid me flat. The ref stood over me, counting, while I blinked up at the black stars spinning over my head. I tried to breathe and couldn’t. I tried to move my jaw and couldn’t. I couldn’t feel my face. My mouth tasted like blood, and blood filled my nose, making me feel like I was drowning.
As the crowd screamed the countdown with the ref, a white-hot surge of fury made me scramble awkwardly to my feet. I had a moment to see surprise in the guy’s eyes before I roared and walloped his head as hard as I possibly could. He staggered.
“You asshole!” I screamed, and spat blood onto the canvas. “You goddamn son of a bitch! I’m going to kill you, you shit-eating asswipe!”
Bruiser hesitated, then his eyes turned to steel and he came at me. That’s when I found out what the girl had meant about it being worse with the jumpsuit on. The guy had claws on his gloves, and he raked them down my arm, shredding my sleeve. The fabric got caught and he gave a sharp tug. The hateful yellow cloth ripped as he yanked again and again, pulling it off me. The seams cut into my skin, my shoulders, the tops of my legs. It felt like he was tightening tourniquets around me, scraping my skin raw. I tried to break his grip, punched at his hand and his arm and anything else I could reach, but he was determined. Soon the jumpsuit was gone and I was there in my underwear and a bunch of rough-edged armor. My skin was scraped and bleeding, my nose was trickling a mixture of snot and blood, and now that I could feel my jaw again I could tell that one of my teeth was loose.
The next mouthful of blood I spat right into his face. His eyes flared, and after that it was no holds barred—not that there had been any holds barred before. He was, as the girl had put it, breaking me down. I punched and kicked whenever I could, but he was so much taller and stronger and more of a douchebag than I was, and he kept slugging me long after he had clearly won.
An eon later I heard the bell ding, followed by the muffled roar of the crowd. I was lying facedown in a puddle of blood, feeling like every bone in my body was broken. Blearily my gaze wandered past the ropes to see Deputy Warden Strepp standing there, frowning at me, her arms crossed over her chest.
That gave me enough of a spark to struggle onto my hands and knees. A tooth had actually been knocked out, and I took a deep breath and spit it at Strepp. It barely made it to the edge of the canvas.
Her eyes narrowed. “There’s something wrong here,” she said.
I stared at her. “Yeah? Which part? The fact that I’m in prison? That all the prisoners are kids? This freak show of a fight with a muscle-bound moron? Like, be more specific!”
Strepp nodded briskly at the guards. “Take them to the pen,” she said.
The girl had said that the guy and I would be stuck in a small room together after the fight.
So, just great.
24
MS. STREPP
HELEN STREPP KNEW WHEN TO speak and when to keep silent. You didn’t get as far as she had without that skill. So Strepp waited patiently while Warden Bell finished what she was doing. After several minutes, during which the Warden didn’t hurry one bit or even acknowledge Strepp’s presence, she finally looked up.
“Yes, Ms. Strepp?” Those three words were enough to make a lesser person tremble, coming out of the Warden’s hard slit of a mouth. She was the scariest, most imposing woman Helen had ever met. Even the Warden’s thinning white hair, cropped into a crewcut, seemed to stand straight at attention. Her large, fleshy body overpowered her desk chair, her bulk spilling over the sides. Helen tried not to mentally calculate its weight load, tried not to picture the metal legs bending slowly and then snapping.
Actually, the chair probably wouldn’t dare, she decided.
“There’s a problem.” Ms. Strepp made her face carefully expressionless, admitting neither guilt nor concern.
“Do tell,” the Warden replied, lacing her thick fingers together on top of her desk. Her cold black eyes waited and watched, like a spider’s.
Ms. Strepp breathed in slowly. She knew not to prevaricate, not to pretty it up, not to use words like might or seemed. Instead she spoke firmly, meeting the Warden’s glittering gaze.
“We took the wrong twin.”
25
THE WARDEN LOOKED AT MS. STREPP with a coldness that seemed to penetrate Ms. Strepp’s very bones.
Resolve, Ms. Strepp thought. You knew this wouldn’t be easy. Nothing worthwhile ever is.
After a moment, the Warden spoke, her voice sounding like car tires rolling over gravel. “Refresh my memory, Ms. Strepp. I know we’ve gathered several sets of twins for our… experiments. Of which twin do you speak?”
“Cassandra Greenfield. We have Rebecca Greenfield instead. From B-97-4275. The agricultural community. The girls must have switched vehicles that day.”
The Warden drummed her fingers on her desk as she digested this information. “Well, fudge,” she said.
Again Ms. Strepp waited.
The Warden sighed and moved some papers from one pile to another. Birth certificates, death certificates, autopsy reports, experiment data. It all piled up.
Then, having reached a decision, she shrugged. “Execute her. Get the other one.”
“That was my thought exactly, Warden,” Ms. Strepp said. “Then I thought, what if I use her as an example to the others? Her testing scores are dismal, as you know. Her fighting ability is pathetic. But if I whip her into shape, if she starts to perform as expected… well, the other prisoners would see what was possible. Even with clay as unpromising as Rebecca Greenfield.”
“Hm.” The Warden looked at her shrewdly. “Don’t get attached to this girl, Strepp. She won’t be with us long. You know that.”
“Of course!” Ms. Strepp looked offended at the very suggestion. “That’s why we’re here. That thought is foremost in my mind at all times, Warden. I see this as simply another experiment.”
The Warden gave a brisk nod. “Very well then, Ms. Strepp. Carry on.”