Raphael picks up a fork and pokes through the food with a look of disgust. Granddad leaps in, heaping the forkfuls into his mouth. Carrick keeps his back to me, ignoring the guards, ignoring the food, ignoring everybody and everything. He wants me to hate him, but it’s not working.
I go to the small toilet in the holding cell to change out of the slip and into the uniform. When I return I smell the food and my stomach rumbles. There’s soup, a beige color that could be anything from vegetable to chicken. For the main course there is meat and two vegetables. I try the smell and taste test that Carrick taught me as I try to figure out just what exactly this food is. There is a distinct smell of mint. Or the antiseptic. Perhaps the mint is coming from the meat, which maybe is lamb, but it looks more like dried beef than lamb. I lift the soup bowl to my nose and close my eyes and breathe in. That slight smell of mint. What could it be?
I can’t figure it out, and I decide I’m not eating this food. That would be a kind of victory on their part. Crevan was right about one thing: My chief feature is definitely stubbornness.
I long to be back in the kitchen with Carrick, sitting before the open fridge, blindfolded, feeling the tips of his fingers on my lips as he feeds me.
Pea and mint soup, I wonder, but then it would be green, not beige.
To think that this dry, overcooked, bad cafeteria food was the last thing I tasted before I became Flawed. Maybe it’s a good thing I can’t taste it now, though it hasn’t stopped Granddad from shoveling it into him and Raphael from picking at it. Granddad has worked his way through it and is even lying down for a snooze.
Carrick gets up from his bed and makes his way to the table, his hunger taking over, too. He sits down and dives into the soup, tasting it straightaway, unlike me, who has to figure it out.
My stomach rumbles and I sigh. Fine. Just get on with it.
But it’s as I’m spooning it to my mouth, as the spoon rests on my bottom lip, that I stall. My memory flashes to Crevan on the summit, that antiseptic smell that I thought was chewing gum. It reminds me of the hospital I woke up in after he stuck the needle in my thigh. It reminds me of how I felt when dragging myself along the floor.
I open my eyes.
They’ve drugged our food.
Granddad is lying down on his bed, eyes closed.
Raphael is slumped in his chair, head on his chest.
Carrick has his back to me and is dunking crusty bread in his soup. I jump up and start banging on the window, screaming.
He can’t hear me, of course, but I can’t think of anything else and so I continue, crying as I watch him eat more and more of it, my voice hoarse and my throat burning, my hands and fists throbbing as I pound on the glass.
I look around for the pen and paper but they’re gone, removed by the guards when they delivered the food.
Then I think of something. I need to cause a distraction. Make a scene. I pick up a chair and throw it. I pull the blankets from the bed and throw them on the floor. I topple the table of food. Anything I can pick up, I throw. I trash the room. Carrick must eventually feel vibrations or see the reflections in the glass because he turns suddenly and his eyes widen when he sees the state of my room. The guards open the door to the holding cells and grab their keys.
I run to the glass and mouth, “The food.” I shake my head. “Don’t eat the food.” I wrap my hands around my neck in a strangling way.
His eyes widen, he looks to his food and then back to me, understanding. He stands up to make his way to me but he goes in a diagonal direction. He wobbles on his feet. He looks to Granddad, then Raphael, and teeters some more. He looks back at me and his eyes have glazed over.
He looks over my shoulder and I see the pain in his expression as the guards open the door and come for me. It’s the last thing he sees before reaching out for a chair for support and falling to the floor.
“Carrick!” I yell.
My cell door opens and I fire whatever I can at the guards, over and over again.
“Grab her,” a guard directs another, and two of them come after me, batons in hand.
“Leave her! Stop!” a voice shouts.
It’s Art.
SIXTY-EIGHT
ART IS WEARING his Whistleblower uniform.
“Don’t touch her,” he says.
“You disgust me,” I say, kicking a chair toward him.
“Whoa, whoa, Celestine, stop!” His voice is like thunder.
“You drugged them!” I yelled.
He looks around the cells and sees the others.
I pick up my bowl of soup and throw it at his feet. “I wasn’t hungry.”
They all run at me, but it’s Art who reaches me first. He wraps his arms around me, and even though he’s not Carrick, even though he’s smaller, he’s still bigger and stronger than me. He wraps his arms around me and squeezes, to stop me from lifting my arms. It’s not so much his strength that stops me, it’s his scent, and the familiar feel of his body so close to mine, and his arms wrapped around me. It feels wrong to struggle against him. Unnatural. It’s Art. My Art.
I start to wriggle again.
“Celestine,” he whispers in my ear. “If you stop, they will go away.”
I freeze. It was the they. The hint that it’s us against them. Is that what I’m supposed to think, is that what he wants me to think, or is that what I want to think?
“We’re fine,” Art says firmly. “Thank you, I’ll take it from here.”
They begrudgingly close the door.
“Christ, they don’t trust me, you don’t trust me—when can I get a break?” He keeps his arms wrapped around me.
They don’t trust him? I don’t blame them.
“I’m not going to throw anything,” I snap. “You can let me go.”
He looks at me, deep into my eyes. I have to look away, just seeing them confuses me too much. His grip weakens and I push away from him. I move to the far side of the cell, the farthest I can get from him.
“What did you do to them?” I say, gesturing to Carrick, Raphael, and Granddad.
“I didn’t do anything,” he replies, studying them. Carrick is lying on the floor, passed out.
“Tell me the truth.”
“I am. He was throwing furniture around, maybe they needed to calm him down.”
“They didn’t, he was already calm,” I say. “And my granddad wasn’t doing anything, nor Raphael. Neither was I. I’m the only one who didn’t eat it.”
Art looks at Carrick, a look of hate, and then he looks at Granddad and I see his resolve weaken. Art liked that Granddad never watched what he said in front of him, in fact his conspiracy theories seemed to grow whenever he was in Art’s company. It amused Art; he was always fond of Granddad. “The spawn of Satan,” Granddad used to call him, which bizarrely made Art laugh. I think he found Granddad refreshing, when he felt everybody else around him was always nice to him because of who his dad is.
“How did you know Carrick threw a chair? Were you watching us?”
“Celestine, the room is covered in CCTV cameras.”
I wonder if he saw the meeting with the judges. I doubt it. “Spying on me for Daddy, Art?”
“Shut up.” He stands. “I’m trying to figure out what the hell is going on here.”