“Hey there,” the girl said, only this time I was sure she wasn’t talking to someone else.
She swam into focus and then I could see her and it was most definitely the blond girl, standing directly in front of me, her blue eyes migrating over me. “You were dead to the world for a while there. Took a helluva lot to knock you out though.”
Knock me out. I turned her words over.
My last truly conscious memory was the flash of her pale-colored hair, followed by a sharp burn in the side of my neck.
That must have been it, the burn. No wonder I’d been so hazy. She’d jabbed me with something, a needle probably—drugged me.
Right after I’d been returned my parents had taken me to the hospital. One of the lab techs had stuck a needle in my arm to draw blood and my skin had healed so rapidly the needle had gotten stuck. I wondered if that had happened this time too.
It made me wonder about the blond girl and whoever she’d been talking to, because when the lab tech had exposed himself to my blood—something the NSA called a Code Red—he’d gotten sick, the same way Tyler had. Only that guy had died.
I studied the girl. Had she been exposed too? Would she die? That’s what I’d call karma.
I tried to lift my hand, to check my neck for a needle or punctures or injuries, but it jerked to a stop. Some sort of cuff, brittle leather, kept me bound in place.
Right, the restraints.
My eyes scanned downward.
I was bound to some sort of chair. It reminded me of a dentist’s chair, except it was really, really old. I could feel the metal at my back, and not of the spotless stainless steel variety. I could only see part of it at my sides, but where I could it was like a grimy, rusted-out stretcher. Cold and unforgiving.
Above me there was an enormous box light attached to an equally rusted pole. The bulb wasn’t on, but the way the lamp was directed, aimed right at me, made it clear it had been positioned there for me.
Beyond the light and all around me—around us—were crumbling and decayed brick, and the smells suddenly made sense.
The building was in shambles. Everything . . . other than the monitors and machines connected to me, the electrodes and wires that slipped beneath the blue-green gown I was wearing, was rotting.
There were two faces watching me—the blonde and some guy. I continued to ignore them. I wanted to get a feel for my surroundings before deciding the best way to handle them, whoever they were.
“Fifteen?” the girl asked, licking her lips intently. “What does it mean?”
Her question caught me off guard, but I managed to swallow my surprise. I gave her an I-have-no-idea-what-you-mean stare, even though I knew exactly what she meant. I must have been mumbling in my sleep, before I’d come to.
A boy came racing into the room then. “Ed says keep her awake. He’ll be here soon.”
I started a mental file, compiling a list of the things I knew:
This Ed guy the boy mentioned must be in charge.
They’d drugged me at least once, and for whatever reason, it hadn’t been easy.
It was morning—something I knew because of the sharp stabs that had awakened me earlier. (Which day, I had no clue.)
And finally (and this was the biggie in my book), there were no fewer than four of them—one girl and three guys.
My guess: they were Returned, because none of them were sick from whatever needle they’d shoved in my neck—the whole drugging thing. If I was more heartless, more of a soldier like Griffin or Willow, I’d test that theory by biting my own tongue and exposing them to a Code Red. But I wasn’t a soldier, and even if Blondie and the others were holding me hostage, I couldn’t stomach the idea of watching someone else get sick the way Tyler had.
Not without knowing why they were holding me in the first place.
“Where am I?” I prodded, hoping to add to my list of facts. My voice came out a croak.
The girl tilted her head and her blond hair draped over one eye as she deliberated. “An old asylum,” she answered decisively. “No one’ll ever come looking for you here.” She smirked then, the corner of her mouth ticking up slightly. “The exact ‘where’ doesn’t matter.”
An old asylum. Made sense considering the condition of the place. It also explained the creepy hospital vibe it had going for it. Wherever it was, it must’ve been deserted years ago.
A guy appeared then. Marched in, was more like it. His presence filled the corroded space and made even the grubby air we breathed seem somehow antiseptic . . . sterile.
Blondie snapped away from me like a tightly strung rubber band. She threw her shoulders back and her chin shot toward the ceiling.
It wasn’t hard to deduce this was Ed I was laying eyes on, even through my drug-addled fog.
Acting as if I didn’t exist at all, their conversation went like this:
Ed: “How long’s she been conscious?”
Blondie: “Not long, sir. We sent word soon as we realized.” She almost, but stopped herself short of, saluting him. Yeah, this was definitely the guy in charge.