I WAKE TO AN ENDLESS white blur. My arms and legs won’t move at all, heavy, as if I’ve been buried alive and the earth is pressing down against me. For a moment, my mind panics, racing through all the memories I have of being Asleep, trapped inside my body but awake, listening. Helpless.
As I struggle against my lifeless arms and legs, my lungs start to contract, giving me less and less air. Is this how I’m going die? Gasping for air in my brain while my lungs refuse to listen?
But my eyes are open. I can look around me, even catch a glimpse of my nose. I can’t be Asleep. No one falls Asleep twice. A calm settles over me as the thought sinks in. My fingers start to twitch and my toes tingle. My neck seems to have strength and I lift my head up. I’m not lost. My body is here, strapped to a pink mat, my necklace pulling at my throat. The numb heaviness weighing my body down must be the last of some kind of sedation wearing off.
The whiteness around me is familiar, the nylon cords coiled around my arms and legs something I’ve faced before, but I can’t place it. A light over my face comes on and a soothing female voice purrs, “Please hold your position. Two minutes, twenty seconds remaining.” I’m in the levels machine again.
A door slams as I twist against the restraints. The tube starts to hum, vibrations throbbing through me. The end of the tube pops open and my mat moves out, inch by inch, until my muscles clench with impatience. When my head finally emerges, it’s Sole who is standing over me.
She’s rattled, fingers shaking as she fumbles with the restraints. There’s a shiny silver table pushed up next to the tube, bright lights focused in hard circles on the reflective surface, pooling at the end around a drain. A tray of sharp-looking instruments is arranged next to it, a clear mask sitting on top, connected to a tall silver canister by a long tube.
Sole’s hand shoots forward, an offer to help me sit up. I take it, shivering as the cool, sterile air floods through the paper hospital gown that seems to be all I’m wearing. My feet are unsteady when they hit the floor, and I have to lean against Sole to stay up. She still hasn’t said anything.
“What is going on?” I ask, fear thrilling through me as we move toward the metal table, my eyes catching on a particularly lethal-looking scalpel. Was it Sole all along? From that first frozen smile to now, leading me toward an operating table?
She doesn’t stop at the table, dragging me toward the door. “No questions right now. Just move.”
The door opens to a loud siren echoing around an empty office, the telescreen flashing red and black with the word FIRE racing up and down the room.
“Should we be running?” I ask.
She keeps dragging and pushing me along toward the door that takes us out into the main Yizhi hallway. “Howl set off the fire alarm upstairs so I could get you out. If you try to run right now, you’ll just fall over. They pumped enough tranq into you to drop someone twice your weight.”
“Why?”
“We don’t have much time before they figure out the fire upstairs is just a bunch of smoke and the cameras all go back online.”
We hobble down the blue-and-white-checkered halls, the drone of the alarm pounding against my eardrums until they must be bleeding. We finally come to a long, unfamiliar hallway dotted with heavy wooden doors every few feet. Sole pushes through the first door on our right.
A simple room, single bed neatly made with blankets patched in blues and greens. Sole deposits me on the quilts, moving back to the door. “I need to report to my station. If I leave now, I might be able to convince Root that I had to come up from level one. Stay here. Hide in the shower if anyone tries to come in.” With that, she runs, dark hair streaming behind her.
I push through the only other door in the room, pulling the communicator out of my gore-tooth necklace. Light tile and glass shower doors shine in the lights, too clean to belong here in the Mountain. Flipping the light off, I squeeze my hand around the communicator. The characters glowing on the back of my hand are unhelpful.
It simply says, Wait for me.