I’M UPRIGHT. I know that. Head down, eyes shut, sucking great rafts of air into my greedy lungs while I let the pain and dizziness recede. Can feel the straitjacket still restraining me. Its snug embrace is oddly comforting. I keep my head down, slowly open my eyes, but the cell floor is just a shadowy blur of shapes. I stare, conjuring focus till I can barely make them out: black snakes, dozens of them surrounding me, their serpentine bodies slithering over my feet.
What the hell is going on?
I try not to make any sudden movements, slowly raise my pounding head—and see, looming high above, dark creatures with glowing blue eyes that blink as they watch me. When I look away from them, ghostly trails of blue stretch across my eyes …
How did I get here?
And where is here?
Soon, sounds of feet clattering down metal steps. And a girl’s faraway voice: “We’re coming, Bix!”
Bix? Sherman said they’d be performing some tests on me. This must be one of them, some sort of psychological evaluation … Or maybe some sick behavioral experiment they’re running. Part of the doctors’ research. They must’ve drugged me, then put me in this room of snakes to observe my reactions. Maybe the girl is their research assistant, coming to tell me the testing is over and let me out of here …
This isn’t some experiment or test. This is real.
Bullshit.
Now another voice, this one male and closer. “Christ, that’s a straitjacket on her! I said something like this would happen if we sent her back. She’s a leader in the Child’s Army, for God’s sake. Frightens the hell out of people here—can you imagine her effect on people there? And we expected Bix with her proclivity for violence to land in 1954 and just … blend?”
“Bix’s proclivities are why we sent her, Gideon,” the girl says. “It’s not exactly safe there—”
“Or here anymore, thanks to her—now that we’ve got the Tabula Rasa’s goon squad breathing down our necks. It’s only a matter of time—”
“We just barely got her back. Can you give it a rest, Gideon?” the girl says.
I squint, trying to make out the approaching lab assistants through my hazy eyes as they emerge from the shadows. The girl’s East Asian, in her twenties, with a brow furrowed deep enough to plant cabbage. The guy’s Black, also in his twenties, though his glasses sit low on his nose like a cranky old man’s.
Trailing behind them are a half dozen more figures, and panic starts to spread through me as they approach. I try to back away but trip and land among the snakes, bound up, helpless—
Only now I see they aren’t snakes. They’re electrical cables, dozens crisscrossing the floor. And the towering shadows with the blue eyes—some sort of black equipment stacked high, their blue running lights blinking on and off.
“Back off, give us some space!” the guy shouts at the others behind them, and they retreat into the shadows.
“You gave us a real scare there, Bix,” the girl says as she kneels down beside me among the cables. “Something went wrong with the machine in your initial jump. A glitch.”
“It sent your fragging levels through the roof,” the guy says, “messed with some of the settings, which might have skewed your landing coordinates.”
“Worst of all it cut your tether,” the girl says. “So we couldn’t bring you back remotely.”
Coordinates? Tethers? Fragging? The jargon’s got to be part of the experiment. Doctors want to see how I react to all the BS being flung at me.
“Thank God you managed to trigger your link inside that restraint,” the girl says, “got yourself back here. We want to hear all about the jump: everything you saw, what you were able to learn. But first let’s get you out of that thing.”
She reaches for one of my restraint ties, and I feel a rising alarm as her hands come closer. “Get the fuck away!” I roar, and the two assistants back up. “Where are they?”
“Who?” the girl asks.
“The doctors running this fucked-up experiment, observing me.” I search the shadows for a sign of them. “Are they out there, hidden in the dark?” I ask.
The two stare at me in weird, stunned silence for a moment before the guy says to the girl under his breath, “Holy shit, she has zero idea who she—or we—are. That fragging did a helluva lot more than mess with her tether.”
The girl nods slowly, then whispers back: “Major memory loss. Shit. Looks like some distortion in her perception of reality as well. Without an exam, it’s hard to tell the full extent of the neural damage—”
“Me waking on that patient transport bus—was that all part of this experiment? Did you drug me then too?” I ask.
“Bix came to on a patient bus?” the guy says. “Those landing coordinates were definitely fucked-up.”
That chopped-off name again. “Bix?” I ask.
“That’s you,” the girl says to me. “It’s short for Beatrix Parrish. I’m Kyung. And this is Gideon.”
The Gideon guy has pulled a small object shaped like a pack of gum from his pocket and is now pointing it at me. What the hell is that? “What could the doctors possibly be testing with this psychological experiment?” I ask them.
“It’s okay, Bix,” the Kyung one says. “Gideon made some adjustments to the machine after we realized something had gone wrong with your first jump. He’s just scanning your disc to see if they helped.” There’s a beep sound, and Gideon looks at his pack-of-gum object. “Well?” she asks him.
“Modifications worked … mostly,” he says. “But she’s still fragging some with each jump. I’ll tweak it some more, get the neural damage down to acceptable levels before we send anyone else,” he says, then disappears into the blue-eyed shadows.
Kyung turns to me. “Can you tell me what happened back there?”
“Back where? I want to speak to whoever’s running this—”
But I’m interrupted by a door BANGING open somewhere. Moments later a guy is bounding toward me, wavy hair flopping with each step. “Bix!”
“Ethan, wait!” Kyung yells, and he stops just short of me. “That anomaly during her initial jump—it was a lot more serious than we thought. There’s been some brain trauma. She doesn’t know us. Any of us.”
Sadness and anger seem to be fighting for dominion over the guy’s face as he kneels down close to me. “I’m Ethan,” he says, trying to smile as he eyes my cuts and bruises. And even though I know all of this is some elaborate setup of Sherman’s, something about this guy’s struggling grin gets to me. Soon big, stupid tears are escaping my eyes and falling to the floor.
Ethan looks shocked by my display.
“Emotional lability,” Kyung says. “Means there’s been damage to her frontal lobe, causing her to experience confusion over what she’s feeling and how to manage it.” Ethan glares at her. “It’s possible all of this could resolve with time—”
“You never should’ve sent her before we fully understood the machine,” he says.
“The clock’s ticking for all of us, Ethan,” she says. “Someone needed to go.”
“So you signed Bix up for your deadly mission.”
“She volunteered!”
The bees are back.
Can feel the buzzing in my feet starting to rise up the long bones of my legs.
Ethan knows nothing of the bees rising. “You should’ve refused, Kyung. Bix was in no state to decide—”
“She’s an adult, fully capable of making her own choices.”
Now the bees have reached the base of my skull and the roar begins to build.
“You knew she’d do whatever she could to stop the Guest,” Ethan says. “And you took advantage.”
The Guest. The words fill me with stomach-twisting dread—and questions.
The pain’s now reaching a crescendo between my ears, and I just want to curl up in a ball and shut all of this out. But I can’t—because part of me needs an answer: “Tell me who the Guest is, Ethan!” I shout, just before I’m swept away by the white roar, back into the dark.