The thumping in my head distracted me from the rubbery feeling inside my mouth. I focused on the pain in my skull, trying to figure out what could be crashing into my head over and over at such a steady rhythm. The pain came from the inside, like my brain was bashing against its cage, trying to escape the ache that filled my body like cement had taken the place of the blood in my veins.
I started to open my eyes, but the bright lights around me only made the thumping worse.
“Shh, you’re okay.” Someone shifted me, like they were trying to cradle me to their chest. “You have to wait it out, but you’ll be okay.”
“What happened?” The heaviness of my tongue slurred my words.
“You punched a guard, tried to bolt past, and took a dart to the neck.” A laugh rumbled against my shoulder. “Not the best thing to happen, but since you were panicking about Mari, I think we can play it off.”
I opened my eyes again, just enough to see the face of the person who held me.
Walsh smiled as he looked down at me. He had settled me in his lap, his arms wrapped around me to keep my head on his shoulder as I slept.
“Where’s Mari?” I tried to push away from Walsh, but my arms were too heavy to move.
“I begged our door guard to radio around.” Walsh shifted his arm, tipping my head so I could see him more easily. “Mari’s in the bunker below seed storage with Miranda. She’s safe.”
“Thank you.” My eyes started drifting closed. “Why are we here? Did we get attacked?”
“I couldn’t get the guard to tell me anything about that. But he seemed pissed and a little scared.”
“That’s not good.” I forced my eyes back open, but I couldn’t get them to focus on anything farther away than Walsh’s face.
“No, it’s really not.”
“We can’t just sit here.” I tried to move away from Walsh, but he held me so tight, I only managed to flop my head to the side. “The room’s swoopy. Oh, that’s awful.”
My stomach rolled as the people around me wobbled like they were riding on the waves in the Salt Dome.
“I feel sick.”
“You’re okay.” Walsh shifted me to sit more upright and rubbed slow circles on my back like I would’ve done with Mari. “Just breathe.”
“You should put me on the floor.” I took a deep breath that didn’t actually make me feel any better.
“Getting puked on wouldn’t be the worst thing to have happened to me this year.”
I took another breath, and the swaying in the room slowed down enough I could actually focus on the people around me.
Long strips of benches ran along either side of the concrete room, with smaller benches running down the middle. Almost everyone had taken a seat on a bench, but a few people paced in the aisles. Two guards stood beside the only door in the space. There was no window, no visible hatch, no way out.
“They locked us in.” I managed to lift my arm enough to push against Walsh’s chest. “We have to get out. They locked us in.”
“We’re supposed to be locked in. This is a bunker.”
“Would a bunker have helped at the depot?”
“No.” Walsh brushed my hair away from my face before tilting my head sideways to rest on his shoulder. “But that’s not going to happen here.”
“How do you know?” My eyes started to sag again.
“Just trust me, Lanni. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
Before I could rearrange the sludge in my brain into words, I’d started drifting to sleep.
“I don’t trust anybody.”
I don’t know if I actually managed to say the words as everything faded back to black.