SCREAMING, BLOOD OOZING FROM THE GIANT mess I made of her nose, Dr. Donna tries to punch me in the face. But I’m faster than she is, and I duck out of the way. I stumble forward.
She snags my hair, yanking my head back. I reach behind me to grab her wrists, twisting my body to break her grip. Her eyes are very wide, her mouth pulled back in a snarl.
Her face doubles in front of me. Triples. The entire room shifts out of focus, and I can’t blink away the blur. Faintly, like it’s very far away, the collar is beeping. My hands go to it, even though I know there’s no way I can pull it off. It feels hot against my palms. I stagger and go to one knee, with a hand on the edge of the chair.
“Oh, no, no, you don’t, you little brat. No Mercy Mode for you! Cody! Arnaldo! Get in here! I need a thousand milligrams of Rylaxin, IM, stat!” To me, Dr. Donna says, “I’ve wasted too much time on you, Velvet. You’re not going to check out so easily.”
I can’t concentrate. My muscles have gone tense and tight. I can’t get up. I watch my fingers curl into my palm, the nails suddenly digging hard enough to cut my skin.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
I get on my feet. Dr. Donna looks surprised. The door opens, and it’s Arnaldo with a tray of syringes, followed by Cody with what I realize is a straitjacket, just like the kind you see in the movies.
She gapes, gesturing wildly at Arnaldo, who looks at me with less surprise than I’d expect. He nods, just barely.
“Arnaldo! Now!”
He has to move, but his hesitation gives me just enough time. I’m at the door with Dr. Donna’s fingers snagging the back of my shirt, but Arnaldo and Cody block me. They pin my arms, but they forget about my feet. I kick Cody in the nose, breaking it. Blood sprays. Arnaldo dives for me then, but I’m fast. And strong.
All the running, jumping, leaping. All the climbing. All these weeks, they’ve done as much to train me for this as if they’d planned it all along.
I don’t stop when I push past Dr. Donna; in fact, I keep going and make sure to shove her as hard as I can. She spins on those ridiculous shoes, teeters, and falls. Then I’m out the door and between the soldiers who have guns pointing at me, but I don’t stop to think about if they’re going to shoot or not, because behind me, Dr. Donna’s screaming my name.
And also: “Stop her, but don’t hurt her!”
The only reason I can outrun them is because I head for the stairs instead of the elevator, and I leap the railing. I hit the landing and slam through a door before anyone has time to get into the stairwell.
The hall’s almost identical to mine, but the doors here are almost all open. I run past them, barely glancing inside. The rooms seem empty, beds and dressers the same as mine. Bricked-up windows. I reach the end of the hall, another set of stairs. They’ll expect me to go down.
So I go up.
I take the stairs two at a time, hand on the railing to pull me along. The collar is hot on my throat, and every so often the pulsing bands of color flicker across my vision, but I ignore them. I push through the door at the top of the stairs and end up in a ward similar to the one I saw that first day they took me to testing.
This one’s worse, though. No beds here. There are a couple of battered couches, some recliners. A TV playing old game shows on the wall. The room is full of collared Connies, all of them wearing soft tracksuits like the one Jenny gave me. Some of them shuffle around, some stand or sit motionless and staring. Most of them are slack-jawed, if not drooling. One, a girl of about my age, with pretty blond hair that’s pulled back from her face with a harsh rubber band, stands facing the wall next to the door I just came through. She bangs her head against it, not hard enough to break the skin, but constant, monotonous, endless. Bang, bang, bang. Nobody stops her.
Some of them turn to look at me as I come skidding through the door, but most pay no more attention to me than if I were invisible. I should run, but facing these people, all ages, men and women and teens—though no kids younger than maybe thirteen—I can’t move. Is this what I will become? I can’t stay here. They’re coming for me.
I walk quickly through the ward, not convinced that running won’t trigger them somehow, even though I know the collars will keep them from doing anything to me. I slip through the door and into another hallway, this one L shaped. Dark, with flickering overhead lights, many of the bulbs burned out overhead. From the end of the hall, I hear murmuring voices, so I turn in the other direction. I pass open doors, rooms laid out like mine but with windows of glass. I guess they figure collared Connies wouldn’t bother to jump out.
I pass another room, this one without a bed and dresser but instead with a set of big metal tubs covered with canvas laced up the middle with a space for someone’s head to stick out. There are puddles of water on the floor and more dripping from an overhead pipe, and I’m so totally creeped out, I have to look behind me after I pass it, convinced there will be some gaunt and spindly thing coming out of that room after me. Another room, with a closed door and an observation window crisscrossed with metal mesh, has a stretcher and a series of machines with dials and wires and leather cuffs.… I’m running now, past these rooms of torture and pain. I’m heading for the stairs at the short end of the L, but before I can decide to take them or not, a door several feet away from me opens and a man in a wheelchair is pushed out by a white-suited orderly.
They don’t see me when I duck behind an empty nursing station desk. But I see them as the orderly pushes the man past me. He’s slumped over, wrists shackled to the arms of the wheelchair. Feet, the same.
But I know that halo of red hair, and even that haggard face. Those blue eyes. Even with the lines of age and rage and time etched into his face, I know him. It’s the man who came into our backyard. It’s my dad.
And I can see by the look in his eyes that he knows me.