32

The narrow table is cold and hard against my back.

I lie inside a machine in the wall that feels like a tight box. My hands are clenched at my sides, trembling though Dr. Tennant said I need to be still. I can’t be still. There’s a whir in my ears and too-bright blue lights on the ceiling two inches from my face.

“Don’t worry,” Ella said. “What they do here isn’t as bad as you think it will be.”

Yesterday, she came back with a thin, metallic tube attached to her belly. An experiment. Inside the tube, a tiny animal like a miniature muckrat scuffled around, trying to escape. When it couldn’t break through the metal, it tried to break through her skin, instead. Sobs came from her cell all night. It’s hard to believe someone who cries.

I can’t breathe inside this box.

Fred, the dark-skinned man, didn’t lie to me. He didn’t speak when the guards came for me, but his eyes told me I’m right to be afraid. I’m right because fear is what they do here; fear is the weapon they use to make us weak.

Let me out, let me out, I want to scream.

The whir stops. The table I’m lying on slides out of the hole in the wall, out of the box, and I suck air into my body. It tastes stale, but good to my lungs.

Dr. Tennant snaps on white gloves. “It looks like you’re allergic to bavix, a protein in the aster pollen inside those injections we’ve been giving you. Thank goodness we caught it. We’ll have to try something different.” He smiles, showing me his polished rows of teeth.

A boulder the size of a planet wedges inside my throat. I swallow, but it won’t budge.

*   *   *

Again I awaken atop a metal table with a tube in my arm. The drip bag is full of viscous purple liquid. This time I know where I am and what happened. I don’t know what the purple is.

Back in my cell, sometime during the night, I wake and vomit the bread and cheese a guard brought me earlier. My stomach heaves again and again, even when it’s empty. Sweat trickles down my back. I’m a drenched rag, a body dragged out of an ocean.

I hold my head with shaking fingers.

“It’s okay, honey,” Ella says from her cell. “It’ll be okay. I promise.”

Today, she told us, there’s a burn mark on her belly. The doctors removed the tube earlier to assess how much damage the muckrat had done. They seared the wound without giving her anything for the pain.

“Be strong, Clementine,” she whispers.

“T-tell me something,” I say. “Please distract me.”

At first she doesn’t respond. When she does, her voice is so soft I can barely hear it from my cell. “There isn’t much left. My memories … they’re more like dreams.”

“Please.”

Another pause. “I remember warmth from sunlight. Wind in my hair. Leaves dipping in color from green to gold. A boy whose smile made the summer rain stop falling. A handsome boy.”

Convulsions rack me again, and I dry heave, spitting mucus onto the floor. I press a palm to my stomach. “What happened to him?”

“A handsome boy,” she whispers.

She doesn’t say anything else.

*   *   *

I count the number of times guards bring us food between my new injections. Three times. Three days.

The pain doesn’t go away. The little sleep I get at night is marred by periods of waking when I can’t stop coughing and crying. My stomach is a never-ending flood of acid.

“What are you giving me?” I ask the nurses.

They smile sweetly. “Something that will help you.”

They’re liars.

The doctors keep Ella longer than usual, into the night. I’m trembling alone in the back of my cell, my bony arms clutching my knees to my chest, when I hear Fred’s hollow voice in the darkness: “You awake, girl?”

I’ve never heard him call anyone else that, so he must be talking to me. “Yeah,” I say.

“Glad to hear it,” he says.

Today, doctors injected him with a high dosage of their aster serum and with some of my blood. They’re curious to see if my allergy will spread to him and cripple him, the way some food allergies spread through blood transfusion. We both have type O blood, that’s why the doctors picked him as the test subject.

He’s been feverish and aching all day, not seeing things clearly. Earlier he kept saying he was going to die. I can’t stand knowing my blood did this to him.

“You’re doing well, you know,” Fred says. “Better than I did when I first came here.”

I almost laugh, but it hurts my stomach. “Doubt that.”

“It’s the truth.”

I bet he’s lying to make me feel better. “How”—I have to pause to gasp for breath—“how old were you when you got here?”

“No idea,” he says. “Age doesn’t matter in here. After a while, time is all one big blur.”

“Then why stay alive? Couldn’t we just starve ourselves?” I ask before a coughing fit overtakes me.

He waits for me to stop before he answers. “You have to stay alive because you’re better than them. Don’t you forget that. Don’t you let them make you believe you aren’t gonna get outta here and feel the sun on your face again.”

“But I’m not.”

“Sure as the stars, you are.”

I shake my head even though he can’t see it. I don’t have the strength to run, or any way out. And where would I run, if I could? Once KIMO goes off, all of this will be gone. There won’t be a Surface for a person to stand on to feel the sun.

“You got someone out there?” he says. “You got someone you miss?”

Logan’s face comes to mind, and my chest tightens like someone shot a bullet through my ribs. “Of course.”

“They got a name?” Fred asks.

I don’t know if I want to say it. Saying his name makes me feel like I’m losing him again. But I take a deep breath and manage to say it: “Logan.”

“Good, fine name,” Fred says. “You stay strong. You get outta here for him.”

I lie down on the cold ground and curl up on my side. I want to be strong for Logan. Of course I do.

But what Fred said isn’t possible, and he doesn’t get it because he doesn’t know what’s happening outside this prison. He doesn’t know the bomb is going to kill Logan before I can get to him, even if I do get out. I have no way to stop it.

I’m alone. There’s no one on my side.

*   *   *

By the fifth day of the injections, I can’t handle it anymore.

When the nurse tries to administer my shot, I struggle against her. I beg. I plead. “Stop, please. You’re gonna kill me. What do you want from me? What do you want me to do?”

“Commander Charlie wants your loyalty, Clementine,” she says, touching my hand as if she’s trying to be gentle. A guard is holding me down. “If you give in to the injections, if you pledge to be obedient to him, this will all be over.”

“No, I won’t. I won’t. Not unless he stops the bomb.”

The nurse laughs. “Well, he won’t do that. You’re not that important.”

She reaches for the syringe and jams the needle into my arm. I clench my teeth to keep from crying out.

*   *   *

On the seventh day, I lie on a metal table, staring at the purple liquid dripping into the tube attached to my wrist. The doctor walks in, and I lose it. Crying, choking on air. I open my mouth to say I’m sorry, that I’ll do anything Charlie wants if he lets me out of here.

He smiles, showing me teeth that are too white. “Is there something you wanted to say, Clementine?”

I want so badly to give in, to be done with this.

But I can’t do it. These doctors and nurses think they’re so much better than all the kids in the camps, so much better than everyone, and I can’t give in to them. How could I even consider it? I can’t keep being weak like this.

I don’t throw up that night. My stomach flip-flops and tumbles, but I hold back the bile. It’s a small feat, but it’s something.

On the ninth day, I stop crying.

The doctors increase how much they plunge into my veins at every meeting. They take brain scans to figure out what I’m doing to combat the medicine, but they don’t understand. And I don’t help them, even when they reason with me.

I don’t care what they do or what they give me. I will not be subdued.

So on the tenth night, when they give me something that makes the world fog and darken—

darken—

darken.

I am ready.