“Daddy,” I’d interrupted softly, from just on the other side of the door.
“We’ll be there.” He’d hung up.
We. And here we were, at the end of our journey into this human kennel, Deare pausing to usher us into a tiny, windowless cinderblock room where another uniformed handler named Tarrant—like most of them, lumpy and buzzcut, with a bit of an extra chin—waited, along with three stiff-backed chairs arrayed in a row.
For me, Daddy, and Wheatley.
And then, the door on the other side of the room flung open, and herehewas, being tugged roughly through it on the end of a short chain lead linked to his cuffs and held by yet another handler. Muzzled, shackled, the restraints all joined together with enough chains to restrain a rabid tiger—albeit one who was stiff-jointed, limping, and obviously in pain just about everywhere. I stifled a cry. God, this place really was for animals.
And when his lead chain had been attached to the ring in the floor, he dared to flick his eyes up.
And when he saw me—oh.
Fuck it all. I ran toward him, swallowing the name I had the nearly uncontrollable urge to cry out. I hadn’t spoken it aloud to anyone yet, not even Maeve. After all, it wasn’t mine to give away anymore. It was his, provided he even remembered it.
And if he didn’t? Maybe, technically, it had never existed. Maybe it never would. Not like it mattered. All that mattered was that he was here.
He jerked on the chain, trying to reach out to me. Before I could touch him, however, a flash of lightning struck me blind.
“Stand back,” Tarrant barked, having fired up the sizzling prod as if he meant to use it onme.
I screamed and froze to the spot, immediately back in that white mausoleum of a room, where the leather and the cold marble walls had swallowed the echo of my screams. My father reached out and pulled me back into a fierce bear hug.
And then, as I tried to steady my breath, as I forced myself to look at my boy again, as the weight of everything that had happened crashed over me—I heard his voice.
“The fuck?”
I turned, stunned.
“Arlo?”
1 Are you okay?
2 “Naughty badger,” an endearment similar to “cheeky monkey.”
27
HIM
Institutional life had its rhythms, ones I’d never really forgotten, ones I could have easily readjusted to under most circumstances. Sleep, eat, work, eat, sleep. Simple. But most institutions—mines, farms, factories—also had certainty. They owned you, and unless a miracle occurred, you weren’t getting out. You accepted that, or you died.
Here, there was no certainty. I didn’t know anything. How long I’d be in this place, why, or what had to happen for me to get the fuck out of it. Andthatwas what was killing me.
They’d given me pain meds at the hospital the morning of my arrival, but they’d long since worn off and nobody seemed interested in giving me more. Besides, I figured it was around eight, and I’d probably missed pill distribution—if they even had one. At any rate, they dragged me limping into processing, where, like usual, I was stripped naked, scrubbed raw, thrown into a starched gray scrub uniform, and led to the chain-link enclosure I’d be sharing with sixty other guys, most of whom were already snoring. I stuck out my hands lazily through ahole in the link so the handler could remove my chains, then collapsed on an empty metal bunk with a sigh, wishing I could run my hands over my scalp just to see if my hair was growing back yet, like the stupid, vain bastard I was, even in here. But I didn’t yet have enough range of motion to put my hands behind my head, so all I could do was tuck them in close to my chest. I blinked against the lurid lighting, which dug crude patterns into my retinas. All in all, I’d prefer the darkness of the mine.
I blinked. What a place to cry.Thatwasn’t happening.
Maeve had spent time in a place like this, I reminded myself. Thanks to me, she was out. And that was enough to let me sleep. A little bit.
“Hey.”
What now?
The guy next to me poked me on my bad shoulder, just as my eyelids were falling shut, causing me to jerk in pain. “You the one who blew up the mine?”
I turned toward my bunkmate, likely a farm laborer only a bit older than me, though his leathery face made him look about ten years beyond that.
“Well, I didn’t actually?—”
