And a minute later, I found myself greeted, predictably, by a body like a wall and a bag over my head.
Notagain.
But this time, I had a good grip on the gun.
23
HIM
It didn’t surprise me that whatever sicko architect had happily accepted a check to design this place had done it with torture in mind. And given that, it also didn’t surprise me when Obadiah dragged me like a bloody ragdoll toward some previously unseen shadowy recess of the barracks, where no doubt Resi kept the control center of her ghastly little funhouse.
At least I wasn’t naked anymore. At some point, she’d ordered a whining Obadiah to button me into what may have been an old slave uniform before it became a tattered, filthy rag.
Okay, so the rape part was over, then? Come on, I had to take comfort insomething.
And as much as Iwantedthat thing to be Louisa’s imminent arrival, I was more concerned now with what she’d find when she arrived. Chains, guns, monsters waiting to rape and/or torture her—and a bloody, maimed boy kneeling on the floor with another woman’s sickly lavender perfume all over him.
Obadiah was approaching, his every step jolting through my frame, muscles tensing and flexing, the pain rolling back inthick, unbearable waves. The cold metal bit into my wrist once more as he immobilized it on another slab jutting from the wall. I could barely move my hand anyway, but for this operation, evenbarelywas too much.
“You know, for maximum efficiency, you probably want to secure the other wrist,” I managed to spit out without retching. “Come to think of it, I don’t think you have the qualifications to be a lab assist?—”
A blow to the skull cut me off, the long-suffering wall behind me rewarded with another splatter of my blood to add to its collection.
I decided to stop talking.
But sure enough, here was another old friend, bit strapped tight over my raw lips and tongue, the metal cage pressing into the flesh of my cheeks. My blood smeared against my teeth, warm and coppery, flowing down over my blackened, bruised chest and mangled hands and enlarging the pool already beneath me on the floor. I gagged on the taste, my world blurring once more, the edges of my vision beginning to darken.
Obadiah snorted and joined Resi, who stood by a table cluttered with instruments and substances gleaming in the buzzing fluorescent light. I cataloged all of it, watching as her fingers twirled artfully over a row of glassware.
She rolled a vial back and forth, the liquid inside catching the sparse light. I was proud of my ability not to flinch when she uncapped the sulfuric acid, though its inimitable tang was so instantly overwhelming that it left my nasal passages watering and my throat constricting.
My body knew what was coming. I’dseenit. An accident, in the university lab in Heidelberg, with a postgraduate researcher—sadly, involving one of the ones who had treated me like something resembling a colleague and not one of the countless pompous dipshits who couldn’t stand the fact that I was eventhere. But all that guy got in return for his tiny bit of compassion was a melted, hardened yellow-black crater where one side of his face had been, just another horror the young slave working next to him couldn’t ever unsee.
Because this shit wasn’t fire. It didn’t stop when you took the source away. It had to be chemically neutralized, and until it was, it was a slobbering, gluttonous beast, consuming your flesh from the outside in.
So. Now sure would be a good time to figure out a way out of these chains. However, having mostly concentrated so far on blowing everyone to bits, I hadn’t had much time to brainstorm anything else.
And it was too late, anyway. Resi’s hands now moved in careful, deliberate strokes as she used baking soda to apply a chemical-resistant stencil on my broken wrist, just below the bandages—pretty ingenious, really, and oddly fascinating to the nerdiest part of my brain, even knowing the carnage in store for me.
I didn’t have to look. As my heart pumped blood, despite all my attempts to slow it down, I could feel the distinct serifs of each digit being carefully traced, one after another. Digits I used to wear. Digits I wasn’t allowed to forget. Hell, I used to have torecitethem every goddamn morning.
And Resi, chillingly, was gentle.
Sweat rolled down my body now, turning my skin into a hot, bloody slurry, and my heart kept pounding in my ears. Meanwhile, her damp, sticky halo of blond hair had turned piebald, reddened by flecks of flesh and blood, yellowed by the bulbs’ sickly film. I swallowed, one last time, and the last thing I saw before she tipped the vial was my own blood delicately colonizing all the grooves in her fingers.
“You thought you could free yourself, boy,” she hissed angrily in my ear. “Likeanyof us will ever be free.”
HER
I jolted.
“Did you just fuckingshootme?” Noam roared in my ear, grabbing the gun from my hands before I could react.
“How the hell am I supposed to know with a bag over my head?” I bit back, despite the fabric muffling my words. “Do you have a bullet-shaped hole in your body with blood gushing out of it? There’s your answer.”
I went for the whistle, trying in vain to latch onto it with my teeth from inside the bag, but he tore it painfully off my neck. “Little brat, how are you still alive, anyway?” he snarled.
“Good question.”
