The Mercy of Birds

CHAPTER 22: THE HUNT FOR THE KILLER II

CHAPTER 22
THE HUNT FOR THE KILLER II

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"Hello?"

"Hey, Victor. It's Safeera. I think he's here."

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"Clementine? Wake up."

A hand shook her firmly on her shoulder and she unveiled her vision to see the sunlight glow outcropping from the horizon within the frame of the open curtain. The shine creeped in soft tendrils, but the full picture of the world was a bleak, white canvas in desperate need of spring to come to paint over it with flowers and warm winds.

"Where is Cameron?" she asked the person standing behind her on the bed, her voice muffled against the blanket where she cocooned herself in. It was officially a week of her living with him and it was the first time he wasn't the one to greet her immediately in the morning.

"He has to go meet his lawyer," Martina informed her. "He's prepared breakfast for you."

"Early? So early he left?" she still didn't budge from her burrow.

"It's already ten," she said. Her voice was curt but it didn't bear any mark of impatience. "Come on."

Anything before three PM is early, she remembered Randall used to say every morning. It was a daily routine for him to protest whenever the bell rang and the nurse roused him, declaring the same maxim and argument as to why people should be free to wake up whenever they wanted.

Even though she could theoretically get behind him on that conjecture, she would still comply with the nurse. She tried to steer clear from a fight and a debate with the authorities or the other inpatients, for through an arduous experience she learned that most of the time she couldn't win, and if a chance happened to be in her favor, it was just a doom disguised as luck. Sorry, Randall. You can call me a sheep.

She shuffled to sit on the edge of the bed. Dark hair cascading like a downpour of waterfall to her waist. An arm reached out to her from her peripheral vision and she saw the variegated pills on the small drinking cup.

"Here." Martina directed it to her and she received it, eyeing the content. She recognized the two pills that she would have to take before breakfast, but there are two more capsule additions among them.

"What is that?" she asked her, curious about the newly issued drugs. "I didn't have that."

"It's your medicine, to repress the hallucination," Martina answered as she picked up the water bottle on the bed stand and held it out for her.

She shook her head to repudiate. "No hallucination, I—"

She halted when realization dawned in on her. Was it because of the day she had her last session with Cameron where she had fallen into a trance and woke up to cause a scene?

The notion wrenched at her heart. She was getting bad again and everyone knew it, that was why Dr. Singh prescribed her more medications. She wanted to trust the erudition of the psychiatrist, but she resented that she didn't tell her anything about it.

Suspicions fostered on her mind, a direct pipeline into paranoia, cultivated by the qualms and adverse what ifs questions that emerged in her convoluted thoughts. She could wake up in the morning on a strict schedule, eat the food they wanted her to, exercise herself into exhaustion, and sit meekly on a therapy session, but she could never accept it if they tampered with her drugs without her knowing. Dr. Singh was supposed to be aware of this precondition, so why didn't she tell her?