Every Missing Piece

Chapter Fifteen

It's been three days since the Assembly locked me up. Three days since I've been outside, three days since I've talked to anyone outside of the Assembly, three days of time consisting not of minutes or hours but when they send a guard with my food or let me out to use the restroom.

Three days since I failed.

Failure surrounds me in this room. It seeps out of the cracks of the plastered walls; it hugs me as I look down from the lone window at a city that is an eternity away. It's hard to escape failure when that's all I've become.

The Assembly couldn't have found a better place to remind me of my stupidity. The room itself is dismal, with the only light coming from the tiny window that overlooks the main square. Once the sun sets, my room fills with darkness, and the darkness comes all too soon in the middle of the winter. The only other things in my room are a lumpy mattress too close to the ground, a wooden chair with uneven legs, and a small aluminum pot pushed aside in a corner in case the guards can't take me to the bathroom in time. I haven't used it; even looking at it feels pathetic.

I stare at cracks in the ceiling and flurries of snow through my window to distract myself from my own deafening thoughts. I keep watching those cracks until I can convince myself they're pictures, and the snow flurries help me imagine that I'm anywhere but here.

The worst of it is that this is all my fault. It's my fault that I'm locked away, and what was the point?

I guess the point is that it could have been worse.

There's a knock on my door. I leap out of my thoughts at the harsh sound of it, and the door opens before I have a chance to wonder who it could be.

A guard pokes his head into the room. "The Assembly says it's time for today's lesson," he says before stepping back into the hall. He knows I'll be right behind him. I have no other choice.

So far, each day's lesson has been my only opportunity to leave my room aside from when I'm allowed to use the bathroom. Each time, a member of the Assembly will lecture interminably about my new responsibilities as a liaison, about how I'm no longer just one of the people of Gotten, and how my one and only allegiance should be to the Assembly who has been so generous and forgiving to me. I want to earn my privileges, so I smile in the right places and pretend to listen, but I'd really like nothing more than to hand each and every one of them over to the rebellion the first chance I get.

From the hallway, the guard eyes me impatiently. He's barely older than I am—not even a guard's uniform can completely hide the youthfulness in his smooth face—but he looks at me like I'm a child he's been coerced into babysitting for an afternoon. I am quiet as he guides me through the maze of hallways inside the headquarters. It's easier that way.

The guard knocks on another door, and a voice answers, muffled, from the other side. The door opens, and I'm ushered into what must be an office, its windowless walls filled with bookcases and an empty chair waiting for me in front of a pristinely neat desk. Behind the desk, Mathias watches me with a grim smile.

"Well, look who it is," he says, surveying me with satisfaction, as if all you need to do is look at me to tell I've been beaten. "Sit."

The guard moves into position in front of the door, like he'd expect me to upturn Mathias's desk and make a run for it if he wasn't there to block my path. Maybe I'll try it anyway and wipe that smug smile off of Mathias's face. From his seat across from me, Mathias studies me with watering eyes until he turns away, inhaling sharply through his nose.

"I've been informed you may already know a great deal about what we're discussing today," he begins. "We'll be talking about the relationship between the Assembly...and triggers."