Descended (Children of Guerra, Book 2)

C.1

The light comes and goes, but I don't move. I don't know if I can, or if I even want to. It's easier just to lie here on the stiff cream fabric of the couch and wait. Occasionally I think about the last time I slept in this exact spot, the night before I left for Chicago and my last assignment, the one that broke my world into thousands of sharp, pearlescent fragments, each as brilliant and jagged as the next. Thinking back that far, to a time before, feels like a dream, like those are the cloudy parts in my mind, even though I know that was real and this... I don't know what this is.

When the light pours through the windows and frosts the room with color, I don't see the coffee table or the black mirror of the television wall screen across from me. I no longer feel solidly here, in my New York apartment. Instead, I'm back there. I'm back on the table, the oily metal of the cuffs digging into my wrists and ankles. And the light is coming not from windows but from square panels set into the ceiling.

I close my eyes against it, sure that it can't signal anything good. Light means the doctors are here. It means the screams I hear are definitely mine. But maybe that's the upside. When I'm screaming it means the others aren't. And that's the hardest part. When the light goes off and it's just me again, I have to lie here and listen to what they're doing to Streetor and Alex and know that it's because of me. At first I tried to block it out, pressing one ear and then the other into the cold steel of the table, unable to lift my hands to my ears because they never unstrap me. But somewhere along the way I stopped trying to spare myself. I just listen now – embrace the ice water that seems to fill my stomach at the sound of his yelling and her "Please, no" – because don't I deserve this? To have to hear all of it, over and over and know that two lives, two bodies, two minds have been worse than shattered because of my choices?

I don't know how many hours pass between when they leave us and when they return, but when I feel those electrical pulses in my skull, like an icepick is boring through all the layers meant to protect my brain, and the strings of nerves behind my eyes feel like they're being twisted, so tightly that they must surely rip, then the shrieking starts again until it's cut off by a wet rag being forced into my mouth, and the next stage begins. I lose track of the drowning, which is not to say I lose consciousness; they would never allow that. But I forget how many times the water burns my throat, as if a wad of steel wool is clogged there, while the water streams over my cheeks and into my hair.

Often it's before they move on to the needles that I wake up here on the couch and see my body reflected back to me in the television.

It just lies there, naked and ghost-like, and I'm thankful at least that it's not a true mirror I'm looking into, so I can't see any details. Knowing what I look like now could push me over the edge, if I'm not over it already.

The thought makes me wonder what I'm waiting for, what I'm holding on to. I don't know how I got here, or whether I even am here. Is this one more sick joke the Guerras are playing on me? Drop her back at her apartment and let her think she's safe. Allow hope to nest in her mind until the doctors come again. Then drag her back and maybe she'll finally break and tell everything she swears she doesn't know. Or else just let her die.

I have no concept of whether I'm hungry. I suppose I must be because I don't remember eating since – when? Before I was brought downstairs. But I am thirsty. My lips have dried together and won't part, and my mouth feels filled with sand. Yet still I don't move. Why should I? Getting up would make this real, would require actions that mean I've accepted what's happened to me. I would have to look at myself and address the wounds and the rotten smell coming from my body and pick out food to eat and clothes to wear and how is anyone supposed to go on and do those things after something like this?