I call for her, but my voice is only a moan as I regain consciousness. Fingers move through my hair like spiders.
“I’m here,” she answers. “I can’t stay long. Listen to me. Are you listening?”
The blurry room doubles. Two Cecilys come together into one solid girl. I move my lips and discover I have a voice. “Yes.”
“I’m going to find a way to get you out,” she tells me. “Trust me.”
Trust. The concept is too perplexing in my muddled state. She has tears in her eyes. She’s wearing a green bikini top, and her wet hair is dripping onto my arm. Several of my syringes have been unplugged. Did Cecily do this, to wake me up? She must have, because the numbness in my body is giving way to pain. Still, I cling to consciousness.
I try to focus on her face, but her eyes are as black as stab wounds. The room jolts and blurs behind her. “I’m having a nightmare,” I say.
“No,” she says. “You’re awake now.”
“Prove it,” I say. I have been taunted by her too many times, only to wake and find myself alone.
“When I was pregnant and not feeling well, you used to tell me stories,” she says. “About twins. They didn’t fight crime or save the world or anything, but they had each other. Until one day they were separated.”
“Those weren’t just stories,” I say. “They were about me and my brother.”
“I know that now,” she says. “I guess I always knew. And I was being selfish. I wanted you here with me. You, me, Jenna, and Linden.” She brushes the hair from my forehead. She smells like pool water and suntan lotion, prompting a memory of bright holographic guppies swimming through me. “If you stay here, you’ll die,” she says. “You don’t belong to me or Linden. You belong out there.”
“Linden doesn’t want me anyway,” I say. “He told his father that.”
Something like pain flashes in Cecily’s eyes. Or maybe it’s surprise. She can’t believe Linden would be so callous.
“You came here even though he told you not to,” I say. “Didn’t you?”
Cecily bristles. “Well, of course he doesn’t know I’m seeing you. He thought it would only upset me. He’s very protective, you know. He thinks it’s better if we just forget you existed, and . . .” She trails off, busying herself with straightening out my gown.
“I have to go now,” she says. She kisses my forehead, ever the aspiring mother figure, and plugs all the syringes back into their right places. “Linden thinks I’m swimming.”
I watch her back away from me, dripping wet, a towel knotted around her little waist. “We’re going to have another baby,” she says, not quite achieving the smile she’s trying for. “If it’s a girl, Linden says we can name her Jenna.”
She turns to leave.
“Wait,” I try to say, but my voice is drowned out as the drugs reenter my veins.
For what feels like days I live in a state of nonexistence, emerging only for moments at a time. When I do, the same thoughts are there to greet me:
It’s true that Linden gave me to his father.
Vaughn still has his talons in my sister wife. She’s giving him another grandchild to experiment with.
I will not be able to protect her this time.
Rose’s baby was malformed. Vaughn killed it. Linden will never know.
My brother will never know what happened to me.
Somewhere very far away, Gabriel woke up and realized I was gone. He will never know what happened to me either.
I will exist in this basement for as long as Vaughn lives, in limbs and pieces and genes.
I start trying to stay unconscious. The problem with this is that no amount of willpower can change the reality. I can’t control when I awaken, or what will greet me when I do.
I see Deirdre standing a few feet away from my bed. She doubles over, making retching sounds for a few awful seconds before the bile comes up, strange and odiferous and green. Her gown is slipping off one shoulder; I can see the notches in her spine. Her knuckles are white, her fists clenched. And when it’s over, she’s quiet for a very long time, taking deep breaths.
She looks at me, eyes all pupil, and says, “He’s planning far worse things for you. You shouldn’t have come back.”
“Deirdre,” I say, my voice full of longing. I want to pull her into my arms and keep her safe. My sweet, loyal domestic who devoted her days to making sure I was cared for, who once upon a time never could have imagined such awful things as are happening to both of us now. And it’s all because of me.
I struggle against my restraints as she takes a towel to the puddle of vomit and then disposes of it in the biohazard container where the attendants dispose of my needles. She throws her hands into her lap, and she looks so hopeless, but she won’t cry, maybe because she still has some fight left. I remember this about her. She’s a small thing, but she was always resilient. “It helps if you think of someplace nice.” Her sallow face is lit up by the fake sunlight over holographic lilies that are animated on a loop. I’ve memorized the way they sway: left, left, left, waver for a bit, right.
Think of someplace nice. Claire’s house at night, little lungs breathing in every room. My head in Gabriel’s lap. He said he wouldn’t let anyone hurt me, and I knew that this was beyond anyone’s control, even his, but I closed my eyes and pretended to believe it.
I force the thought away. I won’t think of someplace nice; it makes it that much harder to open my eyes and remember that I’m here.
“I should have taken you with me,” I say. “Hidden you someplace he couldn’t find you.”
“He would have found me when he found you,” Deirdre says. She makes her way to my bed, and when she touches my thigh, I flinch. As Linden’s bride I grew used to the fussing and pampering of Deirdre and the attendants. Grew used to the hair braiding and makeup and the deep-tissue massages when I was too tense. But a few rounds of needles has reversed that. At my flinching, my once-domestic frowns apologetically and then hikes my gown up to my waist. “There,” she whispers. “You probably can’t see it, but this is where he put it.” She indicates the fleshy part of my thigh, where I see nothing but sickly pale skin and veins.
“What am I looking at?” I say.
“Before your wedding a doctor inspected you,” Deirdre says. “For fertility, among other things. And you were implanted with a tracker so that the Housemaster could always know where you are.” Her wispy voice is being drowned out by the pulsing in my ears. “You and your sister wives are his property. You’ll always belong to him.”
This honestly never occurred to me. While I lived in the mansion, Vaughn tricked Cecily into spying on me. I’d entertained the thought of surveillance cameras, recording devices, attendants who might do his bidding. But I thought I would be safe out in the real world. My world.
And then I laugh, for the first time in I don’t know how long. Of course Vaughn was tracking me. How could I think I’d ever be rid of him? The laugh is broken and weak, and maybe it’s a bit hysterical too, because Deirdre looks concerned. She claps her hand over my mouth and shushes me. “Please be quiet,” she whispers. “They’ll hear.”
“I don’t care,” I mumble into her palm, but for her I lower my voice. “What more can they do to me?” I say. “Or to you, or to anyone else who’s down here?”
Deirdre smoothes the hair from my face. Her eyes are pleading. “You shouldn’t ask questions like that,” she says.
We both know it’s dangerous for her to visit me, but she still comes often. She removes one of the IVs from the needle that’s in my arm, and she must know what she’s doing, because I slowly come back to awareness.
I always knew Deirdre was brave. She’s small, but she maintains a steely resolve in the face of all this atrocity. She’s still trying to care for me. Maybe it comforts her. Like a ghost that doesn’t know it’s dead, repeating the same last action over and over.
For the first time, today she allows herself to receive my affection. I ease my wrist out of the restraint and let her climb onto the mattress beside me. I tell her the stories I used to tell Cecily, about the twins and the kites. I leave out the laboratory explosion and instead make up new stories about ferry rides and mermaids swimming below the waters of Liberty Island.
The sound of elevator doors startles her. In one motion she is off the bed and reinserting my IV as I move my wrist back into its restraint.
“I’ll be back soon,” she whispers, and hurries off.
I close my eyes, feign unconsciousness while I wait for the drug to overtake me. But it never does. I hear footsteps in my room, and feel the pressure of something being taken out of my forearm.
“I know you’re awake,” Vaughn says. “That’s good. You’ll need to be conscious for this one.”
He pries my eyelid open, shines a flashlight at me. “Your pupils aren’t dilating the way they should. Somehow I suspect you’ve been tampering with your dosages.” He laughs. “You always were difficult, weren’t you?”
I squeeze my eyes shut. I wish for him to be a nightmare. But I can still hear him milling about, preparing my next dose of hell.
“I much prefer you when you’re unconscious,” he says. “It’s just easier to keep track of you. But now I need you on a more normal sleep regimen. You might experience some vivid dreams. They’re nothing to be alarmed about.”
Just before he leaves, he taps my nose. It’s the same condescending affection he usually reserves for Cecily.
“I’ll be back to check on you soon, darling,” he says.
I don’t have the vivid dreams Vaughn promised me. Rather, I lose the distinction between dreams and reality entirely. There are times when I’m sure that I’m awake, but the sterile walls start to become black, as though an invisible brush is painting them. I begin to feel a painful throb in my thigh, where Deirdre told me the tracker was. I hear voices whispering to me. I see my father, pale and lifeless, standing in the doorway watching me. He never says anything, and eventually he leaves. Sometimes Rowan comes to loosen my restraints. He is always in a hurry, always trying to push me from the bed, but I’m never able to move fast enough before he disappears.
There is a man in the holograph window. He stalks through the lilies, shrouded in dark clothes, and I know he’s coming for me.
Sounds become twice as loud. I can hear the rolling carts in the hallway as though they are moving inside my skull. The hushed voices of the attendants get trapped in my head and beat against my brain like moths.