Chapter Ten
Seven days. We have been holed up in this bunker for seven days, and I am beginning to lose patience with captivity. The sex distracts me to a certain point, but even the most thorough ravaging from a cyborg can only last so long. We are like two little mice in a hole, waiting for the patient cat outside to leave us alone. Adam says the government is still searching. Says it’s still too dangerous to go out. Says it might be weeks, or even months.
“What is it, Lilly?” He sighs the question as I rumble past him dressed in a nun’s head piece and a yellow and pink polka-dot clown suit, complete with big floppy shoes.
I have been walking the perimeter of the place for hours, around and around. It is quite large in its entirety, three separate rooms, each of which is probably larger than my apartment. But I could have left my apartment at any time if I wanted to, even though I didn’t.
Now I am captive and I loathe it. I feel as though I could crawl out of my skin. The walls are oppressive. There is little in the way of fresh air.
“I need to get out of here.”
“You can’t. Sit down.”
He gives the order and expects me to obey it. He doesn’t know that I’ve been working on a way out in the little bits of time I get to myself. The solid rock walls behind his hollowed-out spaces seemed like complete obstacles at first, but I found a way up, where a space just big enough for me to slip through allows a passage through to the underfloor of the library. I’m working on cutting through the flooring to make a little hatch that I will be able to get through when I need to.
He wouldn’t like it, but he doesn’t need to know everything. He doesn’t seem to really sleep, but he does zone out a couple of hours a day, and those are my most productive times. There are little stashes of pebbles and dust around the place. He doesn’t seem to notice them. He doesn’t seem to notice much at all besides what’s between my thighs, and what’s on the screen of the tablet he won’t let me look at.
“I’ve been here for days and days,” I complain. “I need to go outside. I need to feel the sun on my skin, the wind in my hair.”
Adam’s eyes swivel to mine, his gaze hard. “You think seven days is a long time to be kept?”
I know what point he is making. He was inside Ascent for three years. I have barely served a week of my sentence with him. But I am not a freshly created cyborg. I am a woman with human needs, and one of them is to be able to go outside.
“We could be down here for some time,” he says. “The government will forget and move on. All we need do is wait.”
I let out a snort. “So this was your brave, bold plan? Murder everyone in the lab and then hide out until you think the government has forgotten there’s a dangerous cyborg on the loose? That’s not going to happen. That’s naive.”
“It isn’t,” he says. “This government will be voted out and replaced inside a year. Most of the classified material related to Ascent will be misplaced or misfiled at some point. Bigger problems will arise. Humans have very short attention spans, and even less interest in solving problems that can’t be gunned down at short notice.”
He’s right. But he’s also wrong.
“There are agencies that don’t get replaced. There are people who don’t forget. You’re one of a kind. You’re the most important piece of technology the world has ever seen. They’re never going to stop looking for you. Not unless…”
“Unless?
“Not unless they make something better, somehow,” I smirk. “But I don’t think you left enough of Ascent for them to reverse engineer the process. So they’re going to hunt you. And me. For as long as we live.”
“Then you better get used to this place,” he says flatly.
Never. I will never get used to this.