Chapter Fifteen
It turns out, I need quite a lot else.
My recovery is slow. I wasn’t seriously hurt in the crash, but a crash is a crash. The high Regenermax dose I’d been given the month before helped, Daniel says. Maybe it did. I don’t know. I’m just glad to be back with him, to be able to see his face every day.
But there is a big, black cloud attached to this silver lining. And that is the fact that we are both prisoners now. As much as Daniel works to look after me, there is only so much he can do for me, and only so much time he can spend with me. I am not allowed to leave the room. Ever. It contains a bed, a television that only plays old VHS tapes, a treadmill to simulate walking, and fluorescent lighting. The floor is heavy gray linoleum. The walls are white tile. This is not a room to live in. This is a room where things are butchered.
At first, that doesn’t matter. My relief at having him makes up for the Spartan decor. Within a week, I’m on my feet. In another week, I’ve thoroughly explored the boundaries of this room, which is nine feet by ten, and I’m bored. Those tiles seem to be shuffling ever inward, closing in on me. I start to feel claustrophobic, as if I might die here.
“Please, Daniel, just one little walk.”
“You can’t leave the room,” he explains for the umpteenth time. “But I can get you a VR headset on and you can walk on the treadmill. It simulates outside conditions quite well.”
“I don’t want a VR headset. I want to go outside. I need sunlight. “
“Have you been using your Vitamin D lamp?”
“Ugh! That’s Soviet technology. What is this, a gulag?”
His expression is a mixture of sympathy and grim discipline.
“You can’t always get what you want,” he replies. “You had all the freedom you could use out there, and you used it to breach a military facility. So now you’re locked down. Consequences, Briarlee.”
I don’t like the way he’s talking to me. I don’t like the way he has become as much my captor as anyone else. My entire world has shrunk to being him and him alone. Maybe that should be enough. It’s what I was willing to die for.
I synthesize all these complex thoughts into a simple phrase.
“You’re being a dick.”
“Briarlee…” he growls a warning.
“No. I mean it! What happened to you? You fled into the woods to avoid being taken by the military. I got shot in the process! And now all you care about is following their rules and making them happy? I guess the Regenermax can’t stop you from being a pussy.”
The last words make him go absolutely still. I’ve lashed out and I’ve hurt him in a way I never could physically. But he needed to hear it. We shouldn’t be here, in this horrible facility where they do god knows what. He hasn’t told me, but every room in this place seems to be soundproof, and I can only imagine that’s because the building would echo with the screams of the damned if it wasn’t.
“You got hurt when I ran,” he growls. “You would be hurt again if I ran again. They know what and who I love in this world, and they will use it to get my compliance. I won’t risk that. No matter what you think. Your safety is worth more to me than your opinion of me.”
And now I feel like shit. Maybe I should.
“I’m sorry.”
“It is what it is, Briarlee. I’m going to do what keeps you safe. That’s what a man does. I should never have run. I should have surrendered myself in the beginning. You’d have missed me, but it wouldn’t have destroyed you. The shooting and the Regenermax did that.”
“So you think I’m ruined.”
“I think you were hurt by my choices. I think I’m too late to save everything you once were.”
It’s my turn to be hurt.
“Fuck you,” I blaze. “We should run. We should let them come for us if they want. We should load up on as much Regenermax as won’t kill us and we should go live in the wild.”
“You want to live in the woods?”
“I was thinking Canada.”
He snorts. “Briarlee…”
I get close to him, lower my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You could do it. You could develop a dose for both of us that would make us almost invincible.”
“We’d risk losing our minds. We’d be nothing more than animals.”
“Is that risk worse than the risk of living here forever, me in this cell? You in a slightly bigger one?”
* * *
Daniel
She looks at me with her beautiful eyes and I feel the siren’s call to rebellion.
Her idea is sinking into my mind. It’s wrong on so many levels. But it’s also right in many other ways. We need to be free. We will lose our minds in here. Our spirits will be broken. Maybe one day, a long time from now, our handlers will let us go. Or maybe they won’t. Maybe we’ll die in here if we don’t take our fate into our own hands.
Since arriving at the facility, I’ve weaned myself off Regenermax. The healing is done. My injuries have not returned. The physical gains I made during treatment have eased considerably. I can’t think on the Regenermax. Not as well as I need to in order to develop and refine it. I’ve been clean for three weeks.
What she doesn’t know—what nobody knows—is that I’ve been developing a super version of the drug. A potential one hit that would have cataclysmic effects on the body. It’s dangerous. Very dangerous. Either the subject withstands the onslaught of regenerative growth, or they die. It could likely lead to tumors. There’s no way to test that, but anything that speeds up cell replication has that possible effect.
I could dose us both with it. It would turn us into the human equivalent of monsters. But then what? This place isn’t one that you can simply leave by brute force.
“We’re going to do this, aren’t we?”
“What do you mean?”
She smiles at me a little too broadly. “That’s your thinking face. You’re thinking about how to do this.”
She’s right. I have an idea.
“What would you give up for freedom?” Her answer to this question matters more than she can imagine, because my idea is nearly unthinkable. I suppose, on some level, I have been planning this all along, but it is as it was the first time I took Regenermax. I have to be pushed to my limits to take this out. Seeing Briarlee so angry and miserable in her confinement makes me consider an almost unspeakable option.
“Everything.”
“Everything is a lot,” I say solemnly.
“As long as we’re alive, and together. I don’t care.”
That’s a bold answer. We’ll see if she really means it.