Nina hadn’t been keeping track of the minutes. Her memories of this particular place and circumstance might be borked, but she did recall that being too focused on the time only made it harder to stand the boredom of being locked up. When her stomach rumbled, she ordered a meal through the tablet as Adami had instructed. The menu header said Limone Luxury Health Spa, along with accompanying graphics to prove she was truly exactly where they’d told her she was.

The food itself had arrived within the hour on a tray delivered via a small portal in the wall. She’d opened it quickly, but the door on the other side was locked tight, and the portal itself was far too small for her to fit through. Spa food. Fancy, pseudo-healthy options that arrived on plates decorated with edible garnish that did nothing but get in the way. Nothing so gauche as a cheeseburger had been offered, so she settled for a protein patty on a bed of greens, adorned with cheese that claimed to be real and not synthetic. She didn’t believe that any more than she believed this place was a spa, and at any rate, it was also supposed to be fat-free. Real or not, fat-free cheese was an abomination.

Still, she had limited options and she needed to fill her stomach. She’d eat while she had the opportunity. Eat and wait. And wait. And wait some more. She’d given in to the allure of the room’s viddy screen, flipping through each program until she got to the end, then back to the beginning until she gave up, finding nothing to entertain her.

Instead, still naked because they’d delivered her the food but no new pajamas, and aware that she was certainly being watched, Nina started a workout.

She’d deliberately intimidated Adami earlier, and this workout was meant to do the same for whoever was watching her. It was possible her unseen observers were somehow unconvinced of how deadly she could be. She intended to impress her silent, invisible captors with her strength, discipline, and determination. Also her good humor, since as she exercised, she told joke after joke, some of them made up, most of them knock-knocks. None of them really funny.

“Knock knock,” she said before answering herself, “Who’s there?”

She dropped to the floor for push-ups. “Ewan.”

“Ewan who?” she answered herself, her arms pumping.

She paused, breathing hard, something about this joke tickling at her brain. “Nobody. It’s just me.”

Nina had meant to make herself laugh, but nothing about her joke felt amusing. It stuck in her brain like a pin in a map, marking a spot she knew was important—but could not remember why. She tried another joke, feeling for the same reaction, but got nothing.

“Nobody,” she murmured. “Just me.”

That wasn’t it.

Faster, up and down. Pushing hard to clap her hands together in the air before dropping to hover an inch above the ground. Arms straining, she tried it one-armed. She pushed her body to its limits, rolled onto her back to start again with crunches. Searched her brain for another bad joke, but could only think about the last one she’d said.

It meant something.

She couldn’t remember what.

Furious with herself and a little anxious that the memories were still eluding her, Nina forced her mind to focus on the series of exercises she was running through. By the time she’d worked up a sweat, she was hungry again. She pressed a few buttons on the tablet. Sometime later the portal door pinged and slid open, and her food was there. Still naked, she ate it in front of a program about dolphins that seemed more fiction than fact.

She remembered dolphins. Swimming. Blue water. Crystal bubbles of air.

Dolphins.

* * *

“You’d think they wouldn’t need warning signs for people to keep their hands out of the shark tanks.” Nina’s voice bubbles like air released underwater. All around her is the wavering blue and green of the sea. The sound of it soothes her.

She is not afraid.

“People will do dumb things. Get bitten reaching for stuff they don’t have a right to touch.” The male voice is behind her, and she turns.

A man in the shadows. Figure, silhouetted. She knows him. She ought to know him, at least. His voice. The way he stands. If she could only see his face, Nina thinks, reaching toward him.

Reaching for something she doesn’t have the right to touch.

In front of her, a tank. Inside the tank, a pair of cavorting dolphins. One centers itself in front of the glass, its mouth grinning. Bubbles burst in clear, domed shapes from the top of its head. She can’t hear them through the glass itself, but a speaker must be transmitting their noises, because the distinctive skree-skree-eek surrounds her.

“You’re in a cage,” the dolphin in front of her says. The words are metallic, robotic.

The sign on the wall says these dolphins were part of an experiment in which they were raised as human children. Taught to speak using a translator box. The dolphin spins in the water, then swims away.

“You’re in a cage,” the shadow man tells her without moving into the light. “I want to get you out of it. I want to save you.”

“I’m the one who does the saving.”

The man’s voice fades as he speaks. “Not this time . . .”

Nina spins the way the dolphin did, her arms out. A slow circle. The floor beneath her feet is soft and warm; it has become sand. She is underwater, but she can breathe.

She has become the dolphin.

* * *

Nina blinked. The fork was halfway to her mouth, and she finished taking the bite. The food was cold. Everything on the plate was cold, too. Her foot had fallen asleep.

The viddy had not paused, but something about the program seemed wrong. On the screen, flowers bloomed and died in a series of time-lapse scenes while a soft-voiced narrator of indeterminate gender droned on about the life cycle of pollinating insects. Nina put aside her plate, not caring that the fork slid onto the white comforter, and leaned toward the viddy screen.

Many species of pollinating insects had gone nearly extinct, according to the narrator, but several programs devoted to the reintegration of them had been successful in establishing new colonies of honeybees resistant to the diseases that had formerly almost wiped them out.

Nina got out of bed. She went to the viddy screen. Staring. Trying to think why this meant so much to her. She spun in a slow circle, looking around the room, noticing the places that certainly hid surveillance equipment that she didn’t have to see to believe was there. The viddy screen went black, although she hadn’t touched the remote or even spoken aloud anything that might have been misconstrued as a voice command to stop the program.

She closed her eyes, pushing her bare toes firmly against the chilly floor tiles. She centered herself. Breathing in. Breathing out.

This was not a spa. It was not a normal hospital. This was someplace different, someplace other. She did not know why she was here, but she knew she was being watched.

Something on that viddy program was a clue. She hadn’t been meant to see it. She focused on that. Flowers. Insects. The glimmer of a memory tried to surface and faded before she could dig into it.

Be quiet.

Get into bed.

Go to sleep.

Forget.

“No,” she said aloud. “Get out of my head.”

The sound of the door opening turned her toward it. A man in white entered. He didn’t look familiar, but something about the way he stared at her made it seem as though he should be.

“Who are you?”

“Get into bed,” he said. “Go to sleep.”