SEVEN
FALLEN AWAKE
“Stay away! Don’t touch me!” My voice sounds unnaturally shrill, hysterical, even to my own ears.
In contrast, Stiles’s is pure honey as he walks around the bed, looming closer. “Easy, Island . . . calm down.”
I try to leap from the bed, but I’m no match for his speed and strength. I barely register his movements before I’m pinned facedown on the mattress, his body straddling mine. I thrash, fight his grip around my wrists, and scream until I feel my vocal chords might snap. Dark shapes move at the edge of my vision—several guards have entered my bedroom. Stiles barks for someone to go get Dr. Bentsen in Helsinki ASAP.
One of them leaves, but the others, they just watch. They won’t help me. No one will . . . because I’m dead to them?
“Calm down,” Stiles repeats with an exasperated sigh.
I’m hurting myself more than he is, writhing and straining under him in a futile attempt to free my legs and arms. Above me, a guard looms closer, and I hear Stiles snap, “Give me that.”
A sudden sting of pain in my arm makes me bite down on the sheets with a long wail. There’s a dampness on my cheeks—tears, mingled with sweat. He stabbed me with something, he’s hurting me . . . yet the hold around me is easing already, and his touch grows softer. In a second of vertiginous despair, I understand that it’s because I’ve stopped struggling. As my body is becoming numb, his voice drops down to a murmur.
“That’s it. Easy, sweetheart . . .”
He’s stroking my hair like I’m a dog, and I can’t shove him away. I can barely blink, and no matter how much I will the room to come in focus, it’s getting blurrier, like clouds of dark smoke are swallowing everything. Is this another dream?
No . . . this time I’m waking up.
•••
I don’t recognize this room. It’s not my bedroom; there’s less furniture, and I never noticed cameras before in the castle. I watch black butterflies flutter and spin in circles on the ceiling. I think they can’t get out because there’re no windows, only four bare walls and an instruments tray nearby.
The butterflies won’t stop spinning, and my body feels like cotton all over. I can’t move, but I’m not asleep. It’s because they strapped me to that stretcher. Large bands secure my torso, biting into my wrists and my ankles. There’s a drip in my arm too, each drop falling in the tube like the water clouding my father’s absinthe. Some distant part of me coldly concludes that I’m being drugged, and I wonder if I’m dying. If I am, it doesn’t really hurt. All I can do is admire the dance of the butterflies and listen to the voices in my head. They’re a little muted, as if my father and Dr. Bentsen were on the other side of the bubble I’m trapped in.
My father sounds angry. “What happened today will not happen again.”
“She was perfectly stable when I saw her on Monday. The implant is still in place, but when I tested her tonight, her dopamine and serotonin levels were abnormally high.” Bentsen’s tone grows accusing. “Are you certain you gave her her treatment?”
“Yes.” That’d be Stiles. He sounds so relaxed, as if this entire nightmare was normal.
“Have we considered the possibility of a dosage error?” Bentsen insists.
“There was none,” Stiles replies.
“I find that hard to believe . . . In any case, what is done is done. The IV will stabilize her. After that we—”
The deep bass of my father’s voice cuts her off. “Dr. Bentsen, can you operate on her here, in the castle?”
Operate? I shake my head weakly. I don’t want her near me . . . I want to know what happened to me, what they’re hiding.
My father’s suggestion makes Bentsen angry. She’s almost shouting now. “Certainly not! We’ve discussed this already. That sort of surgery is not . . . that’s not the way.”
Silence falls in the room. All I can hear is the frantic rustle of the butterflies’ wings. They’re desperate to escape.
When my father speaks again, I feel each word rasp across my skin, low, threatening. “You promised me results. And today she relapsed, hacked into our systems, and tried to escape. All this in less than fifteen minutes. No more experiments. Do what needs to be done.”
I see a pale smudge stagger back. Dr. Bentsen. “No,” She repeats. “Find someone else.”
“Are you certain of your decision, Dr. Bentsen?”
“I won’t do it. I specialize in neuroplasticity. I don’t lobotomize patients,” she hisses.
My fists bunch, and my body strains helplessly against the straps. Lobotomize . . . Is that what my father is asking? I want to scream, escape, but all I can manage is a broken moan, and my limbs won’t move.
Footsteps echo toward the stretcher, and a shadow leans over me. Stiles’s soft drawl fans against my cheek. “Shhh . . . it’ll be over soon. Now, be a good girl.”
Across the room, Bentsen is still arguing with my father; angry whispers drift my way that I struggle to piece together. “There would be significant risks . . . if anything happens, she might never be able to hold a spoon again . . . I know you want more than just a listless body to call your daughter!”
A listless body? Isn’t that what I am already? Stiles’s hand is resting on the stretcher like I’m not even here. I’m furniture. Horror blooms inside me, spills in my veins. The butterflies are still there, calling to me. I need to rise, to fly away too, but my body is too heavy and I can barely curl my fingers. I lie helpless, cool tears rolling down my temples.
“Joshua.” I try to focus on my father’s voice as he approaches the bed and talks to Stiles. “Dr. Bentsen will leave us tonight. See her out and take care of the rest. I want this solved in the next twenty-four hours.”
“Understood.”
With this single word, Stiles moves away from me and walks to Dr. Bentsen. I can make out his arm at her back as he leads her out. An ominous presentiment seeps into my bones . . . Stiles . . . she shouldn’t go with him. I want to call her, tell her, but the whimper that makes it past my lips isn’t enough.
They’re gone now, and I’m alone with my father. He reaches next to my stretcher to turn off a lamp. His silhouette barely outlined by the light coming from the doorway, he too becomes a shadow. Like the butterflies.
I gulp and concentrate all my efforts on speaking. “Why . . . are you doing this?”
He kneels by the stretcher in a rustle of fabric and places his hand over my sternum—over the pendant. His palm is warm, and I desperately want to believe he’s going to save me, free me.
“I gave you everything I couldn’t give your mother, Island, and I’ll give you even more. An entire new world. But I can’t make you happy if you fight me.” I feel his thumb caressing the smooth amber. “It can’t work like that.”
My mother? Thoughts collide in my head. She died when her car crashed into a gas station. He told me I was there, that I was wounded too. Did he . . . was there a doctor for her too? Did he lie to her too?
“I don’t understand . . .” I whimper.
He rises to his feet and bends to place a kiss on my forehead. “There’s no need to.”
I strain against the straps keeping me prisoner. “Wait . . . Please!”
But he doesn’t look back, and after the door slams closed, I’m alone in the dark.
•••
I must have slept. I feel dizzy as my eyes flutter open. The butterflies have vanished, and I’ve given up, having no sense of time in this silent and pitch-black room where I’ve been buried alive. I test my restraints, allowing some of the fog to clear in my brain. Like an electric shock, the panic returns tenfold, contracting my muscles. My father and Stiles . . . they did this! I was reading about the destruction of the Poseidon Dome, and then I saw myself on all these web pages saying I’m dead, and they won’t tell me what’s going on! They drugged me, locked me up!
And Bentsen said—oh God—she said she wouldn’t lobotomize me. Was she being serious? Does that mean someone else will? Nausea swells at the back of my throat at the idea of someone gouging out parts of my brain to turn me into “a listless body.” Soft clanks echo in the dark as my body starts trembling uncontrollably on the stretcher. I don’t want this . . . It can’t be real. It’s like those dreams when I’m in an elevator and it falls, and I wake up the second my chest heaves from the sudden weightlessness. I’m going to wake up in my bed. Fighting the tears stinging my eyes, I squeeze them shut and will the nightmare to end. I’m going to wake up. I know I am . . .
The creak of the door opening sends my pulse into a frenzy. Light spills into the room, so bright it blinds me. Ghosts glide toward me. I recognize Stiles’s voice, murmuring to a man in black fatigues to take me. I struggle against the straps holding me in place and croak, “No, wait! Please . . . J-Joshua!”
He heard me. The moment the plea bursts from my lips, a shadow drifts toward me. His face comes into focus, but instead of blond bristles, it’s brown curls haloed by the light. I can make out the meek smile I know so well, and for the first time, it dawns on me that it’s not real; it never was. Morgan shakes his head. “Oh, baby, I knew you couldn’t behave that long.”
A sob shatters my voice. “Please . . . don’t let them take me!”
He moves away, and I register rustling coming from the general direction of the instruments tray. I crane my neck frantically to see what’s going on. When he reappears in my field of vision, there’s something in his hands, and they’re descending toward me, ever closer, blurry.
My hands curl into fists, and my legs jerk in vain. I let out a series of incoherent wails. “No, no . . . please! Pl—” The word ends in a long howl, swallowed by the tape he smooths over my mouth.
“Much better,” he jokes before trailing the back of his knuckles across my cheek. I feel everything, every single hair, every square millimeter of contact between our skin. I writhe in a desperate effort to escape his touch.
“No, no, no . . . You’re not going anywhere, baby,” he coos as he leans closer, enough for me to make out the jagged edges of a scar on his eyebrow . . . the eye patch. He’s not wearing it. The area where his eye should be is shadowed, but I glimpse a mangled eyelid sunk into his empty eye socket. My stomach heaves with the need to throw up. His fingers glide to my temple and tap it delicately. “They’re gonna clean up everything in there . . . I guess you won’t remember me when you come back, but maybe we can start over. It wasn’t so bad, you and me, right?”
All I can produce is a muffled moan of terror. What is he talking about? I just don’t want him to touch me—please, anyone, make him stop!
But his hand won’t go away, skittering across my jaw, my neck. My heart rams against my rib cage in panic when his fingers curl loosely around my neck, his voice down to a trembling whisper. “I’m going to wait for you, and when they bring you back, I’ll tell you about my sister. Do you want to hear about Poppy?”
I pant and whimper under the tape, my chest constricting with each agonizing breath. I don’t want to hear anything; I don’t want his hands, his voice.
“Morgan.”
My body jerks in surprise. I don’t recognize that stone-cold tone, but the drawl is familiar. Stiles is calling him from the other end of the room. The light above is blinding me, blurring my vision: I can’t see where he is. I screw my eyes shut and wait for Pirate Morgan to heed the call and get away from me. He does, his fingers trailing one last time along my clavicles before he retreats in darkness. Yet his absence brings me no relief. The stretcher clanks and moves; I’m being carted out of the room.