Delilah
I woke up with sunlight shining in my eyes from a window high on the wall, and I knew immediately that something was wrong. Gallagher was gone, and though I’d fallen asleep in his shirt, I’d awoken fully dressed in gray uniform scrubs that fit.
Stranger still, I was alone in a concrete room, smaller in scale than the bipedal beast cells, yet more spacious than the holding cell where I’d waited to be processed and issued a collar.
At that thought, my hand flew to my throat. The collar was still there. It was the only thing I’d gone to sleep with that remained with me in the morning. What the hell?
When I stood, my feet sank deeper than they should have into the padding beneath me. I looked down to see that the sleeping mat I’d woken up on was actually a stack of three. A pillow in a clean white case lay on the floor next to the mat, as if I’d lost it in my sleep.
An eerie unease slithered up my spine.
Why was I given a pillow? Why was I in a private cell? Why couldn’t I remember any of that happening?
And why was I so tired after a full night’s sleep?
The food. Obviously I’d been drugged. Probably sedated. But why? What could possibly be accomplished through drugging me that couldn’t be accomplished with the collar? Or by threatening someone I cared about?
Had Gallagher been drugged too? I closed my eyes and thought back to the night before. I’d eaten some of his food, but he hadn’t taken any of mine. Were the drugs in his food? Were they to prevent him from fighting my removal from his cell?
I opened my eyes and spun to study the rest of the room, but my vision seemed to move slower than my body. The room spun around me with a strange sluggishness, and my stomach lurched. I sank onto my knees and took several long, steady breaths while I waited for the feeling to pass.
I’d definitely been drugged.
When I was sure I could stand without vomiting, I opened my eyes again and slowly pushed myself to my feet. The back corner of my cell held a prison-style stainless-steel toilet/sink combination. A toothbrush with a plastic bristle cover and a tube of toothpaste sat on the edge of the small sink, along with an inverted plastic cup.
I grabbed the toothbrush and opened its cover. The bristles were dry and in good shape, but obviously used. The toothpaste tube was half-empty and rolled up from the end, just the way I’d taught Gallagher when he and I had shared a camper back at the menagerie.
I set the toothbrush down and picked up the pillow. It smelled like an unfamiliar shampoo. The scent triggered another wave of nausea.
What had they drugged me with? How long before it wore off?
What the hell was going on?
Light footsteps echoed from the hall. I crossed the cell to peer out the window in my door, through which I saw a narrow, unfamiliar hallway. I could only count three doors along the opposite wall, so there were presumably at least two more on my own side. But if those rooms were occupied, I could hear nothing of my neighbors.
An unfamiliar guard appeared at the end of the hall, carrying a plastic-wrapped tray of food. He stopped in front of my door and seemed surprised to see me through the window.
“You’re awake.” He opened my door and held the tray out to me with gloved hands. I accepted it without thinking, the way people will automatically catch a ball lobbed at them.
“Where am I?” I peered over his shoulder for a better look at the hallway. “What am I doing here?”
The handler frowned. “Is that a philosophical question, or did you hit your head on something?”
A handler with a sense of humor. I was not amused. “What did you bastards put in my food?”
He exhaled slowly, as if he were fighting for patience, which was worthy of alarm all on its own. None of the guards at the Spectacle had ever demonstrated patience with a cryptid, that I’d seen. “There’s nothing wrong with your food, Delilah.”
Delilah.
The problem wasn’t that he knew my name, even though I’d never seen him before. The problem was the way he’d said it. As if we knew each other personally.
As if I should have known his name too.
I glanced up from my tray without really seeing the contents, and my gaze settled on the name embroidered on the left side of his uniform shirt. Pagano. Italian. That wasn’t much help, but I took a shot. “Tony?”
“Michael.” His frown deepened. “Why do you suddenly care about my name?”
Okay, so I wasn’t supposed to know his first name. But “suddenly” seemed to imply that we’d dealt with each other before. Yet even after mentally sorting through all the faces I’d seen at the Spectacle, I had no memory of ever having seen Michael Pagano.
“Eat your breakfast and get some rest. I’ll be back for you later.” He closed the door before I could ask anything else.
“Back for me?” I shouted. I didn’t dare get too close to the door, in case proximity to the sensor triggered my collar. “Why will you come back for me?”
When his footsteps faded, I sank onto my triple-layer sleep mat with my breakfast tray, and for the first time, I truly noticed the contents. Beneath a layer of transparent cling wrap, I found half an apple, a slice of whole wheat toast—the kind with seeds and oats in it—as well as a sausage patty, a hard-boiled egg and a small carton of two percent milk lying on its side. Also on the tray was a single large pill, similar to the one on Gallagher’s tray the night before.
I’d been given a multivitamin and a very healthy breakfast.
Why? If they were planning to make me fight in the arena, they’d be sorely disappointed in my performance unless whoever they put on the sand with me had done something to piss off the furiae.
I pulled back the plastic film and stared at my food. The sausage smelled delicious for about a second. Then another wave of nausea obliterated my appetite and made me suspect the entire meal. Was this food drugged, as well?
However, when the nausea passed, both hunger and logic won out. If Vandekamp wanted to drug me, he could do it just as easily with an injection as with food, if I refused to eat. So I ate everything on the tray, except for the apple core and the vitamin—the most suspicious part of the meal. Then I drank the milk.
I flattened the empty milk carton and slid the tray through the slot at the bottom of my door into the hallway. Then I turned to look up at the window, determined to figure out where I was. The sill was at least a foot above my head, but the triple stack of sleep mats gave me a good boost.
The glass was so thick that the world beyond looked distorted. My view was nothing but trees, and since I couldn’t see the sun, I couldn’t tell which direction I was facing.
I spent the next few hours alternately willing the door to open and going over everything I could remember from the night before, searching for some memory of being removed from Gallagher’s cell. Of being dressed and taken to another room. Of falling asleep with an actual pillow. But the memories were not there. I must have been unconscious when I was moved.
Just when I thought I’d lose my mind from the solitude and the unanswered questions, Pagano opened the door with my empty breakfast tray in one hand and scowled at me. “You didn’t take your vitamin.”
“I don’t believe it’s just a vitamin.”
“Let’s not do this today. You can’t leave the room until you take the vitamin.” He set the tray on the ground and slid it into my cell. “Take it, and I’ll give you an extra lap around the building. It’s nice out today.”
I picked up the vitamin because I was intrigued not just by the concept of an extra lap around the building—how many came before the “extra” one?—but because he seemed to think I knew what he was talking about. My morning made no sense, and I wouldn’t get any answers sitting alone in a cell. So I ran water in the cup and swallowed the huge pill, then opened my mouth to show that it was gone.
“Good. Come on.” Pagano aimed his remote control at my collar and clicked an icon on the screen, then waved me into the hall with one gloved hand. He’d come prepared to avoid contact with my skin, but that was the only thing he seemed to have in common with the other handlers. He wasn’t aggressive or easily provoked. His tone was condescending, but not entirely without respect—he spoke to me like he might to a human child, rather than to a dangerous creature.
I stepped out of the cell, and Pagano took my left arm, but he didn’t cuff me. On our way down the hall, I glanced into the other rooms and found them all empty. The door at the end of the hall opened into an empty foyer, which led us out of a building I didn’t recognize and into what was indeed a beautiful day, if unseasonably cool for September.
The lawn and the sidewalk surrounding the building were unfamiliar. To one side was the patch of woods I’d seen from my window. Opposite that, the sidewalk led away from the building and through an arched gate in the stone wall, beyond which presumably stood the topiary garden.
“Where are we going?” I asked as Pagano led me around the first corner of the building.
“I thought we’d go counterclockwise today.” He shrugged. “I get bored too.”
Instead of answering my question, his reply had led to several new ones, but I swallowed them. He seemed to think I should remember things I didn’t remember, which meant he was ignorant of my ignorance. I’d never fared well from tipping my hand to the enemy, so I decided to trust my instinct. I would figure this out on my own.
My handler’s semicordial familiarity with me. The change in my diet and living quarters. Clothes I hadn’t put on.
I felt as if I’d woken up in the middle of a day I didn’t remember starting.
With that realization, my hand flew to my face. There was no mirror in my room, and there’d been so many discrepancies in my memory that I’d completely forgotten about the bruise from Woodrow’s punch. Which had been easy, because it no longer hurt.
As we completed our third lap around the isolated, nondescript building, my fingers found my cheekbone. There was no tenderness. The scab that had formed over the nick on my throat was gone.
That wouldn’t be possible overnight without the liberal application of some sort of healing aid, like phoenix tears. But phoenix tears wouldn’t explain the discrepancies in my memory.
The conclusion was obvious, if inexplicable. I hadn’t been punched and cut the night before. I wasn’t just missing the memory of dressing and leaving Gallagher’s room last night.
I was missing several days.
* * *
Pagano seemed confused by my sudden silence as he walked me back to my cell, but not entirely disappointed by it. About an hour after he left—though I could never be sure of the time—he came back with my lunch tray, which held a ham sandwich with lettuce and tomato, steamed broccoli, half a peach and a school-lunch-sized carton of orange juice. I could hardly enjoy the best meal I’d eaten since Vandekamp shot me with a tranquilizer dart because of the questions swirling around in my head.
What had changed during the days I was missing? Why was I missing them at all?
Around midafternoon, Pagano came back to escort me to an engagement he seemed to think I was expecting. I wound up in the prep room with five other captives, including Zyanya. She was already paralyzed in her chair when I got there, but I saw nothing unusual in her gaze. She seemed pleased but not surprised to see me.
Nothing the makeup artists said or did gave me any clue about my missing days.
Once I was painted, dressed and rubbed with body glitter, the other captives and I were marched through the topiary and the rear iron gate toward the arena, where we were led to individual box seats. Just like the previous evening.
Which wasn’t actually the previous evening at all.
The fact that it was arena night again confirmed my suspicion that I was missing a significant amount of time. Gallagher had told me that fights were only held twice a week, to give the combatants a chance to heal and rest. That put my missing time at three or four days, at least.
My head spun with the realization. How could I have lost so much time? How could no one else know about it?
Pagano was waiting in my box—the same one I’d served Mr. Arroway in—along with Bowman, who didn’t seem surprised by my presence, or by the fact that my face had healed. Which told me that I hadn’t actually gone missing during my missing days. I just couldn’t remember them.
Half an hour before the fight was scheduled to begin, Olive Burnette escorted a party of six into my box. Four men and two women, all dressed to kill.
The larger party kept me busy serving food and refilling drinks for most of the first two matches, in which a new troll and the manticore I’d seen before successfully and gorily defended their titles.
During the break before the final fight, conversation buzzed in my box while my customers discussed the reigning champion. I listened closely, because as of the last fight I remembered, Gallagher and Eryx had both been champions. If either was no longer a reigning champion, then he was dead.
My chest tightened at the thought, and for a second I had trouble drawing a deep breath. Could Gallagher be dead?
Could my reaction to losing him be what had led to my loss of memory? Had I blocked the entire event? Or had I been so much trouble as a result that Vandekamp had me medicated? Was the memory loss an unforeseen side effect?
That could explain why no one else seemed to know about my missing time.
I shook those thoughts from my head and focused on pouring drinks and offering bite-size delicacies, because I couldn’t believe it. Gallagher couldn’t be dead.
Soon the house lights dimmed, and Vandekamp appeared alone on the sand in his spotlight. With his usual booming voice and composed showmanship, he introduced the challenger: Belua, a behemoth, which looked like a cross between a wild boar and a black rhino. The twelve-foot-long, two-ton beast pawed the ground and paced back and forth, snorting aggressively. The only thing keeping her from charging Vandekamp was the huge steel collar around her neck.
When he announced that Belua’s opponent, one of the reigning champions, was the rare and prized fear dearg, my relief was so consuming that I almost dropped a tray full of stemmed glasses of red wine.
“So what is a fear dearg anyway?” a woman on the front row asked.
“I don’t know, but he’s undefeated,” the man next to her said, and no one pointed out that winning a couple of fights—how many could there have been in a few days?—doesn’t really count as being undefeated.
I held my breath as I stared down at the sand, waiting to see Gallagher. To verify for myself that he was okay.
Lights dimmed all over the stadium, except for three spotlights in the ring. The gate at the other side of the arena slid open. And finally Gallagher stepped onto the sand, into the empty spotlight a third of the way into the oval ring. Then he turned to look up at me. As if he knew exactly where I’d be.
The lights in my box brightened, throwing a square of illumination on the stadium seats just below. Gallagher’s gaze found me, and the image of him on the overhead screen zoomed in for a close-up. The audience turned to follow his gaze.
I gasped, surprised to find myself the center of attention again, and in my peripheral vision, all six of my customers turned as if they’d just then noticed I was there.
“Why are the lights on?” one of the men demanded.
“So he can see her,” Pagano answered.
“It’s her!” the woman next to him half whispered, her focus suddenly fixed on my face, though she’d hardly looked at me all evening. “So it’s true? He fights for her?”
“It’s true. Nothing else seems to motivate him,” Bowman said as if I weren’t standing right there, listening. “Not even his own safety.”
“That’s so beautiful!” one of the women said, but the man to her left scoffed.
“It’s a gimmick, Cherie. They don’t feel things the way we do. They’ve just been trained for this act, to draw in new customers. Like teaching a monkey to dance.”
My face flushed red-hot, but I only bit my tongue and clutched the tray, trying to pretend I couldn’t hear them.
“What is she?” a man in the second row asked. But I fixed my gaze on the screen, where a close-up of Gallagher showed details I couldn’t see from the private box.
His wounds had completely healed, and somehow they’d multiplied. His torso and arms were covered in thick, irregular scars, which had already begun to fade from fresh pink to an older shade of white.
That couldn’t be right. I stepped closer to the glass.
Gallagher’s hair had grown out beneath his cap, not just to stubble, but to a full inch and a half of hair, where there’d been only scruff the last time I’d seen him.
That could not have been just days ago.
My tray clattered to the floor. Glass shattered and wine splashed the wall and pooled on the wood floor.
How much time had I missed?
“Damn it!” the nearest lady cursed, using a napkin to brush drops of pinot noir from her shoes. “What the hell is wrong with her?”
“What’s the date?” I demanded, stepping over the tray and the broken glass.
On-screen, Gallagher frowned. He could tell I was upset.
Bowman and Pagano rushed toward me from the rear of the box, but they froze when I grabbed the lady’s arm. So did she. Bowman aimed his remote at me, while Pagano pulled his stun gun from his belt. “Let her go, Delilah,” Pagano said.
“What day is it?” I demanded.
The woman began to hyperventilate. “I...I don’t...”
I grabbed the phone sitting on the arm of her chair and pressed a button to wake it up. The date slid across her lock screen, and my eyes widened.
Two months. Two fucking months.
I hadn’t lost days. I’d lost eight full weeks of my life.