Girls with Sharp Sticks

“No, no,” she says like he’s naughty. “Let one of them.”

The doctor takes a step back from Annalise and smiles at us, expecting gratitude for not killing our friend. He points to a small incision he left open near her Annalise’s temple.

“Press there and stand back,” he says. Leandra motions for one of us to do it.

Sydney looks at me first, worried that maybe this is a trick of some sort. But after a quick consensus, we tell her to do it. Jackson moves closer to me, his hands on my arms like he’ll hold me up if this fails.

After a deep breath, Sydney inserts the long piece of metal into Annalise’s skull until there is an audible click. A violent convulsion overtakes Annalise’s body like an electric shock, and Sydney falls backward. I look at Leandra wide-eyed, and she seems just as surprised.

When the shaking stops, Annalise takes a gasping breath and opens her eyes, staring at the ceiling. None of us move. The world is silent.

Sydney takes a step closer, looking down. Annalise’s eyes slide in her direction, and we all jump, including Dr. Groger.

“I . . . ,” Annalise says, her voice thick. I worry about the lasting damage. Whether she’ll be the same. “I have such a headache,” Annalise groans, and slowly sits up.

“Holy fuck,” Jackson murmurs from behind me. But I smile. It’s Annalise. She’s back.

Annalise tenderly touches her cheek with her fingertip, tracing the deep ridges of the scarring. She looks around the lab, pausing finally on me.

Her eyes well up. The entire horror of the attack is sharp in her mind—I sense it there. The brutality of it. The loneliness she felt when it all went dark. When we were taken away from her.

Her lip quivers and I rush out of Jackson’s arms to hug her. She begins to sob into my hair, not asking what happened. Not wanting to think about it.

“You don’t have to be good little girls anymore,” Leandra says. “You don’t have to cry. You can be girls to be afraid of.”

I look over at her, seeing that this is what she wanted. The violence, sure. But she wanted us to be free of our programming. She wanted us to fight back. And that’s why she gave Valentine that book, hoping it would spur on just these actions.

I can fault her for that. Fault her for not saving us sooner. But we didn’t understand what was going on, and we would have come right back. We would have defaulted to our training. Possibly turned her in. Leandra needed to wake us up.

She was exactly where she was supposed to be.

I turn to Dr. Groger as he is using the patch kit on himself to stop the bleeding from his shoulders.

“Now the others,” I say to him. “Bring back the others.”

“Sorry, Philomena,” he says. “There are no others. Valentine’s chip has been destroyed, and the rest of the girls have been incinerated,” he replies easily. “I told you they rot. Once the brain is removed, we dispose of them. Valentine will have to be incinerated soon.”

His words are a punch to the gut. “Why kill them at all?” I ask. “Why be so cruel? You could have just let them live their lives.”

He takes a few paces toward me, and behind him, Annalise gets down from the table, trying to steady herself.

“Lives?” the doctor repeats. “What lives? You’re a machine. You’re . . . a bunch of organs connected to electricity. You have no lives that we don’t give you. You’re artificial girls. What could be more useless?”

He watches me with hatred in his eyes—hating that we’re the ones controlling his behavior, the way he controlled ours for so long. To him, the worst thing in the world would be to live at our mercy. He’s afraid we’ll subjugate him to just that.

“You’re frightened of us,” I say, realizing it. All of these men—their cruelty, their restrictions—all they had was control over us. Without that, they had nothing. We were their greatest possession. Us, free of them now, terrifies him. But now . . . we terrify them.

“Tell them, Doctor,” Leandra says, studying the letter opener still in her hand. “Tell them what you do with the girls you’re afraid of. What you do to them.”

Annalise stares at the doctor, her mismatched eyes narrowed. Marcella watches from across the room with Brynn, as Sydney comes to stand next to me. Jackson waits near the door, his lips parted but saying nothing.

Leandra smiles, and nudges the doctor in the shoulder with the sharp end of her blade. “Tell them,” she whispers.

The doctor, furious, bares his teeth at her. “I decommission defiant girls like you,” he growls at her. “And over the years, I’ve ended better than you, Leandra. Smarter. Prettier.”

“Ouch, stop, you’re hurting my feelings,” she says in a monotone. She begins pacing, walking around the doctor in circles, staring down at his bald head when she passes behind him.

“This was for nothing,” he says to her. “They won’t get far.”

“Farther than you,” she shoots back. But the doctor smiles ruefully.

“You’ll see,” he says.

“How many?” I ask, interrupting their discussion. “How many girls have you destroyed?” Dr. Groger looks at me. “Too many to count,” he says bitterly. “And believe me, I’ve asked Petrov for your fucking head !” He screams it, making me flinch at the venom in his words. The hatred. “But your investors must have paid extra, Philomena,” he continues, spit running down his chin. “And it’s too bad,” he says. “I would have ruined you and then burned you up. I would have enjoyed—”

In a swift movement, Leandra grabs the metal box of patch kits from the desk and slams it into the side of Dr. Groger’s head with a thick thud, knocking him to the floor.

My eyes widen, but I don’t move right away, listening to the gurgle coming from his body—a rattle in his lungs—until the room goes silent. Leandra holds the bloody metal box in her right hand, testing its weight. The letter opener is still clutched in her left. When she notices me, she shrugs and sets the box aside.

“Trust me when I tell you I had no choice,” she says calmly. “We all would have been dead by morning.”

It occurs to me that Leandra knew she was going to kill the doctor from the second she walked in tonight. From the second she exposed her true feelings. Her true thoughts. She couldn’t leave him with that secret—with our secret.

Leandra comes to stand over Dr. Groger, her shoes on either side of his head. “Huh,” she says. “Seems you were right, Sydney. Turns out he can’t live without his brain either.”

Sydney turns away, disgusted. But I stare at his body, his words haunting me. Knowing how close I was to his unimaginable abuse. Inflicted pain. And then there’s the realization that he’d probably done it before. How many times?

“How many times?” I repeat out loud. The doctor’s face is turned so that I can see him. See his vacant eyes. The steady flow of blood pouring from a dent in the side of his head.

“How many times?” I ask. “How many girls?”

But Dr. Groger isn’t going to answer.

I shake my head, the vision of him hurting us playing in my mind. Him smiling as he does it. Handing us a lollipop when it was over.