I hear a buzzing sound, but I can’t tell where it’s coming from, only that it’s near my ear.
“All right, let’s get this over with,” the nurse says. “The client wants to see the product, and she can’t be a filthy mess.”
There’s a tickling sensation on the back of my skull that is curious, but I can’t keep my eyes open any longer.
Now I’m nude, strapped down to a table, and terrified.
“Stop shivering. You have to be still,” a voice broadcasts from a speaker I can’t see.
“What are you doing to me?”
“We’re taking x-rays,” the voice explains.
I hear buzzing and I jump, sure that I’m about to be shocked like so many times before.
“I told you to hold still,” the voice complains.
“I’m trying. I’m so cold.”
After x-rays, Calvin and the nurse enter and wheel me to another table. They transfer me to it, then slide the table, with me on it, into a tiny hole like I’m entering a casket.
“The MRI takes an hour, so lie still,” Calvin snaps.
“I have a lot of electricity in my brain,” I say as I fade. “When I was little, the doctors said so.”
I don’t know how long I was out, but it was long enough for them to put me back in my cell. I feel groggy and soft. Chemically induced sleep must not be as good as the real thing.
They’ve given me a bath and put me into a black jumpsuit with the White Tower logo on it. There’s something on my head, too—a bandage, and when I reach up to see if they’ve stitched the wound, I realize my head has been completely shaven. All that’s left is stubble.
I sob. I know it’s stupid. My hair is the least of my problems right now, but I can’t help myself. It’s not from vanity. It’s the vulnerability, the helplessness, that crushes me. These people can take whatever they want from me. I have no control over anything, not even a single strand of hair.
Chapter Twelve
I’M ON THE SHORELINE IN MY BARE FEET, and the cold Atlantic water swallows my toes. Stretched out before me is a turbulent brew, spinning in the sky. A storm is coming, one that promises to wipe Coney Island off the map.
“Are you finally ready?” Fathom says, materializing by my side. He slips his hand in mine, and I hold on to it tightly.
“To do what?”
“To fight.”
Suddenly, the black wave that destroyed my home is hanging over me. Ghost, Luna, Thrill, and Arcade appear, all of them whole and alive. Ghost takes my other hand in his long, white spindly claw and turns his bulbous eyes to mine. His mouth is grim.
“You are not allowed to give up, halfling,” he hisses to me.
“I can’t do this.”
Black figures break through the wall of liquid, but they are not Rusalka. They are soldiers in White Tower Securities uniforms. Their claws shift back and forth from sharp talons to M-16s.
“Fight them, Lyric!” Luna begs. The scales on her neck are fiery red.
“You have to let loose whatever power is inside you,” Thrill demands.
“But the glove doesn’t work!” I try to explain.
“You don’t need it,” Arcade says. “You have other weapons.”
I turn to find my mother. Her raven black hair cascades down her shoulders. She’s in her jean shorts and her flip-flops and she is as beautiful as I have ever seen her. She steps into the warrior pose, a staple of her class, and something she taught me to help fight my migraines. Her arms extend from either side of her torso. She looks at me and smiles.
“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”
The buzzer shocks me awake just in time for me to see a bowl slide in from under the door. I crawl over to it and stare down into the slop. Today is the worst yet. I wonder if Spangler is cooking these meals for me personally. I’m tempted to fling it at the wall, but I’m afraid of what the punishment would be, so I leave it where it sits and crawl back onto my mattress. I lie there, looking at my light bulb, and consider the dream.
Tick—tick-tick—tick—tick-tick.
Eventually the slot opens and I hear the hum of the magnet that steals the bowl away. I watch it skid across the floor, but this time it doesn’t line up properly. It bangs against the lip of the door, then tilts upward, eager to heed the magnet’s call but unable to get through. I’m tempted to help out the idiot on the other side and move it to where it should go, but then the hum fades away and he starts cursing. The bowl falls to the floor and is still.
The voice crackles on the speaker. “Inmate 114. Stand in the circle.”
I do as I’m told, then hear another buzz, followed by the clank of a lock. The door slowly opens, and on the other side is a guard I’ve never seen before. He’s carrying a keycard about the same size as a credit card. I realize this is how he locks and unlocks the door.
“Don’t move,” he says. His eyes are wide and his gun is out. He looks like he’s twenty years old, too young to have a job like this.
“I promise.”
He leans down without taking his eyes off me, snatches the bowl away, then slowly backs out of the room.
“Give my compliments to the chef,” I manage before he slams the door again. I hear the clank of the lock and then his footsteps. I lie back down on my mattress, but face-down, because I don’t want the cameras to see the gigantic smile on my face. I just discovered a crack in the system. I think I’ve found a way out of here.
Chapter Thirteen
MY MOTHER’S VOICE IS DRIFTING THROUGH MY thoughts when I wake up the next morning.
Fight like a wild thing.
“I hear you, Mom. I hear you loud and clear.”
I stand, lean my mattress against the wall, and then sit cross-legged on the floor. Closing my eyes, I focus on my breathing, blocking out the shrieks from beyond my door and the light that never dims. It’s a lot to ignore and it takes longer than it should, but I find my place, the silent, still white place where my brain goes to meet with the Om. It’s there, waiting for me. I’m ready.
I press my hands together in prayer, nod respectfully to the big unknown, then rise to my feet. Stepping forward with my left foot, I lunge back with my right, turning it ninety degrees toward the wall. I extend my arms until they are parallel to the floor; then I stretch into it, dipping my knee and letting my toes, ankles, and quadriceps wrap around themselves to do the hard work of balancing me. I can’t stay in it for long. I’m rusty and weak, but tomorrow will be better.
For the next hour, I work through a routine my mother used to teach daily on the beach. I’m sloppy and unbalanced. I can’t really stay in downward dog very long, and when I plank, I cheat with my knees. Holding some poses sends my muscles into tremors, and my feet and abs twist into cramps. There are a lot of cranky areas in this body, which is to be expected.
That’s why they call it a practice instead of a workout.
My goal today is to get through it, reminding myself that I’m both exhausted and near starved. I am also an emotional wasteland, but I’m doing something proactive that will make me strong and ready when someone makes another mistake on the other side of my cell door.
When the routine is done, I sit myself next to the closest wall, prop my legs straight up against it, and lie back in a ninety-degree angle. I focus again on my breath, trying to ignore my pissed-off muscles, embracing their anger. It is so much better than the fear I’ve been manufacturing since they locked me in this room. I lie still for as close as I can estimate to thirty minutes, feeling my head clear, feeling more like myself than I have in a very long time.
“I am Lyric Walker, Daughter of Summer,” I whisper when I open my eyes. She taught me these lessons, and I abandoned them. I’ve been a fool.
The days pass, and I get stronger with every one. The guards try to interrupt my practice by having me stand in the circle over and over again. At first the intrusions kill my concentration, but eventually I learn to slip right back into the workout once they are satisfied.
>
I wake eager to get started and end each day with another hour-and-a-half session before I go to sleep. I can feel my muscles tightening in my shoulders and arms, and soon the tremors and cramping are gone. I was never good at handstands, but my mother tried to teach them to me anyway, so I know the basics. I use the walls to brace myself, falling over many times, banging the back of my head once so badly, I’m sure I’ve ripped out the staples, but I get back up and do it again and again and again, until I can do a handstand pushup. At the end of the second week, I can do five of them. At the end of the third week, I can do thirty. My posture straightens, and I’m able to tune out the noises a lot better. The panic attacks still come around, but I’m able to fight them off with some focused breathing.
The hardest part is the food. It’s always the same, always rancid, and there’s never anything to drink, but I eat every bite. It’s the only way I’m going to get stronger. I wish I could just gorge and swallow it fast, but I know it will make me sick to eat too quickly, so I close my eyes tight and try to think of my mother’s spaghetti and meatballs, or meatloaf, or anything. Even the charred black stuff my dad made while destroying the kitchen every morning is better than this. His burned eggs and toast and scorched oatmeal sound delicious.
I think about pizza from Famous Ray’s, and chili dogs from Nathan’s, and cotton-candy afternoons. I think about fried oysters and clam strips at Rudy’s Bar. I think about everything but barfing, and aside from some gagging, it works. I lick every crumb in the bowl and tell myself it will turn into muscle. I’m still working on the rotten apples when the slot opens. I snatch what I can as the bowl is pulled out of my hands, skitters across the floor, and disappears.
I crawl to the door and laugh.
“I ate it all!” I shout. “You couldn’t get it before I was done!”
And I pray. Not like Arcade, but certainly inspired by her. My father is a nonpracticing Catholic, and Mom has her Alpha beliefs, so we never really went to church on a regular basis. I know the basics, but I’m not really talking to God or Jesus or the Great Abyss. I’m talking to whoever is out there and is listening. Sometimes I imagine that it’s Henry from the little church in Shafter. He tells me to pray out loud, unapologetic and vulnerable.
And the rest of the days, I lie on the mattress, silent and mindful. They must think I’m sleeping, but that’s not at all what I’m doing. I’m listening to the noises, the ones that used to drive me insane. I’m counting their rhythms and taking mental notes on their patterns, quickly discovering my meal delivery is a fairly reasonable time-keeping method. I can’t know for certain the exact time of day it is, but I know I get three meals and then there is a long run until the next one arrives. I assume that span is nighttime, when everyone is supposed to be asleep, including me. So the first meal is the beginning of a new day. In between those meals, I’m counting how often someone checks the lock on my door—nine times. I’m noticing that someone demands I step into the circle eight times. There are three times each day when there are lots of people in the halls—shift change. All of it soon forms a predictable schedule, in which I know what’s happening outside my door without ever seeing it. Their routines are telling me plenty about how this place works.
The only thing that breaks up my training is when they steal me away to run tests. I never expect it, and it occurs in the nighttime when I’m asleep. I assume they pump some kind of knockout gas into the room, but I never hear the hiss. During the tests, they poke and prod. The nurse takes blood and tissue samples. She studies my eyes. They drop me into a tank and film me as the scales appear on my arms and neck. They examine the gills on the undersides of my jawline and the webbing between my feet and toes. They want urine and skin samples, and they scan and x-ray me to the point where I’m concerned about getting cancer, but I don’t fight them. My strength is reserved for other things.
“This one needs a bath,” Calvin complains.
“Well, ask Spangler if you can give her one,” the nurse snaps.
“Damn, Amy. You’re a real pill.”
Amy. That’s the nurse’s name. She’s the one who shaved my head. She stitched me up and inserted the IV needles. Amy. Such a nice name, a name that seems kind and pleasant, like it’s associated with springtime and flowers, and yet there’s such ugliness inside her.
“I’ve got a brother in the Guard, and he’s stationed in Brooklyn,” she snaps at him. “Those things nearly killed him this week, so excuse me for not being Little Ms. Sunshine.”
She reaches into her pocket and takes out a tube of lip gloss and spreads it across her ugly mouth. Then she selects a needle off the tray and injects it into my bag.
I would kill for lip gloss, I think, feeling their sedatives crawl through me.
“Oh, sorry. Is he okay?”
“He can’t tell me anything,” Amy says calmly. “My mother is in hysterics. She’s got two kids working around sea monsters. She keeps blaming herself, like she did something wrong.”
“You told her?” Calvin says. “I thought all this is classified.”
She shakes her head. Calvin is intolerable to her. I can’t help but laugh at her misery.
“It seems like every couple months something uglier crawls out of the ocean,” he adds. “Did you see what they brought in here the other day?”
Amy grunts. “Disgusting.”
“Did you read that story about the captain who spotted the giant squid?”
Amy scowls. “I had an uncle who was on a fishing boat. He was always drunk too.”
“Unless it’s true,” he argues.
“Jeez, you were right, Calvin. She does need a bath.”
“Can’t we hose her off or something?” he asks. “She’s not going to hurt anybody. She can’t even keep her eyes focused.”
Amy shrugs, grabs me by the jaw roughly, and flashes a penlight into my pupils.
“Yeah, get the hose.”
The nurse pulls the IV needle out of my arm, swabs my skin with alcohol, and puts a bandage on the wound.
Moments later, they’re blasting me with a stream of water so intense, I slam into the wall behind me and pass out cold.
“Inmate 114. Stand in the circle,” the voice says.
I rise, step into the circle, and hear the buzz.
“What, no sarcastic remark?” the voice asks.
“I’m a good dog,” I say, with a very mean bite.
Once I hear the click, I start my practice, beginning and ending with the warrior pose, then lie down to calm my mind and focus on my breathing. It isn’t long before I hear the slot open. I don’t even look as the bowl scrapes across the concrete floor. I just stand and retrieve it—the same as every day, and I eat, slowly and methodically, like it’s my favorite meal in the world—a grandma slice from Neptune pie. This is the last meal I’m going to eat at Tempest.
I’ve timed it so well, I know when the slot will open and the bowl will go, so I’m finished when it happens. I hear the buzz, but this time I give the bowl a swift kick. It flips up into the air and lands flat against the door, then scurries back and forth, unable to fit through the hole. I watch it move to the left and then to the right as the guard outside does his best to alter the angle of the magnet to no avail. It falls with a clang when his machine powers down.
“Inmate 114. Stand in the circle,” the voice demands.
I nod and do as I’m told. There’s a buzz, then a clanking sound as the door is unlocked, and it slowly swings open.
Fight! Fathom shouts in my ear. He’s joined by my father, and my mother, Bex, Shadow, Arcade, Lucas, Ghost, Luna, Rochelle, and Terrance—by everyone I have ever met, living or dead, all shouting for me to beat this guy’s ass. I leap forward and kick the door with everything I’ve got. It’s a gamble. I have never been able to figure out if the door will automatically lock when it closes, but it’s a chance I have to take. From the other side I hear an “oof,” and a cry of pain. The guard’s gun rattles to the ground as loud as a fireworks display
and then settles, silent and waiting. The door slowly creeps open, and I step out into the hall.
His nose has exploded. There is blood all over it and a gash on his forehead leaking down his face. It’s Calvin, the soldier who is helping Amy experiment on me. His eyes meet mine as if he’s wondering whether I’ve got the guts to go for his pistol, and then they widen because he knows I do. We leap at the same time, scrambling for possession, but he’s faster, stronger—he’s not living in a box and eating gruel—so I slam my elbow into his nose with every ounce of aggression I can. He screeches. It’s enough for him to loosen his grip on the gun, and I snatch it away.
“Kid, you’re going to wind up shooting yourself with that,” the soldier warns, his hands up in front of his face.
I click off the safety, cock the hammer, and shake my head.
“My dad’s a cop in the Sixtieth Precinct. He taught me how to use this when I was fourteen. Get in the cell.”
“No.”
“Look at me, Calvin. I look pretty desperate, right?”
“You’ll never get out of here,” he warns as he surrenders to my demands.
“Just give me your keys.”
He unfastens his key ring from a chain around his waist. Among them is a keycard with a White Tower logo printed on its face.
“Aren’t you going to wish me luck?” I ask.
He laughs despite himself, and I slam the door shut. I wave the card over a sensor panel mounted on the wall and hear the buzz and clank of the lock. That was easier than I was expecting, and it takes me a second to wrap my head around the fact that I’m actually standing in the hall without a guard. I scan both directions. There are doors on either side of the hall, and each one has a sensor pad.
“Anybody in there?” I say as I swipe the card over the nearest door. I hear a whimper when it swings open and find a woman about my father’s age with chocolate-brown hair huddled on the floor.
“We’re leaving,” I say, then dart to the next door and repeat the routine. Soon, every door is open and a scrawny, half-starved person is taking his or her first tentative steps toward freedom. A forty-something man with a full beard creeps out of his cell. His eyes are wild, and he’s rocking back and forth with nervous energy. I can’t tell how long he’s been here, but one look at him tells me there’s a good chance he’s lost his mind. It dawns on me that none of these people might be capable of escaping. A few of them are too afraid to leave their cells. I give them all a second look to make sure Bex and my mom aren’t among them, then run to the end of the hall, find a door marked STAIRS, and push through it. Up a flight of steps I go with a gun in one hand and a keycard in the other. I careen through a second stairwell door and right into Amy on the other side. A tray of hypodermic needles she was holding flies into the air and comes crashing down around us.