Ki Book One

Chapter Twenty

  Ki woke rarely over the next several days. Wherever she was, they kept her under with drugs, waking her only when they deemed necessary.

  Occasionally she would catch glimpses of her surroundings. The ground was cold, carved stone, worn down and scuffed by footfall. The walls were a mix of rock, concrete, and mottled red brick. Everything looked old and faded, constant sun exposure and general use having drained it of color and life.

  Whenever her blue curtains were pulled back, she could see out into the large room around her. Once or twice she’d caught sight of a squared off, stone window ledge. It showed a view of some kind of compound, a fleeting glimpse of a lighthouse beyond, and a thin strip of ocean leading off to the horizon.

  She had no idea where she was. She assumed it was an island though. She’d overheard the doctors and nurses talking about something called Avictus. She had no idea whether that was the name of the island, but it seemed to fit.

  She’d given up asking how she’d gotten here. She’d also stopped demanding they tell her what they were doing to her. She had never, however, stopped asking to see Jackson.

  He had to be here.

  If not because reason dictated it, then because her every hope forced her to believe it had to be so. He was her only constant now, her only rock. Though they’d never really gotten along, she would trade this cold building, those clean blue curtains, and the unsympathetic medical staff for him any day.

  When she was not asleep, she was either being questioned or poked and prodded with syringes and machines. The doctors had taken so much of her blood that she had a constant pounding headache and a numb, tingling sensation in her limbs and the tip of her nose.

  She answered what she could. She told them about the Zeneethians, about the Scouts, about the weapons she’d seen. She tried to recount her stay and the experiments that had been performed on her, but the facts she could remember were scant. She could describe what had happened, but she couldn’t tell them why. She’d never understood what the Zeneethian scientists had wanted her for, let alone what their experiments had been designed to do.

  As the days wound on, she started to withdraw, accepting her new fate. She was a prisoner of the Ashkan Military. She would escape only when she died.

  Unless there was a miracle.