“How many times have you erased my memory?”
He sat on the edge of his desk and picked up his remote control, but surely the implied threat was empty. If he silenced me, I couldn’t answer his questions, and he couldn’t shock me without hurting the baby he obviously wanted to protect.
I shrugged. “You answer my question, and I’ll answer yours.”
“No, you answer my question, or I’ll lock you in a room with no window for the next month and make sure your boyfriend suffers in the ring.” He gave me a moment to let that sink in, and I could only clench my fists at my back.
“Is he dead?” Vandekamp pressed.
“Who? Bruce Aaron?” I asked, and his brows rose. I shrugged. “He left his ID lying around. Why would you want a United States senator to kill himself?”
“So, he is dead?”
Another shrug. “When I left, he was beating his own head against a door frame. Whether or not his wife chooses to call an ambulance is up to her.”
His cold smile was the most genuine emotional reaction I’d seen from the owner of the Savage Spectacle. No doubt he only let me see it because I wouldn’t remember it.
“Why erase my memory? Who am I going to tell? The next client? A party guest?”
Vandekamp circled his desk and made a note on a sticky pad.
“Are all my private engagements like this? Just...vengeance?” Nothing that could get me pregnant?
He continued scribbling.
“Do I always come here afterward? Are we always alone?” Was I looking at the father of my unborn child?
“Are you going to make me silence you?”
“Is that what you like? Women who can’t say no?”
He finally looked up, his gaze narrowed. “Do not assume I share my clientele’s fetishes.”
Was that a yes or a no? Was he saying one of his clients had done this to me?
My eyes watered. I swallowed compulsively, trying to hold back words that would show him how desperate I was for information. But the pressure was too much. The opportunity was too rare. “What don’t I remember?”
Vandekamp put his pen down and looked up at me, as if he suddenly found my questions fascinating.
“Tell me what I’m missing,” I demanded through clenched teeth. “Do you have any idea what it’s like not to know what you’ve done? What’s been done to you?”
“You’re saying ignorance isn’t bliss?” That odd smile was back, and I realized he was studying my pain, like a scientist conducting research. Yet enjoying it like a psychopath. He came around the desk again and looked down at me from inches away. “You’re upset because you can’t remember all the time we’ve spent together? All these private meetings?” He ran one hand boldly down my arm, and there wasn’t even a hint of fear in his gaze. He knew I couldn’t hurt him unless I saw him hurt someone else.
He wasn’t afraid of me.
“You know, most people think cryptids raised free are harder to control than the rest, but I think it’s just a matter of pressing the right button. And you have so many buttons.”
I closed my eyes as he trailed one finger up the side of my neck and over my chin. “Just tell me.”
“Ask me nicely.”
I exhaled slowly and opened my eyes. “Tell me please, Dr. Vandekamp.”
He laughed and took a step back. “No.”
* * *
Deep in the bowels of the infirmary, Pagano took me down a hall I’d never noticed before, which shouldn’t have been possible. I’d been in the infirmary half a dozen times to deliver lunch trays, that I could remember, and my duties had taken me all over the building.
Halls don’t just suddenly appear. But they can be made to disappear. Or rather, to go unnoticed. Which meant that Vandekamp had cryptids in his collection that I’d never met, or even seen. Cryptids with very interesting abilities.
Or maybe I had met them, but couldn’t remember.
My handler opened a door near the end of the strange hallway and led me into a small, unoccupied room, where a single barber-style chair was bolted to the floor. Laid out on a counter that ran along one wall was a set of gray scrubs.
“Change clothes and put the costume and shoes on the counter.”
Pagano watched while I changed, but again I saw no real interest in his assessing gaze. When I was dressed in gray scrubs, the tile floor cold against my newly bare feet, he gestured at the chair in the center of the room.
I sat, and he pressed a button on his remote.
The realization that I couldn’t move brought with it that familiar sense of panic, but when I cleared my throat, trying to dislodge a psychological lump, I realized he hadn’t turned off my voice. There had to be a reason for that.
“How does this work?” I asked as, on the edge of my vision, he took up a position next to the door. “How do they take my memory?”
“I don’t understand the process,” the handler admitted. “But I can tell you it won’t hurt.”
“Yes, it will.” Would I wake up in my cell again, missing nine and a half weeks, instead of eight? Would I have to re-discover my own pregnancy? Reimagine the horror of the conception?
“But you’re always happier afterward,” Pagano insisted, and his confidence caught me by surprise. Did he seriously think having someone mess with my head was in my best interest?
People have to be able to remember trauma in order to deal with it.
“They’re going to keep taking until there’s nothing left of me, and not being able to remember the loss doesn’t mean I won’t feel it.”
To his credit, he didn’t try to argue.
“How long will I last?” My voice carried almost no volume. “How long do most of us last here, before Vandekamp decides that watching us die is worth more than making us work?”
Pagano cleared his throat. “We’ve never had one like you before. This...” His broad-armed gesture seemed to indicate the entire room. “This isn’t the norm.”
“How long, Michael?”
Maybe it was my use of his first name that made him answer, or maybe he had a rare moment of true compassion. Or maybe he just knew I’d forget it all in a few minutes anyway. “Weeks, for those who go straight to the hunt or the arena. Gallagher and Eryx have both had a great run, but eventually the boss will find something that can kill them. Or he’ll pit them against each other.”
I closed my eyes, and tears rolled down my cheeks. “How long for those of us in the dorms?”
“A year. Two at the most, for the ones that don’t get much personal interest. But the client favorites...they have it hard.”
Two years.
Even if I managed to carry the baby to term, I would never see it grow up.
I might never see it at all.
Someone knocked on the door, and Pagano opened it, but I couldn’t see who he’d let in until one of the few female handlers led a child into my field of vision. The girl was small, with wide yellowish eyes and long dark hair, and she couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old.
I recognized both her and her guard from my lunch route, but I had no idea what her species was.
“Okay, Sandrine, do your thing,” the female handler said, and as the child approached me, both guards stepped out of my vision to continue a conversation they’d evidently struck up on some previous occasion.
Sandrine stood on my right and looked down into my eyes. “Hello, Delilah,” she whispered, and though her lips moved, her voice seemed to come from within my own head.
“Do I know you?”
“No.” Again her mouth formed the word, but the sound seemed to belong only to me. “And you never will.” Her hands came toward my face, and even as panic dumped adrenaline into my bloodstream, I realized that something was wrong with her
fingers. Something subtle, but real. They were too...smooth.
Sandrine had no fingerprints. Her palms had no lines, as if the everyday motion of her hands left no imprint upon her skin.
She laid one hand across my forehead, and her touch was impossibly light. Her eyes closed. “Tell me about the house,” she said, and I understood why Pagano hadn’t taken my voice. “Just enough to help me find it.”
“Wait!” I whispered, and her yellow eyes opened in surprise. “Sandrine, don’t do this. I need this memory. Please.”
“There are rules...” The words bounced around my head as if they’d been born there.
“I won’t tell anyone.” My voice was as soft as I could make it. “I’ll pretend I don’t remember. I swear.”
“I can’t...”
“Please. I’ll owe you. I’ll...” But I had nothing with which to pay her. The only thing I even had easy access to was... “Do you like cookies?”
Her eyes widened, and I knew I’d said the right thing. A child growing up in captivity probably saw very little luxury. “Chocolate?” Her voice bounced around my head with excitement.
“Yes. I’ll bring you a cookie next time I see you. A big chocolate one. All for you. That’ll be our secret, just like this is.”
Pagano and the female guard were still talking, just outside my field of vision, and I realized that they couldn’t hear her at all, and even if they heard me, they were paying no attention. They expected me to talk to Sandrine. That was part of the process.
“Okay. Our secret.” The child’s lips turned up in a hesitant smile, and I was heartbroken to realize she might treasure the secret as much as she would the cookie. “Close your eyes.”
Her hand slid over my forehead again, and I obeyed. “You can’t remember anything after you left your cell, until you step into your cell again. You can’t remember me being here. Touching you. You can’t remember this room.”
I panicked for a moment, until I realized she wasn’t taking my memory; she was giving me instructions on how to fake it.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
When she removed her hand from my face, I opened my eyes. She started to step away from me, signaling the end of her job. “Sandrine,” I whispered and she frowned. “I can’t remember the past two months. Did you take those memories too?”
She shook her head. “That wasn’t me,” her lips said, though I heard the words from that other, internal source.
“Are you sure? Could you have been made to forget what you did?”
That time her wide eyes hinted at deep sadness. “I can’t forget anything.”
* * *
The next day, I was both relieved and disappointed when Pagano came to get me for lunch duty. Relieved, because I didn’t have lunch duty on fight days, which meant that Gallagher would not be forced into the arena that night. Disappointed because that meant I wouldn’t get to see him.
In the kitchen, I chatted with Mirela as we loaded trays, and my preoccupation with the fact that she had less than two years to live if we couldn’t break out of the Spectacle almost made me miss what she was saying.
“...and Lala saw her yesterday during the dinner shift in the infirmary. She may have a limp, but she’s going to be fine.”
Genevieve. She was talking about Genni. However, news that the werewolf pup would recover was bittersweet at best, because she’d be hunted again as soon as she could run. “None of us are going to be fine, Mirela. Not if we don’t get out of here.”
“I know. We’re watching, and making lists, like you asked.”
“Like I...?”
Mirela’s hand paused as she lifted a cookie from the tray. They were freshly baked, but came from premade dough, which put them squarely in the middle of the food-quality spectrum, which stretched from the gourmet bites served at events to the tasteless but nutritionally sound fare doled out to the captives. “You asked us to watch the handlers and make mental lists of who works when, and where, remember? There are three that rotate shifts in the security room, two at a time, so that it’s never empty, even when one goes to the bathroom. But you can tell when there’s only one there, because the control room door stands open but the nearest bathroom door is closed.”
I’d asked my friends to gather intel?
“Good. That’s good work. Thanks.”
“I don’t see how it’ll help, if we can’t get through the door. And even if we could, we don’t know how to disable the system.”
The whole system? Of course. Why bother with one or two collars, when we could take them all out at once? Or at least remove their restrictions. “I’m working on that.” Though for all I knew, I’d already figured it out once.
I glanced at the chart hanging on the wall over the tray she was filling. “You’re going to the stables. Could you make sure Genni knows her father is here? That might improve her spirits as she recuperates.”
Mirela’s eyes widened. “Claudio is here? How? When?”
“Zyanya didn’t tell you?”
The oracle shook her head. “She just said Payat survived.”
Naturally her brother would have been her priority. “Claudio breached the hunting grounds and was brought in during the first round the other night. I don’t know how he figured out Genni is here, but he got himself caught to get her out. Or at least to be near her.”
“Okay. I’ll tell her.” Mirela slid her last tray onto the cart and headed for the door. While the guard on duty reminded her that she’d be shocked and paralyzed if she wasn’t back in half an hour, I slipped an extra cookie onto my own cart, beneath one of the trays.
* * *
The infirmary was the last building on my route, and as Pagano led me through the front door, my gaze homed in on the “unnoticeable” hallway. It was suddenly perfectly noticeable, probably because I knew what to look for, since my memory of it hadn’t been erased. But my route didn’t take me in that direction.
The third room on my list was Sandrine’s. In the hall, I took a tray from the cart, but as I was giving it to the handler, I tripped over my own feet and made sure her lunch hit her square in the chest.
The handler gasped and stood frozen with her arms out at her sides. Beef stroganoff, Italian dressing and bits of lettuce clung to her uniform.
“You bitch!” She pulled back one hand to slap me, but Pagano rushed in to grab her wrist.
“Don’t touch her! It’s not safe for the guards.” He held up his gloved hands for emphasis, while the woman glared at me. “Come on.” He slid one arm around her waist, and I remembered their conversation in the “forget things” room the night before. “I’ll help you clean up.” Pagano was a player.
The female handler nodded, still angry, and he pressed a button on his remote, restricting me to Sandrine’s room until he got back. “Be good, Delilah,” he said as he escorted the other handler from the room.
The second the door closed behind them, I retrieved the cookie I’d hidden beneath a tray and headed for the pen where Sandrine was kept locked up with one other girl a couple of years older. “Sandrine. Thanks again,” I whispered as I handed it to her through the bars. “Eat quickly.”
She devoured a third of the treat in one bite.
The girl next to her watched with quiet, passive envy, blinking yellowish eyes similar to Sandrine’s. She too had smooth palms and fingertips.
“What’s your name?” I asked the girl.
“Laure.” The word seemed to echo from within my head, as if I’d spoken it myself, with my ears plugged.
“Laure, have you ever...” I mimed touching my own forehead. “Have you ever made me forget something?”
She nodded.
“Did you make me forget a long period of time? Like, several weeks?”
Laure nodded again, and relief washed ov
er me as I gripped the bars between us. Answers were seconds away.
“Do you know what you made me forget?”
She shook her head. “I used a starting point and an ending point, but I didn’t see what fell between.”
“So, you can’t tell me what I’m missing?” I asked, and she shook her head again. “Can you...put it back?”
Sandrine laughed, a timid tinkling sound in my head. “We don’t take memories. We...” she mimed digging with an invisible shovel “...bury them.”
My hands tightened around the bars. “Can you dig them back up?” Please, please let that be possible...
“No,” Laure said. “But you might be able to uncover them yourself.”
“How?”
“You have to find the right tool.” Again, she mimed shoveling. “A sight. A sound. Sometimes reexperiencing an element of the memory can help you dig up what’s buried.”
I swallowed a groan. The only things I knew for sure had been buried were private engagements—yet last night’s hadn’t triggered any memory—and the conception of my child.
“Okay. Thanks.” Footsteps from the hallway made my pulse trip faster, and I turned back to the girls, speaking in an urgent whisper. “Laure, who asked you to take my memories? Was it the boss? Vandekamp?”
She shook her head and gave me a very strange look. “You did. And you brought me a chocolate chip cookie.”
Delilah
You did.
Laure’s words played through my head while I finished my shift in the infirmary, handing out trays to handlers without seeing them. Paying no attention to where Pagano led me.
I’d had my own memory erased, and I’d paid Laure for the service with a cookie.
Then, in trying to uncover that fact, I’d subconsciously replayed my own actions by bribing Laure’s friend Sandrine with the very same reward. Which told me that Laure was right. The information was still in here. How else could I have been so sure that Sandrine would be willing to bargain for a cookie?
Yet the biggest of my questions had gone unanswered. Why would I ask Laure to bury my memories?