Alone The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,17
before I met Wolfe. Where are you now?”
He shied away from my look again. “You’re at their base?” He hesitated. “With those guys…from…”
“The Directorate. It’s what they call themselves.”
“Yeah. You’re with them?”
“Not ‘with them’ like we’re on the same team, but yeah. They want to run tests on me. Tell me what I am. Where are you?”
“Can’t tell you.” He cringed as he said it. “Sorry. I don’t trust them.”
I looked at him in annoyance. “I’m not staying here forever. I’m trying to decide if I want to let them figure things out for me before I leave. How am I supposed to find you if you won’t tell me where you are?”
He finally looked me in the eye. “Seems like you’ve found a way to contact me. So talk to me again when you’ve escaped.”
I threw my hands in the air. “Where am I supposed to go?”
He started to fade, getting hazy again, like there were gaps in his skin replaced by darkness. “Anywhere. Just get away from them.”
I woke up with a start.
Eight
I sat up in bed and looked around. I hadn’t even bothered to crawl under the covers. The red face of the digital clock on the dresser told me it was after midnight. I reached over and found the bottle of water I filled earlier. I picked it up, took it to the bathroom and dumped it out again. Just in case they snuck in while I was sleeping. Paranoia, thy name is Sienna.
After I filled it from the tap and drank two bottles, I laid back down on the bed. I was almost positive I had just talked to Reed in a dream. I went to sleep thinking of him and I dreamed of him. But he was right. What happened there was not like a regular dream. All the weirdness and surreal atmosphere of a dream was gone; it felt like we’d had a conversation in the waking world, but with a hazy backdrop.
Could I touch people’s dreams? Was I a telepath, a mind reader? My thoughts raced while I thought about the possibilities. I’d never read a mind, so it probably wasn’t that; unless it hadn’t fully manifested as a power yet. Or maybe it was just limited to dreaming.
I thought about Mom as I lay there. Thought about when she used to get home, and how we’d eat dinner and talk about…I dunno, whatever. Training, mostly. TV shows, sometimes.
The world outside? Never. Rule #5. We don’t talk about the outside world. It doesn’t exist, for conversational purposes. We stay inside the house. The four walls that defined my life.
I thought about Mom and her rules and I wondered if maybe I could dream and talk to her, see where she was. I set the water bottle aside and lay back, this time crawling beneath the covers. I thought about her, about the smell of the chicken soup she used to heat up out of the can with the TV going in the background as we sat on the couch and talked. I recalled watching her walk out the door in the morning, and hoping that she’d open the outside door to the porch before the inside door to the house had shut, so I could catch just a glimpse of the outside world (she never did).
Then I thought of the times I’d disobeyed her. The times I’d let her down. I shuddered. The times she punished me.
The last time.
Somewhere in that succession of thoughts I drifted off again, and I woke to the sound of distant voices and a raging hunger. I blinked the bleariness out of my eyes and felt my skin covered in a cold sweat. My dreams this time had definitely not brought me to Mom. Light streamed in from a gray sky outside, peeking in through the blinds.
I padded into the bathroom and stripped off my clothing, which was sticking to my body. I thought for a moment about the idea of the Directorate watching me and I sighed, a deep, uncaring sound as I looked around the bathroom. I felt truly disgusting; there was still residual mud and grit in my hair from the parking lot two days ago when Wolfe had dropped me, even though someone had tried to clean it.
I sighed again and with a shrug I decided that I wanted a shower more than I wanted to worry about someone spying on me in the bathroom.