knew the answer to that, because the smell inside it was horrific; it made the whole basement stink of rot when it was open.
“How long did she leave you in there?” His eyes still appeared unreactive.
I laughed, a dark, humorless bark that rumbled through me, keeping my emotions in check behind a facade of false bravado. “Which time? There were so many. As you mentioned, I am somewhat stubborn and defiant. I was in there at least once a week. Usually for smarting off; Mom didn’t like that much.”
“How long?”
I shrugged. “An hour or two, most of the time – with the door closed on the front, so it was completely dark. And that, honestly, wasn’t so bad. It was the times when I was in there for days, those were the ones when it was bad—” The times when my stomach screamed at me because it was sick of nothing but the water that was piped in from a reservoir by a small tube. The times when I started to get lightheaded and had to sit down, where I just felt weak and near dead by the time she let me out.
If she let me out.
He grimaced, the first sign of emotion I’d seen from him since the conversation began. “What about the longest time?”
I paused, and an insane sounding laugh bubbled out of my mouth. I felt a stupid, pasted-on grin stretching my face. “A week, I think.”
His voice had grown quiet, but it was undergirded by a curiosity. “When was that?”
Silence owned me, but just for a beat. “Let’s see. After I ate something and showered, I lay down to sleep – you know, horizontally, because trying to sleep curled up in a ball inside it sucks, just FYI – and I woke up and you and Kurt were in my house. So…a few days ago.”
This time the silence was stunned. “She left you…after locking you in?”
I nodded, hoping he wouldn’t ask the dark, piteous question I’d been asking myself lately. “And I haven’t seen her since.”
Fourteen
That ended Zack’s questions, thank God. He said some more things after that, but I missed pretty much all of it. My head was buzzing and I couldn’t focus. I forgot that I was hungry and as soon as I could get away from him I did, leaving him in the cafeteria. He extracted a promise from me that we would talk more soon, and I didn’t argue because I didn’t have the energy.
Ever been in a fight that gets really emotional, and you may have been feeling absolutely wonderful five minutes earlier but suddenly you’re just exhausted? That was me; all my energy was shot and I dragged myself back to my dormitory. I crashed on my bed, but I didn’t fall asleep. Instead I thought about Mom again; of the last time I saw her, when she shut the door on me, even as I was screaming, hammering my palms against the steel and begging her not to – and then she peered at me through the little sliding door, her eyes looking into mine, and she said something different than the hundreds of other times she’d put me in.
“Whatever you may think, I do this all for your own good.” I wasn’t in a position to pay attention at the time (I was as distressed when I went into the box as a cat being dunked in water – I’ve seen it on TV) but her look was different than usual. Less spiteful. Less vengeful. Less pissed. I might have seen a trace of sadness in her eyes, though I didn’t recognize it at the time.
Then she shut the little door and left me in the darkness.
I thought about her again, concentrating hard, trying to focus on her as I drifted off to sleep. I awoke the next morning, an alarm going off beside the bed. I hadn’t set it, but it was blaring. I looked at the clock and realized it was timed so I didn’t miss my appointment with Dr. Sessions. Someone from the Directorate must have done it, fearing (probably rightly) that I didn’t much care if I made them wait. Probably Ariadne. That bitch.
I thought about blowing it off, but the truth is I was curious. After all, they kept telling me I was meta-human, and I believed it, but I wondered what other abilities I might have. I was hoping for flight, because that would be cool.
When I got to Dr. Sessions’s office,