Man Winter left, but only after he gave me another long, hard stare. After they left, Dr. Perugini took a moment to record my vitals, fluffed my pillow with a matronly cluck, and then, with an admonishment to call out if I needed anything, walked to her office and shut the door.
The curtains were up between me and the rest of the patients, and from where I was sitting I could see the backs of agents through the windows, stationed outside the doors of the medical unit, and I heard a healthy cough from behind one of the curtains, telling me there were more behind the partitions. Yet still, I felt alone. Again.
I thought back to what Ariadne had said about expecting a different reaction from me at the thought of being in lockdown. I wondered for just a moment what I must look like to them, how my actions must appear; then I dismissed it and realized I only cared a little. I still didn’t trust them. They would protect me now, but for reasons that were their own; reasons that were still unclear to me, but almost certainly involved using me and my powers, whatever they were, for their own ends.
I looked across the unit and found the wall there to be made of reflective metal that allowed me to see a distorted picture of my face. Bruises dotted my cheeks and wrapped around both eyes. There was crusted blood under my nose, and it looked misshapen. My eyes were haunted, the look of someone who had the spirit battered out of them.
The overhead lights went out, dimming the room, and my reflection was shrouded in shadow. It was nighttime; I knew it even though there were no windows.
I heard a door close heavily at the far end of the ward, and it brought me back again to the sound of the box when Mother would slam it shut. “Keep your fingers out of the way,” she’d snarl just before she closed it. Then the little clicks followed as she worked the pin in place to lock it. She always shut the little viewing slit last, usually after saying something reassuring or taunting through it, and the light would go out from the world and I’d be alone in the dark, all by myself.
Confinement or Wolfe. I knew which I feared more.
Seventeen
I don’t know when I fell asleep but I know that when I did my head was still swirling with thoughts about Wolfe and the fight, if you could call it that. I drifted into a darkness that had little to do with my physical surroundings. I felt myself swallowed in that surreal, faded world that had been present both times I had talked to Reed in my dreams. But this time, somehow, it was different.
The world around me swirled in a sort of rough clarity; as it came into view I recognized the surroundings. Little lights hanging above, soft blue mats on the ground below, and blurred concrete at the edges of my vision gave rise to the realization that I was in my basement. I looked into the corner and sure enough, there it was – the box – peeking out of the darkness, its flat edges visible in the low light of my dream.
“Little doll…” The growling voice sent an involuntary twitch through my body, stiffening my spine and causing me to raise my guard. It did not a whit of good. Wolfe sprung at me from out of the darkness by the box, bounding at me, leaping from all fours. I was paralyzed, unable to move as he crossed the divide between us. I blanched away from the impending hit, throwing all the training Mother had given me right out of the nearest window.
Wolfe sailed toward me, then passed through me as though I were as insubstantial as the air we were breathing. He came to rest without touching the wall, pivoted and came back at me, passing through once more. An angry, perplexed expression darkened his already vicious features, and he bore the look of a man denied his fondest wish. He drew once more to his full height and looked at me with suspicion, keeping his distance and watching me, eyes wary and calculating.
“A dream walker…this is not real…” His voice was low and gravelly, and even though he couldn’t touch or hurt me, his words sent a very real chill of fear through my guts in the same place where