Omega The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,41

even though it was my teammates and my brother under her care. It’s not like I could do anything for them, and I was tired anyway, so I went back to my room.

I lay down on my bed after taking my injection of chloridamide. I felt the pinch of the needle as it left my arm, and I put a little piece of cotton over the hole, letting it rest for the minute or so it would take to stop the bleeding. I looked around my room: bare walls, plain carpet. I’d been in Kat’s suite before—the one she barely used because she was so busy sleeping with Scott most nights—and it was totally different. I lay back on the bed and pictured it from the time I’d been in there with her while I waited for her to change.

There were posters on her walls. Justin Bieber. One Direction. I snorted at the memory, and hadn’t bothered to avoid laughing at the time. She just smiled in that infuriating, uber-confident way she had—not really like a cheerleader at all, just more comfortable in her own skin. She said she liked them. Her decor was like something out of bad set design for a fourteen-year old’s room. She didn’t even have a TV. Her wardrobe was super cute, at least everything she wasn’t wearing when she was working. Great taste in fashion. Mine was abysmal compared to hers. She had like...a thousand pairs of shoes. I had ten. I’m still a girl, after all.

I thought about her room, and how empty mine had felt compared to hers, and I wondered if she’d be staying in there for the foreseeable future.

I lay my head on the pillow and stared at the whirls of texture on the knockdown ceilings in the sparse light of the single bulb of my nightlight. I thought about Kat, about what she remembered of her life before the Directorate, and I realized that I hadn’t really asked her about it. All she had told me was that she couldn’t remember anything before the scientists at the facility in the Andes. I wondered how she’d gotten there, if she’d loved someone like Scott before in her century-plus of life, and if she’d love someone like that again and end up forgetting it.

I thought about Zack for a few minutes, then consciously made the effort to put him out of my mind before I fell asleep. Nothing could be worse for him right now than me coming to him in his dreams, and I needed that worry like I needed another mission with Clary at my side.

I woke to the screeching of my alarm, fading into consciousness with sunrise still somewhere over the horizon. I yawned and wondered why I had bothered awakening before seven. Then I remembered—food, get dressed, interrogation—all of which were important things.

My morning routine was half-speed, for some reason. I didn’t ache as if I had been in a fight, but I definitely knew I’d been in one, because a few little pains remained. I remembered the times before my powers manifested, when my mother and I would spar in the basement. I was left with bruises that took a week to heal, with pains that stayed with me for days. Yesterday I’d been thrown into a concrete retaining wall and had a house dropped on me. My back hurt a little, like I’d slept on it at the wrong angle. I kneaded at the knots in my shoulders with my hands; even with the weak muscle control I sometimes felt in the mornings it was more than enough to cause me pain. If I squeezed full strength, I had the ability to break the skin and draw blood. Well, that was as hard as I had ever squeezed myself, at any rate.

The cafeteria was already filled with activity when I got there, from the crowds of people going about the start of their daily routine. I thought about texting Zack to see if he would be in for breakfast, but I didn’t want to be a clingy girlfriend, especially after last night. I suppose it was a compliment that he enjoyed our nighttime activities so much, but it worried me, and the pleasure was all his. To me it still felt fake, like trying to touch a shadow. I wanted to feel the real thing.

I waited in line, lost in thought. The crowd and conversation went on around me, hundreds of voices rising and falling