Soulless The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,7
tennis shoes, my socks were long. They were all soaked, some from sweat but most from wading into the creek to recover Eve. Every single article of my clothing was starting to stick to me, even as the water that had taken up residence within had matched my body temperature; only a little dash of coolness was running down and surprising me every once in a while. The rest just felt like sweat.
The first days of brutal summer had started only a couple weeks ago; before that it had been a beautiful, sunny-skied and cool-aired spring, all the way to the last of June. Since then, it was as though the weather had decided to get hostile. I had to say I preferred winter as a season to summer; it was colder, but even factoring in the number of times I’d landed in the snow while fighting, I didn’t get as wet as I did sweating during these training exercises, which were an everyday thing, in one form or another.
“Hey.” I had missed the footfalls behind me, caught up in my own thoughts. I turned without drying my eyes, hoping that the sweat would mask the other, marginally less stinging liquid. I doubted it would. Scott was there, along with Kat, who was leaning on him. They walked like I envisioned a couple would, her arm around his waist, her face looking more drawn than it had a few minutes ago. She rested against him, leaning her weight against his muscular chest. If we had been in a different place, and different people, she could have been a drunken sorority girl, leaning on her boyfriend for support.
And I could have been a...I dunno. Something else.
“You took down Eve pretty hard.” Scott stopped, repositioning himself as Kat pushed off him to stand on her own two wobbly feet.
My hands came up to cover my mouth as I wiped the sweat that was beading on my upper lip. “Yep.” I let them rest there, as though I could cover the lies that were bound to drip out when he asked the inevitable question.
“Why?” It was Kat who asked it, her hair looking stringy because of the humidity, but without a hint of the frizz that was afflicting mine. Thanks, humidity. It’d take a miracle and an hour with the flat iron later to get the kinks out.
I didn’t move my hands away from my mouth. “Why what?”
“Why’d you take her down so hard that I had to fix a skull fracture, a broken sternum and three ribs?” Kat let go of Scott and dropped to her rump, sitting with her legs in front of her. “I know we don’t do these kind exercises where we beat the hell out of each other for real very often, but we’ve done it enough to know you don’t lose control like that.” She laughed and tossed a blond lock over her shoulder. “I mean, when it comes to the training, you’re like the queen of control; it’s why you’re Parks’ favorite—”
“I just didn’t think.” I was sweating even harder now, my lip pressed up against my hand, more perspiration trailing down my forehead from my hairline. I felt my shirt sticking to me and all I wanted was a shower. “It got away from me, the rock. The adrenaline was pumping after we took down Parks—”
“After you took down Parks, you mean? When you left us behind?” The accusation came out of Scott, his arms folded but his manner cool.
“I drew her away from you,” I said. “I don’t know what else I could have done to help you. I wanted to win, and it was just...” I pulled my hands away from my mouth and licked my lip, tasted the salty residue of sweat.
“It’s not Wolfe, is it?” Scott stared me down. His T-shirt had been white when we started, but now it was gray in the places where he had sweated through, and bore the stains of dirt and grime from where he’d been pinned to the ground. “He’s not breaking out or whatever—”
“He’s not,” I said. “I haven’t heard from the rogues’ gallery in my head in months. I think Zollers and I have that under control.” That was mostly true. The medication Zollers had given me was working, but I had other help as well.
“I guess it was hard for us to tell by the way you acted back there,” Kat said, sarcasm oozing through her words, which were laced with