Untouched The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,4

and putting a hand over my throbbing head. “You’re such a bastard,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me what you know about my mother?”

I stared at the ceiling, waiting to see if Wolfe would reply. He didn’t.

Mom had gone missing about a week before the Directorate had ousted me from my house. Everyone here denied knowing anything about her disappearance. Wolfe knew something, I suspected, but in the last day or so of sharing skull space with me, he’d been cagey.

He was there, I could feel him, skulking in my brain. The headache was his doing. Whenever he had a burst of strong emotion, I felt its effects. Yesterday, when I was leaving the medical unit, a stay caused by my last fight with Wolfe, Ariadne had offered me different options of where I could stay on the Directorate campus.

“We have a variety of dorm rooms,” she said, talking in a quiet voice, as though I were too brittle to be exposed to words spoken at normal volume. “Or, if you would feel safer, you could stay in the secure room in the Headquarters basement—”

“How about the dorm room I stayed in before?” I asked her, not sure where the question came from.

“The one where Wolfe...attacked you?” She took a step back, her eyes wide. “I assumed that there would be bad memories associated with...that place.”

I had felt a little thrill run through me, a surge of pleasure at the memory of what he’d done to me there. It wasn’t my feeling, which would have been closer to nausea, but it was strong enough to overwhelm my own emotions. “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll stay there.”

Ariadne didn’t have the most expressive face; it was reserved most of the time, and her red hair was always the only splash of color in her drab attire. Still, on this occasion, she had emotion—concern. For me.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “He’s dead. Nothing to fear from him now.”

Oh, but there is. I ignored him.

Ariadne’s fashion sense was prosaic; it was as if the dull and dreary winter weather was her inspiration. Wolfe threw out an uncharitable and crass thought about what he’d do to liven up her look and I ignored it even though it caused a vein in my eye to pulse. She didn’t argue with me anymore after that, just let me go to my room—to rest, I told her. I didn’t, though, not the rest of that day. Not until well after nightfall, and then I was plagued by the nightmares that had caused me to wake in a sweat.

The linoleum on the floor was causing my body to ache, and I felt a throbbing in my head. I sat up, felt the pain Wolfe had inflicted fade, and grabbed hold of the counter, pulling up to my feet. I stared once more into the mirror, looking at myself, my face, my eyes. There were bags underneath them; I looked tired.

I turned out the bathroom light and walked back out into the room, heading to the closet. The feeling that Wolfe had been watching me while I was nude left me unsettled; I dressed in silence, slipping on a long-sleeved sweatshirt and jeans.

The air was warm enough; I could feel an unseen heater fighting against the chill of the winter outside. The window was one-way, Ariadne had told me, a type of special glass that was tinted so that whatever happened inside could not be seen from outside, even if the lights were on. I had walked around the dormitory building and couldn’t see anything but my own reflection, even at night, when I knew there were lights on inside.

I walked to the window with confidence that I was unseen. The ground was covered in snow, at least a foot deep if not more; the only disruption to its smooth, unblemished surface was the place a few hundred feet away where a path had been cut with a snow blower so people could walk and some footprints that were not fresh—mine. Far in the distance lurked a pine forest, the green needles blending with the black of night.

The sky seemed lighter than I remembered it being a few minutes ago. I stared out and saw a flat spot next to the headquarters building with heavy lights sticking up out of the snow around it, reminding me of a baseball game I’d seen on TV that was played at night.

I watched, looking through the dark, and saw figures standing on the