the wheels will kick up. I will outrun this place and protect them both from ever feeling the pain of loss again.
I shift onto my knees, mind and leg throbbing with my pulse. I need to get someone’s attention—in our cabins, if anything were to happen, we had an emergency button to push. That’s how they knew to come and get Ruby. I don’t have that luxury, and I haven’t understood that it is a luxury until this moment when every single part of me is shaking and panic is making it hard to focus on anything. I gasp in a deep breath, feeling my leg again. My fingers don’t even brush the bite, but my leg feels waxy to me, and aside from the shooting pain, there’s barely any sensation outside of the feeling of sand pouring into my bones.
What I have is a dark room, and one lone camera somewhere on the wall behind me.
I stick my hand through the opening that Tildon created in the metal bars. Each time my mind brings up the image of a snake, I stubbornly turn it back to Lucas’s face. No one is coming becomes He’ll come, he’ll come, he’ll come to get me. I don’t want to be a realist. I don’t want to pretend like I’m okay living in this gray numbness anymore. I want to get out of here. I want to live. I want to feel every ounce of pain and happiness life can serve up, because it’ll mean I’ve survived. It’ll mean I’m alive.
I fit my arm as far through as it’ll go and wave it up and down. Minutes tick down, second by second, until I can’t ignore the way the metal is cutting into my arm and that nothing has happened. I tug on the lock but my hands are shaking too hard to keep my grip. Shuffling back along the metal bottom of the kennel, I pull off my shirt and expose my skin to the cold. It feels good, actually. There’s something boiling just under my skin; I feel it bubbling in my stomach, too, until it starts to cramp. The shirt is pushed out the hole first, and I reach down to grip it, hoping beyond hope that they’ll be able to see the color moving in the dark better than my arm. I wave it frantically up and down.
Nothing happens, and no one comes, and the longer it takes for me to realize it, the worse I feel. It’s too dark here. Unless the cameras can see in the dark, they have no idea anything is wrong. I could try to scoot the crate back, get close enough to the stacked crates to try to send them crashing to the ground, but it wouldn’t matter. They wouldn’t see it.
I have to get to the lights.
At this point, the punishment I know will come stops mattering and I flip myself around again, scraping my back against the top of the kennel. I can’t make out anything in front of my face, it’s all feeling fingers and desperate hands. Still, I lay on my back and I kick. One leg, the one that feels like it’s actually on fire, I can’t so much as move. I grit my teeth and use my other to kick against what I think are the crate’s hinges—they can break, can’t they? Anything can break if you hit it hard enough. Aren’t we all proof of that?
I hear a snap; the reverberation of the hit races up my leg. One more. Please, just one more—
The door flies off and clatters against the cement. I don’t waste a second in twisting myself around so I can use my arms to drag myself out. The contents of my head are swinging around. I can’t get a bearing on the ground with my feet under me. It’s farther to fall, anyway, than if I go on hands and knees.
I move through the dark, scraping my skin, feeling the loose pieces of concrete dig into my skin. The hand out in front of me bumps the wall and I reach up, feeling along the wall for the switch. My fingers fumble, slick and clumsy. I force myself farther up until I hear a click, and the light that floods the room burns tears into my eyes. I shield my face and look to the door. It would lock from the outside, wouldn’t it? I could try. I need to try.