Wilder Girls - Rory Power Page 0,39
the Tox gave me. One of the restraints rips free.
I scrabble at the other buckle and leap from the table, but the other doctors are there. They grab hold of my arms. Drag me back, and I kick, scratch tears down the front of their hazmat suits.
“Byatt!” Paretta yells. “Byatt, you need to calm down.”
And I want, suddenly, not to escape, not to be free. I want to hurt her.
I only make it a step before they stick the syringe into my neck and the world goes dark.
HETTY
CHAPTER 9
I wake up with a headache. Throbbing at my temples, sharp behind my blind eye. It leaves me clutching at the edge of my bunk, body braced for a flare-up. Since my first, they’ve all led with a pain like this, and followed with something worse. Last time it was wet webs of tissue, so thick in my throat I couldn’t breathe, each fresh with blood, like they’d been ripped from the inside of my stomach.
A headache like this could mean my next flare-up is coming. Or, I know Byatt would say, I could just have a headache.
Above me Reese’s bunk creaks, and I remember everything from last night, all at once. Welch’s voice, and the plans she made with the man on the walkie. The needle and thread, now tucked safely into my pocket. Byatt is somewhere in this house. And if I can’t find her today, I’ll find her tonight. Past the fence, after midnight in the last of the dark. Reese and I will follow Welch to Reese’s house, and Byatt will be there. And she’ll be alive.
“This lying in silence thing is fun,” Reese says suddenly from above me, “but can we go eat?”
* * *
—
On the days without a supply delivery, meals are quiet, almost orderly. Anything good goes fast in that first rush after Boat Shift. All that’s left is what nobody really wanted. Most of the girls wait in the main hall, but there’s one from every small constellation of us that heads down the southern corridor to the kitchen where Welch doles out the food and bottled water, ready to carry something back to her friends.
This has been my job since the start. Byatt said people would feel the worst for me and let me have the best of what was there. They’re scared of Reese, and that works for Boat Shift day, but the name of this game is pity, and I’m how we win.
I leave Reese in the main hall and follow Cat down the south wing corridor. At the corner where the hallway hooks to the left, there’s Headmistress’s office, one of the last places left we’re still not supposed to go. I’ve only been there twice before: once on my first day at Raxter and then again a semester later, when I got reprimanded for talking during assembly.
Maybe that’s where they’re keeping Byatt, I think. I have my hand on the latch before I realize I’m doing this in plain daylight, and Cat is waiting for me.
I hurry to catch up with her. She gives me a smile, doesn’t ask how I am or what the hell I was doing, and I’m grateful for that. After we put in an appearance at breakfast I’ll circle out around the house, peer through the windows of Headmistress’s office. And then keep searching if I don’t find what I’m looking for.
Together Cat and I turn the corner and continue on to where the kitchen opens, with its skylights and checkerboard tile. The last time I was here, Byatt was on the floor, coming apart. The last time I was here, the whole world ended.
Enough, I think. I’m doing what I can. Soon I’ll have her back.
A handful of other girls are already there, waiting for Welch to come in and unlock the pantry, where we keep the food. I’m dreading having to look her in the eye, but there’s no way she knows what I overheard last night.
“Hey,” says Emmy, barely up to my shoulder, her sleek hair still baby-fine. After her first flare-up the other day, she was bouncing off the walls, excited to be like the rest of us even if her flare-up left her coughing up teeth from somewhere deep inside, but today she’s got on an affected solemnity. Of course she does—she’s here for Landry, probably bursting with pride at representing the girl at the top of what’s left of Raxter’s social ladder.
“I just wanted