Chapter 14 RealMake Believe
REAL OR MAKE BELIEVE
Control - Halsey
Honey
Warmth is the first lie.
It wraps around me the moment I wake. Blanket-soft, skin-deep, the kind of heat that makes you think of safe rooms and clean beds and hands that don’t hurt. For a second my body believes it, because bodies are stupid like that. They remember comfort and reach for it before the mind has caught up.
Then I open my eyes and see the ceiling.
Not white. Not surgical. This one is a gentle cream with a faint pattern. Flowers, maybe, or something meant to pass as flowers without ever being quite real. The light is golden, like afternoon through curtains. There’s even a soft hum in the air, like a radiator doing its job.
I don’t move.
Relief rises on instinct, a bright little flare in my chest.
I smother it.
Relief is how you bargain. Relief is how you agree to things you shouldn’t.
My head turns slowly, scanning.
A bed. A real bed. Mattress with gentle softness, sheets that smell faintly of laundry soap.
A chair in the corner, upholstered, the kind you could sink into and forget your spine exists.
A small table beside the bed with a glass of water and a plate of biscuits arranged as if somebody has rehearsed hospitality.
The walls are painted. There’s a framed landscape of soft hills, a stream, the kind of picture you’d see in a waiting room because it offends no one. There’s a door.
A door.
I swing my legs off the bed and stand. My feet sink into carpet. Carpet.
It should not be possible for carpet to make me suspicious, but my suspicion latches onto it like a burr.
I take two steps, testing the room’s willingness to let me exist in it. No alarms. No voices. No temperature shift meant to punish curiosity. If there are cameras, they’re hidden. If there are microphones, they’re everywhere.
I approach the door.
The handle is metal, cool against my palm. It turns without resistance.
The door opens.
Not into a corridor. Not into a guard post. It opens into a small bathroom: sink, mirror, folded towels, shower with a curtain. A bar of soap in a dish. Toothbrush. Toothpaste. Someone has stocked this room like I’m meant to stay.
But it is not my room.
I stare at my reflection. No signs at all remain of our final battle on the roof.
How much time has passed?
I look…fine. Too fine. Clean. No bruises. No blood under my nails. My hair is brushed back from my face as if someone cared enough to make me presentable. Or wanted me to feel cared for.
All evidence from our fight on the roof is gone. But…why were we fighting? Who were we fighting? And why were we on the roof?
Something niggles at the back of my mind, urging me to think, to remember, but when I try to focus on it, memory slips through my fingers like sand.
Instead, I lean closer, searching for tells – pupil dilation, tiny injection marks, the faint sheen of something chemical. I don’t see anything. Which means either I’m wrong, or they’ve become so practised they’ve stopped leaving evidence.
I turn away from myself and return to the bedroom.
The biscuits sit waiting. The water beads cold on the outside of the glass as if it’s been set down recently.
A thought comes uninvited, soft as the carpet: maybe this time is different.
I swallow it whole and let it sit like a stone in my gut.
Because here’s what I know: cruelty doesn’t always look like pain. Sometimes it looks like a kindness you didn’t ask for.
I don’t touch anything for a long minute. I circle the room instead, slow and deliberate, letting my fingertips skim the wall, the frame of the picture, the edge of the chair. Everything has weight. Everything feels real. That, too, is a lie. Realness as camouflage.
When I finally sit, I choose the chair, not the bed. The chair places my back against an angle that keeps me awake. The bed invites surrender.
I pick up the water and sniff it. Just water. I take a small sip, hold it in my mouth, taste for bitterness, metallic tang, anything out of place. It tastes like water.
I swallow anyway. Thirst wins.
A voice speaks, and it comes from nowhere and everywhere at once.
“Honey.”
My name in a tone that sounds like a nurse, a teacher, someone whose job is to reassure.
I freeze.
“Good afternoon,” the voice says. “How are you feeling?”
It is such a normal question that for a moment my throat tightens.
They are not supposed to ask you how you’re feeling. They are supposed to tell you what they’re doing. They are supposed to strip you down to a subject, a variable, a thing.
This voice offers me a person’s question.
I hate it for that. I hate myself for the little spark of wanting to answer.
“I feel like you’ve redecorated,” I say, forcing lightness into my voice the way I’ve forced it in front of terrified people, in front of children, in front of anyone who needed a calm face. “It’s charming.”
“Your humour is noted,” the voice replies, as if it’s taking minutes. “You are safe here.”
I laugh once, sharp. “That’s not a thing safe places say.”
There is a pause, not long enough to be human, too long to be a machine thinking.
“We have designed this environment to reduce distress,” the voice says. “Distress interferes with accurate measurement.”
There it is. The seam in the wallpaper. The truth behind the soft lighting.
“So I’m being measured,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Measured for what?”
“Attachment response. Prosocial behaviour. Empathic output.”
My fingers tighten around the glass. “You can’t measure empathy.”
Another pause. “We can measure your body’s responses. We can measure your choices.”
The room’s warmth feels suddenly too thick, like syrup. Like I’m being held in it.
“What do you want?” I ask, and my voice comes out quieter than I intend.
“To understand you,” the voice says.
That’s the second lie.
Understanding is what you offer someone you care about. Understanding is not what you do to a subject strapped to a table, even if the table is disguised as a bed with clean sheets.
The voice continues, smooth and calm. “A facilitator will join you shortly. Please remain in the room.”
The door clicks softly. Not locking, not unlocking, just acknowledging itself.
I set the water down. I don’t touch the biscuits. I don’t touch anything else.
I wait.
Time stretches. Or maybe it doesn’t and my mind is just desperate to fill the gaps. I take slow breaths. I listen for footsteps. I listen for the hum of hidden ventilation. I listen for anything that suggests a person exists outside this manufactured comfort.
Then there is a knock and my stomach drops.
I stand before I can stop myself, body moving to meet it because the sound of human presence pulls at something in me that is older than caution.
“Come in,” I hear myself say, and I hate that it comes out like an invitation.
The door opens.
A woman steps in.
For one impossible heartbeat, I think I know her. Not her exactly, but the shape of her – dark hair pulled back, face that looks tired in the way real faces look tired, not styled tiredness. A plain grey jumper. Dark trousers. No visible weapon. No guard behind her.
She holds her hands where I can see them.
“Hi,” she says, and the way her voice catches on the word makes my chest ache. “I’m Lena.”
I stare at her. “Lena,” I repeat, tasting it.
Her eyes flick to the biscuits, to the water, to the chair. She gives a small, uncertain smile. “They told me you…you like to joke.”
My skin prickles. “They told you that, did they?”
She swallows. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
That sentence, from a stranger in a controlled room, is a hook. It catches behind my ribs.
I force myself to breathe. “Who are you?”
She hesitates. Looks at the ceiling as if expecting it to answer for her. “They said…I’m a facilitator. I’m supposed to help you adjust.”
“And you decided to introduce yourself like we’re at a coffee morning?” I say.
Her shoulders lift and fall, a small, helpless shrug. “It’s…less frightening if you talk to someone.”
“Is it?”
She looks at me properly then, and there is something in her expression that makes my throat tighten again. Not pity. Not clinical curiosity. Something like recognition.
Like she’s been frightened too.
My brain supplies a dozen possibilities, all bad. She’s an actor. A projection. A person with a script and a syringe hidden in her sleeve. Or she’s real and coerced and if I say the wrong thing, she will pay for it.
“Sit,” she says softly, then flushes as if she’s realised it sounds like a command. “If you want. I mean. You don’t have to.”
I remain standing.
“I can’t help you if you don’t talk,” she adds, too quickly, and then winces. “Sorry. That sounded…like them.”
That, oddly, makes her feel more real than anything else.
I swallow. “Fine. Talk.”
She sits in the chair. I remain standing near the door, because my body refuses to be cornered by furniture and warmth. She looks up at me, hands folded together so tightly her knuckles whiten.
“I’m not one of them,” she says. “I don’t work for – for whatever this is.”
“And yet you’re here.”
She nods. “They brought me in. They said if I cooperated, they’d—” Her voice breaks. She bites it off hard and looks down.
The room shifts around me. Not physically. Emotionally. The soft light suddenly feels like theatre lighting, designed to make her face look more vulnerable. Designed to make me step closer.
I do not move.
“They threatened you,” I say, and it comes out flat.
She nods again, tears brightening her eyes. She blinks them back hard. “They threatened my brother.”
There it is. The lever.
My chest aches. It’s an instinctive response, immediate, like my body has been trained to respond to distress with action. It’s the part of me that steps between. That smooths. That offers.
The part of me that believes if you are gentle enough, you can buy people out of pain.
I hate that part of me and I love it and I can’t cut it out.
“What do they want you to do?” I ask.