Chapter 33 Use Your Words, Not Your Knives
USE YOUR WORDS, NOT YOUR KNIVES
Mad - Echos
Kookaburra
The knock on my door isn’t really a knock – not one meant to be heard, anyway. It’s the timid, apologetic tap of someone hoping I won’t answer.
Callaway slips inside before I can tell her not to bother, her bun too tight, her smile tighter, the strained professionalism of a woman who’s been up all night trying to pretend she didn’t see something she definitely did.
“Kayla,” she says quietly, “it’s time.”
I don’t move from my place on the bed, cross-legged, staring at the crack in the ceiling shaped like a man mid-scream.
“For what? Another round of ‘use your words, not your knives’?”
She shakes her head. “Medical check.”
My stomach doesn’t drop; it rearranges itself. A small, subtle shift. Not visible – nothing on me is ever visible unless I want it to be – but something curls and unrolls just beneath my ribs.
“I didn’t agree to medical checks,” I say, almost pleasantly.
“You did,” she insists, already lying.
Two orderlies materialise behind her like cowardly shadows, both broad-shouldered and smelling of nerves. One of them is new. I can smell it on him. They’re not here as escorts – they’re here to make sure I comply.
“Unnecessary,” I tell her, flicking my gaze toward the muscle. “I’m pregnant, not rabid.” Ish.
The silence that follows is thick and clumsy. Good. I slide off the bed and let them flank me, the way you walk a dangerous animal through a zoo that pretends it doesn’t euthanise the ones that don’t perform.
The scan room is colder than the hallway, the kind of cold that feels deliberate, calculated, stitched into the walls. Everything is white or pale blue – the tiles, the gel bottles lined up like obedient little soldiers, the monitor already blinking my name as if it’s been waiting for me.
The sonographer looks up when I enter and goes instantly pale. Young, too young, with soft hands and softer eyes – someone who still thinks the world plays fair if you cry nicely enough.
“Up on the table, please,” she says, trying for steady but landing somewhere between a tremor and a prayer.
“Buy me dinner first,” I mutter, but I climb up anyway, the paper beneath me crackling like dry leaves.
I don’t like how exposed the light makes my skin look. Too washed out. Too human.
“Lift your shirt.”
So I do, slowly, enjoying how her throat bobs when I don’t rush.
The gel hits my skin without warning, cold and slick and intimate in a way that makes my breath catch once – once – and only because it reminds me of restraints and antiseptic and the kind of hands that didn’t shake when they hurt me in the best ways possible.
“Try to relax,” the girl whispers. I laugh, and it ricochets off the tile in a way that makes her flinch, a little trill that sounds too close to the laugh I try not to think about.
“You should print that on a t-shirt,” I tell her. “Kayla Kingfisher: Try to Relax.”
The probe touches me and everything inside me goes taut, an invisible wire pulled so tight it could cut. Outside, I’m still – always still – but in the architecture beneath my bones, a door slams shut.
The machine kicks on with a soft crackle, and a heartbeat thumps through the speakers, too fast, too eager, like something knocking from inside a sealed box. The sonographer’s brow pinches. Callaway sucks in a breath.
“What?” I snap.
“Nothing,” they answer in unison. Wrong answer.
The screen fills with static before resolving into a grainy blur, shadows pretending to be a baby. I feel the tension crawl up my spine, feel something ancient shift in my gut.
It’s too still. No twitch, no defiant little kick, just that heartbeat pounding like a mechanical fist.
For the first time, something in my rib cage clenches. Not fear for me. But maybe a tiny stab of fear of losing whatever the hell this thing is. And I don’t know how to feel about that.
The girl presses harder, and the image sharpens, then shifts – barely, a flicker – and for a heartbeat even I can’t tell if it moved or if the machine blinked.
“It looks good,” she lies, without the courtesy of meeting my eyes.
“It looks like a crime scene photo,” I say back.
Callaway tries. “Everything appears normal.”
Normal.
Offensively normal.
Normal pregnancies glow. Normal pregnancies swell and flutter and give women something to look forward to. Mine feels like a quiet parasite curled in the dark, pretending to behave.
A shape rolls across the monitor. The girl inhales sharply, too sharply to be nothing. “There,” she says, forgetting to hide the tremor. “Do you see that?”
Callaway steps in close. “Freeze it.”
The captured frame hangs in the air like a snapped bone. Neither of them speaks. Neither of them breathes. Their silence is too loaded, too precise, and I feel the back of my neck prickle.
“What?” I ask again, and the softness in my voice is the kind you should fear.
Callaway swallows. “We’ll…compare it to the previous images.”
My head snaps toward her. “What previous images?”
She hesitates – a tiny, damning pause. “There were preliminary checks after surgery. Standard.”
Lie.
Lie.
Lie.
I sit up so fast the wand skids across my skin, leaving a smear of gel that looks indecent. “Don’t lie to me.” My feet hit the floor, cold and steady.
Behind Callaway’s elbow, a folder sits half-tucked into a tray, cream-coloured, unlabelled except for a red stamp: SUBJECT VIABILITY – PRIORITY. I reach for it. She’s faster. That tells me more than the file ever could.
“You aren’t monitoring me,” I say. “You’re monitoring it.”
“Kayla,” she tries, too softly. “It seems healthy. But if you destabilise again—”
“Again?”
Her voice thins. “The Director may request intervention. For the child’s safety.”
For a split second – just one – the world narrows to black around the edges.
Intervention. Containment. Extraction.
They can rename it however they want. They want what’s inside me. Not me. And that means the only person allowed to decide if this thing lives or dies is me. They’re not having it.
For the first time since leaving the island, something cold and electric knives up under my ribs – not fear for myself. Something uglier. Something I refuse to name.
I let the moment harden into something useful. My breathing evens. My expression resets into that pleasant little smile that makes professionals reconsider their career paths.
“Relax, Doctor,” I murmur. “If I wanted to end this little science project, I wouldn’t need your help.”
She blanches.
I take a towel, wipe the gel from my stomach like I’m erasing a mistake, and tug my shirt down. I don’t wait for permission to leave. The sonographer steps back instinctively as I pass, like she’s realised the thing on her table wasn’t prey.
Halfway down the corridor, something shifts deep inside me – a flutter, or a muscle twitch, or something worse.
Enough to stop me for a heartbeat I pretend I didn’t lose.
Enough to make my hand close into a fist until half-moons bloom in my palm.
It’s growing, I think. Or pretending to.
Hard to tell what parts of me are real these days.
Callaway says my name behind me, quiet and pleading.
I don’t answer.
If they want to study me like a specimen, they should remember the first rule of cutting things open: sometimes the subject learns how the tools work. And sometimes, it sharpens itself while you’re not looking.