Rosabelle 5
Rosabelle
“I thought you might not come to me, Rosa,” he says softly. “I was beginning to get upset.”
I experience a spike of revulsion at these words, though I don’t outwardly animate as I enter the room. I briefly lock eyes with the soldiers standing guard just outside the door before it snicks shut, then take my seat at the chair I’d requested be placed against the far wall.
My face is carefully devoid of expression.
This is an old mask, one I’ve worn most of my life, and I’d almost forgotten what it was like to wear it.
Not a good sign.
Still, my movements are fluid and calm. My right arm doesn’t tremble at all as I clasp my hands in my lap, sitting back gently in my seat.
I’ve pushed so far into myself that I can hardly feel the chair beneath me.
I’m so dead inside that looking at Sebastian is a little like looking at a painting. The brushstrokes of time.
He’s always been classically handsome.
His dark hair, his darker eyes. His fair skin is rosy, almost boyish. It was the same when we were kids. He was always blushing too much, his hands doughy and clammy. I’d forgotten how much space he took up in a room, what he looked like standing, sitting.
I’d forgotten a great deal.
I’d gone soft over the past month.
How’s Clara?
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly, and my voice feels separate from my body. “I was in the hospital for a few days. This was the soonest I could make arrangements to see you.”
He cants his head at me.
There’s a flash of something like feeling in his eyes, then the faint glare of a blue glow. My response has sparked interest back on the Ark. I have no idea how many officials are watching now. Sebastian’s father is almost certainly watching.
“I had no choice, Rosa,” he says to me, leaning forward. “You weren’t listening.”
Four gunshot wounds. One blew clean through my thigh; another caused severe bone fractures in my left arm. One nearly took out my spine.
Two knife wounds. Both lacerations near my lower back. One nicked my kidney.
Bruised ribs; contusions all over my body; internal bleeding—
I don’t really remember the rest of it.
Sebastian has always been an excellent soldier and a ruthless opponent. He was never taught mercy. Upon assessing my injuries, the healers were surprised I was still alive.
The problem, of course, was that I was alive at all.
Vital. Vulnerable.
Weak.
How’s Clara?
“I know,” I say to him. “I understand.”
“You were fighting alongside the enemy,” he says darkly. “You kept screaming his name.”
I take an almost perceptible breath.
This, the mere reminder of James, is all it takes to reach me where I really am. This is the danger he’s delivered me. Even now, dead and buried, I can almost feel my heart beating.
“Why were you screaming his name, Rosa?”
The violence in Sebastian’s voice nearly makes me flinch. Panic rises inside me like a storm, though the tempest is dull, the roar a whisper.
James has been the greatest miscalculation of my life.
For six weeks I’d felt myself dangerously release into his warmth, unfurling every day an inch more into heat and sensation. I allowed myself to want. I allowed myself to breathe. To be.
Die, I tell myself.
Die.
I push into the abyss so hard I nearly lose consciousness. My eyelids flutter. I close my hands into fists.
Sebastian is watching. Klaus is watching.
I relax my hands.
“I wanted him to believe I was scared,” I answer softly. My voice is so calm I sound indifferent. “It’s a simple, effective technique.”
A flicker of uncertainty passes over Sebastian’s face. The tension in his body unclenches a degree but not nearly enough.
This is a dangerous game.
There was a time, long ago, when I’d believed Sebastian was gentle. As a child he was bashful and reserved; he always spoke to me so quietly. He’d follow me around and agree with everything I said and he’d blush beyond his hairline if I so much as looked in his direction.
I’d thought we were friends. Best friends.
He’d seemed so safe.
“I didn’t know it was you in the warehouse,” I tell him now, choosing simple, honest statements. “I was being chased and I acted on instinct. I couldn’t believe it when I saw your face. I never would’ve thought you’d set foot on the mainland.”
Sebastian considers my admissions in silence.
He’s nearly as tall as James, and he looks a little ridiculous sitting on the small bed, his hands tensing against the mattress.
Unfortunately, Sebastian isn’t stupid.
Neither is he gentle.
He sits forward on a minor exhale, elbows on his knees, eyeing me warily as a lock of dark hair cuts across his forehead. I can almost see the questions forming in his mind; his mistrust of me warring with intrusions of doubt.
I learned the truth about Sebastian when I was seven years old. It was the day I found the mutilated remains of a stray cat waiting for me in a familiar alley, blood pooling slowly beneath its dead eyes.
Its tail had been cut off.
I’d been the one to tell Sebastian about the stray cat.
My stray cat. It had been a secret from my parents; a story shared between friends.
The cat would meet me behind the same building for scraps of food, and every day I grew lighter and giddier at the thought of placing my small hand on its little head.
I hadn’t yet taken a life.
I hadn’t yet learned how to bury myself beneath this armored skin.
Sebastian had appeared like a wraith in the alley as I stood there, trembling with shock, fading in and out of my own body.
I’d known he was coming that day; in fact, I’d told him where to meet me.
Our mothers were best friends and regularly crossed sector borders for visits.
Sebastian had stepped out of the shadows in perfect silence and offered me the cat’s severed tail.
Even then, I’d known not to scream.
Blood was caked under his fingernails, drying on his hands.
There were specks on his face. He was blushing as I accepted the tail from him in mute terror, my mind defective.
I can still remember the horrible feel of it in my closed hand, the fur matted and wet.
Sebastian looked almost shy when he said quietly—
“I didn’t like it, Rosa.”
I’d held perfectly still. My heart was hammering. Heat was pressing against my eyes, bile rising in my throat. I’d wanted to drop the tail and run, but my body was trying to teach me self-preservation. I was only just beginning to understand the danger I was in.
“You didn’t like the cat?” I’d whispered.
He’d blushed harder. “No,” he said. “I didn’t like how much you liked that cat.”
I hear a rustle of sound and look up to find Sebastian shifting his weight, the subtle motion reeling me back into the room.
I blink, disoriented.
“I didn’t like it, Rosa,” Sebastian says to me now. He rises to his feet, towering over me. His voice is soft, his eyes flinty. “I didn’t like the way you screamed his name.”
I kill the fear escalating inside of me.
Die, I tell myself.
Die.
This next part is essential.
This next part has been rehearsed. Discussed. This next part needs to be executed without error.
“Sebastian,” I say, steadily meeting his gaze. “There are no cameras in this room. The rebels can’t see us right now. They can’t hear anything we’re saying.”
This is, in fact, true.
Sebastian stiffens at once, his dark eyes gleaming a brighter blue. Our observers are paying close attention.
Admitting this fact out loud is to put myself in danger; but admitting this is essential to building the narrative I need to establish.
I cautioned Warner not to put Sebastian in prison. I told him not to make the same mistake they made with me. I was nearly incoherent in recovery, desperate and half out of my mind with panic.
“Don’t let him look at you,” I remember screaming.
Sebastian was here.
Sebastian was here.
The Ark had never sent anyone like Sebastian—of his rank and caliber—into hostile territory.
They’d never once, in ten years, deployed a battalion of soldiers.
The Ark uses mercenaries for tactical missions; but covert agents on the mainland have been embedded since long before the fall of The Reestablishment; they are possessed, as a result, of an older generation of tech and weaponry.
This was a historic escalation.
Not only for the precedent now established but because Sebastian holds a unique power among his peers.
He’s one of the rarefied elite allowed access to Klaus’s intelligence.
All Ark residents are connected to the Nexus, but not everyone is given permission to utilize the synthetic omnipotent brain as a tool.
Some still don’t even know that Klaus is real.
The moment Sebastian recognized James in the warehouse was no doubt witnessed by dozens of Ark officials. Dissected by Klaus. Mined for weakness and leveraged into a plan of action.
I could not sufficiently explain my fear to these people.
Warner had placed a hand on my arm in the hospital, which I hadn’t realized was shuddering violently, knocking against a heart monitor. I was half-covered in blood; I remember tasting it along my teeth, feeling it drain down the back of my throat.
“Don’t let him look at you,” I kept screaming. “You can’t let him look at you—”
“What do you mean?” Warner had asked calmly. “What happens if he looks at me?”
“They’ll all see you,” I gasped, struggling. “When he sees you, they all see you—”
“Who?” Warner demanded. “Who sees us?”
“Cover his eyes,” I’d cried out, coughing up blood. Choking it down. “COVER HIS EYES—”
Sebastian suddenly takes a step toward me, and I’m jolted back to the present.
“Where are we right now, Rosa?”
His probing tone drives under my skin, inspiring in me a faint nausea. Sick sense memory.
Sebastian used to conduct my monthly interrogations. He was assigned to me precisely because of our history; because Klaus couldn’t see directly into my head. We’re already falling into an old pattern: Sebastian asking me questions, searching my eyes for truth. He’s been trained to interrogate me.
I’ve been trained to bleed for him.