Chapter 14 Sirena
I was ankle-deep in effluvia, and the box I was trapped in kept shifting.
There was no point in screaming for help—I knew the rest of the MSA was there, especially after someone hit the wall.
Goddammit, it was my own fucking fault I was in here.
I pulled my phone out of my workbag, but there was no signal—of course the fuck not—but at least its flashlight would give me eyes.
I turned it on and swept it around the box, while the sounds of combat continued outside, dulled through the cargo box’s metal.
I was disgusting, and so were the people on the ground.
“Hello?” I asked, kneeling beside the nearest one.
This time it was a man. I peeled up one of his eyelids and skated the light across his eyeline.
His pupil constricted, but only barely, and I couldn’t get a hold of his mind inside mine.
Reaching for his thoughts, or any of the others, felt like putting an unwilling hand into cold Jell-O.
There wasn’t much there, and whatever there was, you couldn’t grasp for long.
“Come on,” I said, tapping his cheek, then pinching his trapezius, trying to do anything I could to bring his mind back into his body.
Because I didn’t want to accept that he didn’t have a mind anymore.
But it was the obvious answer for why he—why all of them—were here.
And all of us were being slowly dragged onto Voss’s boat.
I went from being concerned about them to being concerned about us.
“Guys?” I squeaked as the sounds outside stilled—then the cargo box was hit by rhythmic waves on the roof. Gusts of air.
Someone had to be driving this thing—and flying what sounded like a helicopter.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
I pushed at both minds—driver’s and the gunner’s—but my thoughts went right through them.
They, whoever they were, were as empty as the bodies with me on the ground.
They were doing things, but they weren’t listening—it was like they’d been set on courses prior, following programming I couldn’t overwrite.
The sound of gunshots rang out, along with the sharp slap of bullets hitting the ground.
Someone hit the back of the cargo box at full speed, and I squealed. I fell on my ass as the fluids we were in sloshed.
But in the silence after that, I realized I wasn’t going to be saved.
And the sound of the dolly pulling the box I was on over a slight ridge onto the boat was damning.
I’d managed not to drop my phone. I turned it off and hid it in my bra. Then I felt more empty people surrounding the box as they cracked the seal.
Nex’s name for them—Hollows—had been right.
An even fouler stench flowed in, and I backed away from it until I was pressed against the metal wall behind me. I held my breath until I couldn’t anymore, then breathed it in and coughed it out again, thrashing, as a man—a thinking man—wearing a rubber suit and a gas mask loomed.
Too bad my own mind was fuzzy. I tried to hold onto consciousness—I wanted to push him back, not just with my thoughts, but with my entire being, especially as he clamped my jaw and made me look up at the light shining out from a lantern mounted just above his eyes.
“You’re special, Sirena.” His voice was soporific. The kind of calm that was melting—which explained why my knees were giving out. “So we’re going to do very special things to you.”