6. Jasmine
six
Jasmine
Iwoke up in a cold sweat, not from fear or a nightmare, but from pure vigilance.
In a concrete box with seven other women and one man with a collection habit, sleep felt like a risk.
I’d spent the last six hours studying every sound in the bunker.
Not just the obvious—the wet cough from Cynthia two doors down, the desperate shuffle of slippers, the faint, compulsive humming of Molly at the end—but also the mechanical details.
The relay click of the ventilation every twenty-eight seconds.
The hollow thunk of the water heater switching cycles.
And, most important, the schedule of footsteps up and down the corridor.
So when the lights in the bunker shivered awake—a cheap flicker that made every woman’s face jump out of the dark in white and blue—I was already sitting upright, spine against the cinder block, feet flat on the slab.
My hair was out, wild and unconfined, the way I wore it when I knew a fight was coming.
The air tasted like bleach and whatever breakfast Adam’s hobby chemistry set had whipped up.
It was mostly egg, with a smell of burnt plastic.
He hit the corridor right on time. I heard the code beep, the soft pneumatic sigh of the vault door, then his approach.
He started with the cell closest to the exit—Carol, the blonde with the motherly smile and thousand-yard eyes.
The plate slide. The murmur of “Morning, Eve,” and the corresponding “Thank you, Adam.” Then down the row: Cynthia, Ashley, Lina, Molly, Renata, Eve, and finally me.
He knelt in front of my door, hands easy on his knees. The food slot popped open, and a plate of eggs, toast, and a plastic cup of orange juice glided through like an offering. I didn’t move to pick it up. He looked up at me, face open and almost friendly.
“How’d you sleep?” he said, in a tone that made it clear he’d ask this every morning until I was dead or compliant.
I stared at him. Not blinking. Not even a twitch.
He waited, then gave a little shrug. “Everyone’s first night is the hardest. You’re doing better than most.”
My voice was low, clear, and flat. “What do you want?”
Adam didn’t flinch. He stayed crouched, watching me with a sort of clinical patience, like he was trying to puzzle out why his new lab rat wasn’t running the maze.
“I want what I want for all of you,” he said.
“A life without the chaos. No more running, no more being used up and thrown away. I want you safe. I want you cared for.”
A speech, I thought. The kind you rehearse in the car, over and over, until it stops sounding insane.
He kept going, voice calm and almost warm.
“Outside, the world doesn’t give a fuck about you.
Men are monsters, women get lost or used or ignored, and nobody gets a second chance.
Here, you have everything you need. Food, shelter, company, even time to think.
I’m not your enemy. I’m your deliverance. ”
I kept eye contact, jaw locked, hands braced on the cot. “You think locking us up is protection?”
Adam’s mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. “Sometimes people have to be saved from themselves. From the patterns they can’t break. The world isn’t built for survivors, Jasmine. But in here, you can just… exist.”
I felt my lips pull back from my teeth. “You want to be a god.”
He didn’t argue. He just held my stare, matching my anger with a kind of sad, infinite patience. “You’ll see,” he said. “It gets better. The first week is always the hardest. Then you’ll find your peace.”
He said it like he believed it. That was the part that made my stomach go tight.
He waited for a beat, maybe hoping I’d reach for the plate, maybe hoping I’d start to cry or plead or give him some sign he’d won. I didn’t. The food sat untouched on the floor.
He leaned in a fraction closer, so I could see the whites of his eyes, see the way they shivered at the edges from lack of sleep. “You’re Eve Eight now,” he said. “The last. The collection is complete.”
I stared at him. “You’ll wish you’d stopped at seven.”
That got a real smile. He liked the fight. “I hope not,” he said, then stood up, smooth and easy, and moved on down the corridor.
His footsteps faded. The big steel door hissed shut, and the bunker was quiet again, except for the buzzing lights and the subtle, constant drone of the fan system above us.
I stayed where I was, listening to the sounds of the other women eating. Two cells over, Renata started crying, but muffled it with a pillow. Cynthia, down at the end, made a show of thanking Adam out loud, her voice syrupy-sweet.
I didn’t touch the food. I didn’t move until the eggs started to sweat and the toast curled at the edges. When I finally picked up the plate, it was only to scan it for contraband: fork, knife, napkin, paper cup. All plastic, no sharp edges. No contraband, no hope.
I closed my eyes, sat back on the cot, and tried to picture Sniper. I gave myself exactly one minute to miss him, to remember the rough cut of his hands on my face, the way he never said “I love you” unless he was about to leave. I let the memory burn hot, then snuffed it out and went back to work.
I had seven more days to break out of here. That was the limit, the time before they started breaking you in ways you couldn’t get back.
Seven days.
By the time I’d decided to put the eggs to a better use as a missile, Adam was already halfway back down the row.
He stopped in front of Cynthia’s cell—Eve One, the original, and from the way his body language loosened up, definitely his favorite.
I’d noticed it last night: every time he made eye contact with her, his face unclenched a little.
He even smiled, an actual smile, not that lipless line he gave the rest of us.
Cynthia reached through the bars, her fingers delicate but steady, and brushed the back of his hand.
The look on her face wasn’t fear. It wasn’t a performance either.
It was something way worse: honest affection.
I watched her thumb trace the blue vein just above his wrist, slow and gentle, like a wife checking her husband’s pulse.
She looked up at him and whispered, “Thank you, Adam.” He put his other hand over hers, sandwiched it for a second, then pulled away and moved on.
I didn’t hate her for it. Some people made peace with cages faster than others. I just marked the moment, filed it under “ways to get under his skin” if it came to that.
The corridor echoed with his steps as he vanished behind the vault door.
The instant it shut, the whole bunker seemed to exhale.
In the silence, the women ate in clumps of three—Cynthia and Ashley in the “early adopters” club; Molly and Lina as the late bloomers; Renata and me, the skeptics, the ones who still treated every sentence as an attack vector.
The lights buzzed. My food started to congeal.
I heard the soft sound of Renata clearing her throat, two cells down. She spoke just above a whisper, but the concrete made sure I caught every word. “It gets easier.”
I snorted, loud enough for her to hear. “Not interested in easy.”
“You will be. They all are.” There was no judgment in her voice, just the tired certainty of someone who’d watched the movie a hundred times and never seen a different ending.
I picked up the fork, spun it in my hand, then set it down. “I’m not staying.”
No answer for a while. Then, from her side of the wall, “That’s what the last one said.”
I rolled my head to the side and caught her eyes through the gap between our cells. Dark, clear, and so full of fuck-you defiance it almost made me like her. But under it, I saw the other thing. Fear, or maybe just tiredness pretending to be fear.
I held the look, then blinked first, because I wanted her to know I didn’t need the approval.
I lay back on the cot and locked my hands behind my head.
The mattress was too thin, the pillow too flat, but I made myself comfortable out of spite.
The ceiling was blank, but in my mind I filled it with the map of Kingman, every street and alley, every turnoff Adam could have taken to get here.
I traced the path from the shop to the 93, tried to guess how many miles underground I was, whether there was an echo of civilization anywhere above.
I built the mental grid, then filed it away.
Next, I ran a check on my body: arms, legs, the bruise on my neck, the dull ache in my lower back from sleeping upright all night. I flexed every muscle just to make sure I still could. The feeling came back, which meant the drugs were already out of my system. Good.
I closed my eyes, and for a second, just a second, I let myself think about Sniper.
Not the grand, romantic idea of him, but the real man.
The weight of his arm over my stomach in the morning, the way he always snuck up behind me at the shop and pretended he could lift me off my feet, even though he never could.
The sound he made when he yawned, like it actually hurt.
The way he said my name—soft, half-laughing, with a trace of surprise, like he never expected I’d still be there when he woke up.
That was the memory I kept, not the fear or the anger or the sense that I was already getting erased from the world above.
I opened my eyes, counted the flicker in the fluorescent, and started timing the seconds until Adam came back for round two.
I was not going to be Eve Eight. I was not going to be anyone’s anything.
I was going to get out. And when I did, I was going to take something with me.
Maybe his hand. Maybe his fucking head.
That was the promise I made to myself, every time I blinked.
I counted the seconds. I never lost track. And I waited for the mistake that would let me break him open, piece by piece, until the only thing left was the truth.