Chapter 27
“Don’t,” Warden White warned as the door closed over behind Madame.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t make a run for it.” He gestured to my collar. “That thing will go off if you so much as touch the door.”
That explained why they hadn’t locked me up while Madame left. They weren’t worried I’d overpower them and escape because I’d be shocked if I tried to leave the room. Fortunately, I’d thought better of making a run for it.
But I’d had enough of sitting, I needed to move.
“Woah,” White grabbed a hold of both of my arms as I got to my feet.
“Let go.” I tried to shake his grip, but my blood pressure plummeted. My head spun, feet fumbling, when Warden White caught me.
“I was just trying to keep you from falling face-first, love.” All of me felt weak, I must have been immobile for longer than I realized. “Here, let’s get you settled in your room.”
My body put up little resistance as we shuffled across the floor into the sparse cell—the tiles and cement grittier than I would have liked—before I was lowered onto the bare mattress.
Keeping the upper half of my body upright, I fought at gravity. “Why is it so hard to move?”
White’s brows knit together. “You haven’t moved in more than a week, love. It’s going to take a little getting used to.”
I thought I might have managed a day in my pit, maybe two, but a week?
Warden White, crouched down to my level, patted my hand. “Everything’s going to be alright. I’ll get you something to eat, I’ll make the grilled cheese you like, and you’ll build up your strength.”
Grilled cheese? I’d eaten? That was news to me. It had been a week, so I must have gotten food into me somehow during that time, but I’d assumed that while I was in my pit I was unresponsive. A vacant shell.
Venturing into the pit was scarier than I realized.
“You look like a mermaid!” Three watched me with rapt fascination, as Warden White exited my cell—sorry, my room. “So beautiful.”
Covered in creature comforts and piles of pillows and blankets, Three’s nest was so much more inviting than the emptiness that surrounded me.
Goosebumps rose over my flesh. Not just from the severity of the situation, or Three’s unsettling chants, but because it was cold.
We must have been at least two-stories underground if it managed to stay this cool in the height of summer. Or there was very good air conditioning. But given the lack of moving air, and the flickering light in the corner, I doubted there was a high-quality HVAC system.
Tired of fighting gravity, I reluctantly laid my upper body on the plain mattress and folded my arms over my chest. “Could I have a blanket?”
Three and White exchanged a look. “No.”
I propped my head up. “Why not?”
Neither of them said anything. Warden White pressed numbers into the keypad beside the door, unfortunately having the wherewithal to hide the code. “Keep an eye on your sister, Three.”
I paid little attention to White’s choice of words, because as soon as he was out of the room, Three scooted across her cage to the bars between our cells with a look which founded many a conspiracy.
Maybe she was smarter than she seemed, maybe the whole child-in-a-woman’s-body thing was an act. Or maybe, just maybe, she would sneak me a blanket.
Instead, she said, “You didn’t know that, did you? That we’re sisters?”
What? Beyond the numbers carved into our faces, we looked nothing like each other. I doubted very much that we shared any of the same DNA.
“We have the same birthday and everything. You’re older by two full hours!”
No way did I share a womb with this woman. “We’re… twins?”
Three laughed. “We’re sisters, but we have different parents, silly!”
Because that made so much more sense.
But it was information on offer, and I’d take it.
Hoping that if I got enough of the pieces together something, anything, would start to make sense.
Even if I was trapped, in a cell, a shock collar around my neck, without blankets, next to a woman I was starting to suspect had never seen the light of day.
?
The woman who was precisely my age sang:
Three, Three, wonderful, Three.
You’re everything we ever expected you to be.
Three is devout and caring and smart.
She’ll fill the role, with kindness, with heart.
As close to a sure thing as there can be,
Three is the choice for you and for me!
?
Sometime later, Warden White returned with the grilled cheese he’d promised, and I practically inhaled it. For a man I wanted to kick between the legs, he was a decent cook.
I shoved the blunt-edged plastic food tray through the bars of my cell. “So, about that blanket?”
“I’m afraid not,” was all he said before collecting the platter, lowering the lights, and exiting the room.
Being told I couldn’t have something as simple as a blanket just made me want it more. Three had an ample supply, surely, she’d let me have one.
“Three?” I hugged my sides.
“I can’t do that.” Her eyes flickered over her shoulder. There was a camera in the corner of the room. Next to the incessant buzzing and flickering light.
I see…
?
For the next week, I tried to get a sense of the routine and failed. Even when I counted the seconds between meal times there was significant inconsistency, and no specificity to which meal we ate or when. For three meals in a row, they served breakfast. The next four meals were all dinner.
Solomon’s Seal was smart, but they were using a tactic I’d seen before. They didn’t want Three and me to have any idea how much time had passed. They made it so our entire world revolved around them, which meant we were entirely at their mercy.
But not having much else to do, beyond reflecting on the songs, attempting to gather more information from my co-inmate, and avoiding spiraling at all costs, I timed Three’s cartoons.
They each ran approximately twenty-two minutes.
It didn’t take much to convince her to watch sixty-five episodes in a row, which if they ran back-to-back would take nearly twenty-four hours. Yes, I checked my math. Thrice.
The whole point of this scheme was to get some sense of how long each day felt underground, so I could keep better track of how much time passed… in theory.
Twenty episodes into our binge-watching, I saw the error of my ways—the day moved painstaking slow, the cartoons too repetitive and brash— but I was already committed. By episode fifty-four, both of us were sleep deprived and irritable.
Despite the irritability, the cartoon-induced sleep deprivation proved useful.
It got Three talking.
“Have you ever watched this many cartoons in a row before, Two?”
“If we keep watching, we’re sure to break a world record.” I didn’t tell her that it would be the world record for cartoons watched being held in an underground facility while being held captive by a cult. But I wasn’t about to bother her with semantics.
“Really? Do you think?” Three flipped onto her stomach kicking her heels in the air, like a girl gossiping at a sleepover.
“Wow, a world record holder.” She drifted off into her own mind for a moment, an animated bird running circles on the television, before she changed the subject.
“I’ve never had a sister who wanted to watch them with me before. Isn’t it exciting?”
In the time I spent conscious while in captivity, I’d learned to pay close attention to Three’s choice of words.
When she said she’d never had a sister who wanted to watch cartoons with her before, it wasn’t that I was the first ‘sister’ to be locked down here with her.
No, I got the distinct impression that my cell had a previous owner, and based on the songs Three sang during nearly every non-cartoon-filled moment, I suspected it once belonged to One.
“Two, Two, I said isn’t it exciting?”
Beyond the dread-filled thoughts about the person who occupied my cell before me, and what became of her, my whole body ached—for the last two or so days I just couldn’t get comfortable—so whatever I was feeling wasn’t excitement.
“I think… this is fun, but there are a lot of fun things we can do together.”
“Like what?” That was almost too easy.
“Like tell each other stories.”
“Oh, I love stories, what kind of stories? I like the ones that have princesses and cute animals. But no kissing frogs, because it’s gross.”
“Stories from our lives, so we can get to know each other a little better. Sister to sister.” I shifted. “Like what our lives were like before we were in these cages together.”
“Oh.” Three’s face dropped, her brows furrowed, she pulled at the threads in the blanket in front of her. “But all of my stories are from here. I’ve always been here.”
My heart sank. I’d expected as much, but suspecting and knowing were two very different beasts. If she lived her life in a cage, it was no wonder she was emotionally ten years old.
Which made my leash with the FBI look like a day at a theme park, and—
And I didn’t want to think about the freedoms Mads touted he had bestowed on me. How I should be grateful for his benevolence.
But I was starting to realize, slowly but surely, I could have had it much much worse. And not known any different.
“You’ve always been in here?”
“Always.” She watched me fidget, and reposition myself for about a minute before she said, “Can’t get comfortable?”
“Not really.”
“It’s probably the baby, you know, something about the hormones.”
“You’re probably right, but that isn’t making me any more comfortable.”
“You’re lucky you know that?” She inched her way closer on her elbows. “You have the Seal inside you. You are going to change the world.”
Doubtful. “To be honest, Three, I don’t really care about that at the moment. My whole body feels like it needs to run and rest at the same time, and it’s…”
“Frustrating?”
“Very.” This gave me an opening. Both Three and Warden White had been unreasonably adamant that I not get a blanket. There had to be a reason, so I pushed, “But maybe if I had a blanket…”
“I can’t give you a blanket, Two.”
“My name is Delilah.” It took everything in me not to rub at my eyes. “I prefer you call me that.”
“No, no. No.” Three scrunched her nose and shook her head. “You are Two, and you can’t. It’s against the rules.”
“You have like five blankets, why can’t I have one?”
I don’t know what I did, or what I said, but Three spontaneously and completely burst into tears. A full-on wailing sob.
Well, I hadn’t been expecting that. And I hadn’t even gotten to the hard questions yet. My investigation and intimidation techniques were better suited to adults, who understood logic, which clearly that wasn’t going to work here.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay.” I got closer to the bars, noting all of Three’s belongings were inconveniently more than an arm’s reach away. “It’s okay, Three. Talk to me.”
“No! It’s not okay!” Three smacked the heels of her palms into her cheeks. “I can’t let you do what she did!”
Three was overtired, that much was clear, but I was getting somewhere. If I wanted to get information, it was time to press the issue. “What who did?”
“One! She… she…”
Warden White burst into the space, metal door clanging. “What did you say to her?!”
Interesting. He’d seen Three was upset on the surveillance camera but couldn’t hear what was said. “Nothing, I just asked for a blanket.”
“She asked why she couldn’t have one!” Three sobbed.
“Oh, my poor girl.” Warden White pulled the heavy ring of keys off the wall and unlocked Three’s cell, joining her on the ground inside, arms outstretched. “Come here.”
Three curled into Warden White’s lap, head cradled to his chest as he stroked her hair and rubbed her back. “What happened with One, isn’t going to happen with Two.”
Oh boy.
Very rarely did I want to be wrong, but this was one of those moments.
I’d already suspected One had been held in captivity—just like Three—but now it seemed something terrible had happened.
Something horrible enough to scar Three, and cause this reaction.
Which solidified my suspicions that One had also been held in the cell I now occupied against her wishes. And that she’d done something about it.
With a blanket.
“How can you be sure?” Three looked at White with ruddy tear-streaked cheeks.
“Because I know these things, Three. It’s all going to be okay.”
“I don’t want her to go. I want her to stay here.”
“She’ll stay here, Three. I’ll make sure of it.”
White was making promises he couldn’t keep. Because I sure as hell wasn’t going to stay here, waiting to be discarded after I was no longer useful.
An unexpected seed of a thought formed, slowly wedging itself into the corners of my mind with growing permanence. There was no going back now.
When I escaped, come hell or high water, I was going to bring Three with me.