Rosabelle 15
Rosabelle
I sway a little, and Elias braces me around the shoulders.
It’s getting harder to think straight.
I’m trying to gauge my vitals beneath the dull clamor of all this pain, but it’s hard to tease the many feelings apart.
I don’t know if I’m in any condition to fight my way out of this room without killing anyone.
Leaving these people alive requires greater finesse, and I’m starting to worry I’m not strong enough. I don’t know how much blood I’ve lost.
“How many were there?” Jing asks.
“How many what?” I ask, feeling dizzy.
“Did you see their faces?” Jing again.
“Whose faces?” I can feel my heart racing. My control is beginning to crumble.
“Possible trauma to the head?” asks Aya.
I try to find the metaphorical notepad in my mind, try to scribble down my thoughts: Doctors?
Jing’s brows draw together. “This is a little alarming for being so atypical, don’t you think?” He glances at the others. “They never usually go for the face.”
“Who?” I ask, fighting to remember what we’re talking about.
“Any of the usual hired guns,” he says, before turning to the others. “Have they ever gone for your face? I don’t think so, right?”
Hired guns.
Elias looks grim. “Not the head or the hands,” he says. “Too much value.”
“That’s only if they’re trying to scare you,” Aya points out. “If they’re trying to kill you, they don’t care about your head.”
Elias tightens his grip on my shoulders. “Were they trying to kill you, Rosabelle?”
The metaphorical pen falls out of my metaphorical hand.
“I don’t like this.” Jing’s eyes are back on my face. “Something doesn’t feel right. This is giving me Leon flashbacks.”
Leon.
“Her eyes are clear,” says Aya. “I don’t think it’s the same thing.”
“Yes,” says Elias, “but Leon’s eyes didn’t change right away, remember?”
Aya acknowledges this with a tense silence.
I try to make a note of this, try to pick up my pen—
They know about Leon.
“Did they do anything to you?” Jing asks, lowering into a crouch to better meet my gaze. “Rosabelle, are you alone in your mind?”
This registers as a strange question. Curiosity shines a light into my head, clarifying my thoughts. I reach around in my mind again for my mental notes.
I want to know what they know.
I force myself to sharpen. “What do you know about Leon?” I ask. “Who are you?”
For the first time, the three of them lapse into a cold silence, and I realize, in the intervening tension, that I might’ve made a mistake.
It’s Aya who speaks first. She tilts her head at me. “I thought he might’ve told you.”
I blink softly. “Who?”
The tension in the room seems to release, but only to resolve into confusion.
“Should we tell her?” says Elias, still sitting beside me.
I try to clear my head a bit more. Try to straighten.
They glance at each other.
My eyes dart to the picture frame again.
“I don’t know,” says Jing. “I’ll ask him. Aya, do you have your pager? Mine just died.”
“Yeah,” she says, and opens the drawer of her nightstand. She tosses the object to Jing, who catches it easily and immediately begins to shoot off a message. I stare at the tech in his hands, dumbfounded.
“You’re allowed to have pagers?” I ask.
“We are, yeah,” says Jing, glancing up. “Didn’t you get one?”
“I—yes—” I falter, remembering the inelegant tech weighing down my pocket. “But—”
“Don’t worry,” says Elias. “No one else knows. We’re not supposed to carry them around.”
“Not technically,” says Jing, still typing. “Technically, we’re supposed to leave them in our rooms.”
I try to get this all down in my head: Dangerous? Doctors? Special privileges?
Aya drags the desk chair into place across from me and takes a seat.
She begins dabbing at my mouth and cheeks with a warm towel, and it feels like I’m being touched through a layer of vinyl, my skin tugging in tempo against bone.
The scene is surreal. Too familiar. I’m briefly swept out of my head.
Hold still, Clara.
I watch as Aya draws the towel away from my face, the white cloth already soaked red.
My thoughts blur into memory.
Can I tell you something funny, Rosa? Clara asked me once. She was in bed the way she often was.
Shivering.
How many times did I wipe Clara’s mouth?
How many times did I clean the vomit from the soft folds of her neck?
How many nights did I spend curled around her small body, pressing my hands so hard to her aching stomach that my own arms locked in place?
How long did I lie awake like a corpse, afraid to so much as rustle the sheets in case I missed the sound of her breathing?
She’d turned to smile at me. When I was really small, she said, I didn’t know you were my sister.
I didn’t think that was funny at all.
Clara must’ve seen the thought on my face because she directed her sunken eyes to the window, her smile fading as familiar blue light reflected in the glass. I was too little to understand, she said quietly. I hadn’t made sense of everything that happened to us.
My heart was pounding. I couldn’t explain why this story was unnerving me. Who did you think I was?
Clara hesitated. She finally looked at me. I thought you were my mother.
Aya drags the warm towel across my bloody chin again, and the sensation draws me back into the room.
I take a moment to study her.
Her movements are gentle and assured. She folds the towel in half before wiping once more at my face, and I recognize something like compassion in her dark eyes.
I glance at the picture frame, the two toothy smiles. Dimly I wonder whether this woman was ever a mother.
Aya registers my attention, then flashes me a smile.
“We all knew you were some kind of high-profile prisoner when you first arrived,” she says to me, apropos of nothing. “Rumor was you’d skipped prison altogether, which upset a lot of people.”
I already know this. “Really?”
“Oh yeah,” says Jing, crossing his arms against his barrel chest. He resembles a small-headed bear standing upright. “No one is admitted just like that. The waitlist to get into this facility is staggering.”
“Management was pretty angry,” Elias agrees.
“But the way Leon activated the day you showed up?” Aya says, shaking her head. “That’s when we knew for sure that something was happening. We just didn’t know what.”
“Activated?” I say. “What do you mean?”
“He came out of his room for the first time in weeks,” says Jing.
I sit back, surprised.
“Hold still,” says Aya, folding the towel once more.
Hold still, Clara.
“How do you all know Leon?” I try again.
“We worked in the same lab,” says Elias, circling the room with his finger. “Leon was our partner.”
Finally, clarity, like a bracing slap: “You’re scientists?”
“Medical research,” says Aya.
“Neuroscience,” Elias says.
Jing nods. “My focus was in toxicology. But we’ve all worked across multiple fields.”
I find the notes in my mind and delete them all. I open to a new page and write down:
Scientists
No combat training
Talk too much
Possible liabilities
Easily killed
I hesitate, scratching out the last one. I don’t need to kill these people.
I don’t want to kill these people.
In my head, I reach for my makeshift weapons, removing the pen, the bobby pins, the water glass, and the picture frame from my mental arsenal. I put them all back where they belong.
“Why are you helping me?” I ask, trying to look around the room to read their eyes. “If Leon was your friend—You saw what I did that night. You were all there. I remember the looks on your faces.”
“It was a hard night,” Aya admits quietly.
“We didn’t have all the details then,” says Elias. “At that point, we’d only been ordered to keep an eye on you. Your status kept changing.”
“Keep an eye on me?”
“And we’d known there was something wrong with Leon for a long time,” Aya is saying. “For a while we thought maybe his mind was just deteriorating. The things they did to him”—she looks away—“they’d tortured him for years.”
“Who?” I ask.
“The Reestablishment,” says Jing, frowning at me like this is obvious.
“But—”
“Don’t move,” says Aya, rising from her seat. “I need to get another towel.”
Don’t move, Clara.
I need to get another towel.
Jing glances at Aya’s retreating figure before taking her seat. He locks eyes with me.
“Look, I know you’re nursing some bruises, but”—he frowns, looking me over—“you seem to be okay for the moment, right?”
I study him in silence.
I wonder what he would do if I suddenly started screaming.
“So, uh”—Jing forces a laugh—“do you think you could hang out a little longer before we get you into recovery?”
He looks nervous.
Sounds nervous.
Sometimes I forget that I make people nervous.
“We’ve, uh, we’ve actually been hoping for a chance to talk to you,” he adds.
Alarm bells go off in my head. “Why?”
Jing exchanges a loaded glance with Elias. The older man gives him an affirming nod.
“Because,” says Jing. “We’ve had a chance to go through all of Leon’s stuff since his death, and we’ve collectively arrived at a theory.”
I stiffen, holding my breath.
Jing holds out his hands for emphasis. “We don’t think you killed him.”