1. ~Vex~
~Vex~
Three years, seven months, and thirteen profoundly tedious days later, I have perfected the art of being a model patient.
This is, naturally, the most dangerous thing I have ever done.
Blackthorn doesn’t look like a place where they cage monsters.
That’s the first lie the building tells, and it tells it with confidence.
From the outside, perched on its private cliff a long, cold drive from anywhere that matters, it wears the face of an old-money sanatorium—pale limestone, arched windows, ivy permitted to climb in tasteful amounts so the brochures photograph well for the families who pay to forget us.
Money built the bones of this place a century ago, when the wealthy still had the decency to lock their embarrassments somewhere with good architecture.
The cruelty is all in the renovations.
Behind the limestone, they bolted in a second skeleton of steel.
The windows that look so romantic from the lawn are reinforced to stop a body thrown at full sprint; I know, because a girl named Priya tested it the autumn I arrived, and the glass simply held her like a butterfly under a pin while the orderlies took their time.
Every interior door is a slab of magnet and ceramic that breathes open with a buzz and shuts with a thud you feel in your teeth.
The corridors run long and white and patient, lit by the fluorescent tubes I loathe with my whole heart—that flat dead light that flattens everyone beneath it into evidence, into a thing on a slide.
There are no shadows here that the staff didn’t put there on purpose.
The smell never changes.
Bleach over something older. Old fear, scrubbed but never quite gone, the way blood lingers under floorboards no matter how many times you mop.
And under the antiseptic, the truth of the place: a dozen suppressed designations leaking through the seams of their medication, each of us a flavor pressed thin into recycled air.
Someone two doors down runs to citrus and gunmetal.
The new girl in the east wing is all bruised peonies, sweet and beaten, the scent of an Omega who still flinches.
Mine drowns them all.
Strawberries gone soft and warm. Whipped cream.
Vanilla bean and cotton candy and, underneath, the deep dark weight of chocolate ganache, of pink velvet cake left to bloom.
Walk past my door and you’ll think someone propped open a Valentine’s parlor at midnight, sweet enough to ache a tooth.
It’s part of why they keep me sedated more often than the charts admit.
An Omega who smells like dessert and behaves like a scalpel makes the staff nervous.
I find their nervousness nourishing. I eat it for breakfast, most days, with the pudding.
Blackthorn runs like a watch, and like a watch, it runs on repetition.
There is a metronome buried in this place.
I hear it everywhere—in the buzz-and-thud of the doors, in the click of the meds cart wheels, in the dead tick of institutional time that swings the same arc through every identical day.
I burned a man’s life down to the rhythm of a metronome once.
I find it soothing now. I find it a promise.
Six o’clock, the lights come up whether your eyes consent or not.
Then pill call, which is my favorite small theatre.
The cart arrives with its rows of little paper cups, each crowned with its rattling cargo, and Nurse Ofori or one of the others stands over you and watches you swallow, then asks you to lift your tongue and waggle it like a child who’s been good.
The trick, for those of us who object to being chemically blurred, is in the timing—the dry click of a tablet tucked high against the gum, the convincing gulp, the open and honest mouth offered for inspection.
I am very good at the open and honest mouth.
On the days I want my edges, I keep them. On the days I want to be soft, stupid, watched-over, and underestimated, I let the fog roll in and play my part beautifully.
Compliance is just another costume.
And skillfully enough, I own it in every color.
Breakfast in the communal hall, where everything is plastic and nothing has a point. No metal forks. No glass. No mirrors that aren’t bolted and polished steel, so we all greet our reflections warped, which I’ve always found more honest than the alternative.
Enrichment, they call the next block, as though we’re zoo animals being given a frozen treat to bat around—and we are, that’s exactly what we are, I simply respect the honesty of the word.
Group therapy. Worksheets about coping wheels. A counselor who believes, against three years of mounting evidence, that I might one day color inside the lines of my feelings.
And then play time.
That’s my name for the rec hour, not theirs; theirs is something bloodless and clinical, supervised social integration or whatever the manual decreed that decade.
The principle is simple.
Pack a room with the most volatile Omegas the courts could find, hand them puzzles, paperbacks, and a television bolted too high to reach, and let them mill about under the eyes of four orderlies whose entire job is to make certain the milling never sharpens into something with edges.
Most days it doesn’t.
Usually it’s checkers, muttering, and a woman named Constance who narrates a soap opera that stopped airing in the nineties.
The days it does—the screaming, the hair, the bitten ear, the takedown—those are the days the staff earn their pay, and they earn it fast, with restraints, a syringe, and a quiet that settles over the room like snow afterward.
They removed the poles from the rec room eight months ago. The pole-fitness ones, bolted floor to ceiling, that the wellness consultant installed with such optimism.
Nobody will discuss why.
That’s how I like my legends.
Unverified, and slightly worse than the truth.
Lunch. Another block. Meds again at the hinge of the afternoon, the cart and the cups and the waggling tongues.
Dinner. Lockdown. Lights down at a decreed hour, the corridors dimmed to the sick amber of the night cycle, and the cameras switching to whatever it is cameras do when they think you’re asleep.
Because there are always cameras.
That’s the part the families don’t see on the lawn. Blackthorn watches. The lenses are tucked into the smoke detectors, the light fixtures, the seams where wall meets ceiling, little glass eyes that never blink and never bore.
I clocked the whole array inside my first week—I always count the eyes in a room, it’s a tic, a courtesy I extend to whoever’s watching—and I’ve spent the years since pretending not to notice them.
I wave at the one above my bed sometimes. I blow it kisses. I want whoever sits in that monitoring room to understand that I see them seeing me, and that I have decided to allow it.
The security is theatrical, total, and, where I’m concerned, doubled.
Every Omega patient wears a band that knows where she is at all times.
Every door reads it. Every count—and there are counts, so many counts, the staff tallying us like coins they’re afraid of losing—finds us where the system swears we should be.
But there’s a classification stamped across the top of my file in a red that the other files don’t get to wear.
Level Red.
Highly intelligent. Manipulative. Escape risk.
Which is a great deal of bureaucratic poetry that translates, in practice, to: never fewer than two orderlies when I move, the chemical-restraint cocktail kept drawn and ready in a fridge with my name on the dose, and a conspicuous, almost insulting absence of anything in my vicinity that could be sharpened, swallowed, or thrown.
They learned that last one the expensive way.
I can throw a great many things.
They took my daggers when I arrived, naturally, but a dagger is a philosophy more than an object, and you can’t confiscate a philosophy.
Six locked rooms, in three years. Three restraint systems. One secure wing, walked out of in a borrowed cardigan with a borrowed smile, just to prove that the wing was a suggestion and not a fact.
I never ran.
That’s the part they can’t metabolize. I open the cage, I admire the open cage, and I sit back down inside it, because I am not finished here.
The leaving will be on my schedule, dressed for the occasion, and it will be a doorway of my own making—not a panicked scramble through somebody else’s.
To the staff, I am a nightmare with good cheekbones.
To the patients, I am a legend they tell in the dark to feel less alone.
To the men in the monitoring room, I am a recurring problem with an open ticket nobody can close.
And to me?
I am the grand prize.
The thing at the center of the maze that the whole maze was built to hold and can’t quite.
They can watch me from every angle, in every light, around the clock, forever. They can log my scent and chart my cycle and count me a hundred times a day.
They cannot touch me without my permission, they know it, and the knowing is what makes them so careful and so afraid. Look all you like. Press your faces to the glass.
The exhibit does not come down off its plinth for anyone.
Not yet, anyway.
I am wearing pink today.
The jumpsuits are color-coded, a thoughtful little system, and I’ve made an art of wielding it.
Pink is playful. Flirtatious. The shade that lets the orderlies unclench half an inch and forget, for a blessed moment, the incident report with my name across the top.
Purple is for my quiet days, my reading days, the days I let Genevieve sit at the window in the thin grey light and grieve a life that ended before it ever got to begin.
And green?—
Well. Green is the color I wear when I’ve had an idea.
They removed green from my rotation around the same time as the poles. I never asked for it back.
A girl should keep some weapons in reserve.
“Miss Valentine.”