10. The Blood Calls
TEN
THE BLOOD CALLS
Seven
I shot upright on my bed, clutching at my chest, gasping. All of the melancholy that had stolen through me in the aftermath of the rape and of my body’s betrayal of me … forgotten.
Something was wrong. My organs suddenly felt too tight for my rib cage. What was happening?
“Everything alright in there, Seven?” a voice crackled through the intercom. The same agent who had supervised my rape earlier.
“What do you think?” I snapped back, fingertips clawing into my chest. My heart thrummed, and I couldn’t breathe.
“Is this because of … of what happened before, with the male?”
I shook my head, knowing the agent on the other side of the glass would see everything. It wasn’t about that at all.
It’s about a male, though … the whisper confirmed. This is because of OUR male.
No …
You know what he is.
No, it couldn’t be about him. We’d barely even glanced at one another. I hadn’t even spoken directly to him. Not once.
I hadn’t seen him since …
My shoulder tingled in memory of where his arm had brushed mine.
But why would … he … make me feel like this?
The empty desolation from earlier returned, but it felt different, somehow. It was … yearning.
I covered my eyes with my arm.
You know why … the whisper insisted.
Mine.
I pressed the heels of my hands hard against my ears. As if that would somehow silence the whisper in my head.
The blood calls, Seven. Our blood calls. And his is calling back.
“Seven, are you well?” the agent asked, panic tingeing her tone.
Lie. Do not let them know. They will drug you, and you will lose the call.
I sniffed. Maybe that would be for the best.
But I couldn’t make myself do it. Couldn’t make myself call out or show my agitation. I’d been craving the listlessness of the drug too often of late. I was becoming dependent on my jailors and their injections and the sweet oblivion they gave me.
But maybe I didn’t hate feeling this something. Even if what I was feeling was confusing, and disturbing, and made zero sense.
“I’m fine. I think I’d like to take a shower now, please,” I said, my voice eerily calm, even as the tightness in my chest became a bottoming out in the pit of my stomach.
Shock. Something had shocked him, I realized with startling clarity.
I stood and walked stiffly over to the little bathroom attached to my room. I shared it with the female in the room next door, but we never saw one another. My door had to be unlocked for me to access the bathroom. And hers and mine had never been unlocked at the same time. I didn’t even know which female was in the room beside mine. They made sure to prevent us from leaving our cells at the same time.
I supposed they didn’t want us to form friendships. Alliances. Even in the mess hall at mealtimes, all we managed was uneasy muttering, often only to relay something we’d overheard. Like the two girls in the kitchen gossiping about Twelve being pregnant. Their fear underpinning their guarded murmuring. That unspoken worry that they had no idea what would happen to her … and subsequently to them, if a male was successful in impregnating them.
It had been different in G Block. Even when sparring, when we were learning on each other how to inflict pain, how to incapacitate a strong, fast, supernatural being, Two and I … we had been friends, or as close to it as I imagined was possible in here. We’d dreamed together, in hushed whispers, about what we’d do if we ever got out of here. Not that we’d had any real clue about what the world outside the white walls of the facility was like.
Yes, there had been pictures and textbooks, and occasionally a documentary film about what awaited us on the outside. But our schooltime lectures had mostly consisted of learning about Pures … or, more to the point, learning about how to kill them. Being taught why they needed to be eradicated.
It had felt so naughty to imagine a life that wasn’t about killing Pures—the life we’d been raised to believe was our calling.
But it had been almost two years since I’d seen Two. And in that time, I had been outside, however briefly. I’d breathed air that wasn’t pumped in through vents. And it had only made that world feel even more incomprehensible to me.
I wished suddenly and fervently that I could see Two again, could tell her about the smell of damp earth and the swish of wind in tree branches. Could tell her about the way the moon left shadows on the ground that looked like clawed beasts. Looked like us.
I wished I could tell her that I’d smelled a male … and a whisper in my mind had started insisting that he somehow belonged to me, and it just wouldn’t go away. I could imagine how she would scoff and laugh at how stupid that sounded.
I wished I could tell her that sex was awful. That the pleasure she could give herself would far outweigh what a male would do to her.
I remembered a night in our cell, where in giggling, silly whispers, we’d wondered about what it would feel like to have a male inside of us. That day the females had been given a perfunctory lesson in the mechanics of it, mostly to warn us that our use as Guardians would be compromised if we managed to procreate with the males in G Block.
The following morning, the male and female Guardian students had been separated. And I hadn’t seen a male who wasn’t an agent for years. Until I was relocated to Rape Block.
The water in the shower was scalding, but I barely felt it as I stepped under the spray. I pressed a hand against the glass of the cubicle, and let out everything I was holding in. I let the swooping sensation in my belly, the one the whisper insisted was because of him , overtake me, sweep through my bones, and overcome me.
My feelings, his feelings … it didn’t seem to matter who they belonged to anymore. I poured them out, let my tears mingle with the water, invisible to the agent who I knew had access to monitoring our shower time … our toilet time … every single moment that should be private.
When the tears had washed down the drain, I felt empty once more. But the emptiness never lasted long. Because it made room for the bottomless well of rage that simmered, that began to fill me. The hatred for everything this place stood for.
Once upon a time, I’d believed the Pures were the worst monsters out there. But I knew the truth now.
Tingles wracked my body—a sure sign that the efficacy of the drugs was waning. That my shifting ability was returning. The rage always burned the drugs away.
Hold your rage in. Keep it tight. Don’t let them see that you’re fighting off their drugs. You’ll need everything when it’s time to escape with him. And once you are out, he will help you exact your revenge. The time will come, sooner than you realize.
The whisper’s words were getting wilder and wilder. Maybe it was just a sign that I was finally losing whatever sanity I was clinging to in this hell.
Nevertheless, I obeyed. I breathed deep and pulled the fury back inside my skin, the tingling subsiding. When I was sure that there was no outward sign that the drug had worn off, I stepped out of the shower and grabbed a towel, wringing out my hair, barely even glancing at my reflection in the steamed-up mirror.
That was when the screaming started.
“Return to your room immediately, Seven!” the agent’s shaky voice piped through the bathroom speakers. I ignored it, stepping towards the other door. The door that led to the cell I shared a bathroom with.
The feral screams were coming from the female in that room. I gritted my teeth, listening harder. There were words scattered through the choking, sobbing cries.
“It hurts! Please!”
“Bring him back? He’s Mine!”
“It’s too far! Too far!”
“Nineteen! Please!”
I staggered back from the door, heart hammering.
Twelve.
It was Twelve next door.
Ignoring the fact that I was naked, I hammered on the door that separated me from her.
“Twelve!” I shouted. “Twelve, are you okay?”
“Back to your cell, Seven!” a male agent commanded through the intercom.
The screaming continued.
“Twelve! What have they done to Nineteen?” I asked as an alarm sounded from my cell.
“He’s too far! AAAAAARGH!”
Her guttural scream wrenched at me, and the rage I’d just managed to control seared through my veins. My claws extended in a flash. I swiped at the door, gouging long gashes in the metal.
“What are you bastards doing to her?” I shrieked, slashing and slashing, then pounding at the metal with my fist. Sharp, feline teeth erupted from my gums, and I hissed viciously, the sound drowned by Twelve’s painful cries.
“Seven, move back from the door.” The same male voice, but close now. In the room.
“Fuck you! What are you doing to her?” I snarled, slamming my claws into the door. The screech of them dragging through the metal vibrated my back teeth, but I gritted them and kept going. Someone needed to help Twelve.
A tickle at the back of my neck. I swatted at the annoyance, my fingers meeting cold metal. And then the hot, bracing zap of electrocution.
But it didn’t hurt. It was a mere annoyance, and I gripped it, tossing it and the agent it was attached to aside. There was a crash, a groan of plumbing breaking, and water sprayed across the room.
“Shit!” an agent cried. “No live prods in here! Repeat, no live prods!”
I ignored him as one of my claws made it through the metal door. With a hiss, I gouged harder. “Hold on, Twelve, I’m almost there!”
Footsteps flooded the room behind me, but I was so close to having this door ripped to shreds that I paid them no mind.
A sharp sting in my buttock.
The world blurred … and then went black.