Robert Crane - Alone

“Not ‘with them’ like we’re on the same team, but yeah. They want to run tests on me. Tell me what I am. Where are you?”

“Can’t tell you.” He cringed as he said it. “Sorry. I don’t trust them.”

I looked at him in annoyance. “I’m not staying here forever. I’m trying to decide if I want to let them figure things out for me before I leave. How am I supposed to find you if you won’t tell me where you are?”

He finally looked me in the eye. “Seems like you’ve found a way to contact me. So talk to me again when you’ve escaped.”

I threw my hands in the air. “Where am I supposed to go?”

He started to fade, getting hazy again, like there were gaps in his skin replaced by darkness. “Anywhere. Just get away from them.”

I woke up with a start.

I sat up in bed and looked around. I hadn’t even bothered to crawl under the covers. The red face of the digital clock on the dresser told me it was after midnight. I reached over and found the bottle of water I filled earlier. I picked it up, took it to the bathroom and dumped it out again. Just in case they snuck in while I was sleeping. Paranoia, thy name is Sienna.

After I filled it from the tap and drank two bottles, I laid back down on the bed. I was almost positive I had just talked to Reed in a dream. I went to sleep thinking of him and I dreamed of him. But he was right. What happened there was not like a regular dream. All the weirdness and surreal atmosphere of a dream was gone; it felt like we’d had a conversation in the waking world, but with a hazy backdrop.

Could I touch people’s dreams? Was I a telepath, a mind reader? My thoughts raced while I thought about the possibilities. I’d never read a mind, so it probably wasn’t that; unless it hadn’t fully manifested as a power yet. Or maybe it was just limited to dreaming.

I thought about Mom as I lay there. Thought about when she used to get home, and how we’d eat dinner and talk about…I dunno, whatever. Training, mostly. TV shows, sometimes.

The world outside? Never. Rule #5. We don’t talk about the outside world. It doesn’t exist, for conversational purposes. We stay inside the house. The four walls that defined my life.

I thought about Mom and her rules and I wondered if maybe I could dream and talk to her, see where she was. I set the water bottle aside and lay back, this time crawling beneath the covers. I thought about her, about the smell of the chicken soup she used to heat up out of the can with the TV going in the background as we sat on the couch and talked. I recalled watching her walk out the door in the morning, and hoping that she’d open the outside door to the porch before the inside door to the house had shut, so I could catch just a glimpse of the outside world (she never did).

Then I thought of the times I’d disobeyed her. The times I’d let her down. I shuddered. The times she punished me.

The last time.

Somewhere in that succession of thoughts I drifted off again, and I woke to the sound of distant voices and a raging hunger. I blinked the bleariness out of my eyes and felt my skin covered in a cold sweat. My dreams this time had definitely not brought me to Mom. Light streamed in from a gray sky outside, peeking in through the blinds.

I padded into the bathroom and stripped off my clothing, which was sticking to my body. I thought for a moment about the idea of the Directorate watching me and I sighed, a deep, uncaring sound as I looked around the bathroom. I felt truly disgusting; there was still residual mud and grit in my hair from the parking lot two days ago when Wolfe had dropped me, even though someone had tried to clean it.

I sighed again and with a shrug I decided that I wanted a shower more than I wanted to worry about someone spying on me in the bathroom.

The hot water felt great, renewing me as it washed over my skin. Little flecks of dried blood that had caught in my sweater from the fight with Wolfe flaked off and swirled down the drain. I stayed in there longer than was necessary to get clean; the shower has long been my place for rejuvenation, the only spot where I could get privacy from Mom. The only place I’m allowed to shed my gloves, my shirt and all else.

I stepped onto the rug and took a moment to appreciate the warmth of the dormitory bathroom. Even in a house as buttoned up as ours had been, drafts ran through it with alarming regularity. I could always tell what season it was by how cold I was when I got out of the shower. The bathroom here was perfectly insulated, though, and as I felt the soft squish of the plush bathmat between my toes there was a touch of that feeling of unfamiliarity again. It was as though I were so far outside my comfortable life that I almost couldn’t recognize the actions I was taking as my own; like they were those of a stranger I was watching on TV.

I stepped out into my room wearing a towel and pulled open the closet to find a half dozen outfits. I took a look at the clothes I had discarded – dirty, disgusting and a little bloody. I wanted to put them back on, but it would undo the shower. Instead I picked out a black turtleneck and a pair of jeans and put them on, unsurprised to find that they fit me perfectly. I was only going to the cafeteria, but I grabbed the coat I had worn yesterday and slipped on my gloves, the only part of my ensemble not completely caked with filth. Rule #4. Old habits die hard.

The dormitory building was large and seemed to contain quite a few people. I guessed they were all metas like me, retrieved at some point or another by the Directorate. They seemed to be keeping to themselves, didn’t meet my eyes in the corridors, which caused concern for me. Some of them hung together in small groups, and I could feel them looking when my back was turned.

I remembered seeing a sign for the cafeteria somewhere near the entrance I had used yesterday, so I walked the corridors looking for it. When I found one, I followed it to a large, open space with a hundred or more tables. Glass windows stretched from floor to ceiling of a two story-high space, looking out onto the snowy grounds. One wall opened up into a long serving line with a variety of different foods sitting out in a self-serve style, from Jell-O to meatloaf. A digital clock hung overhead, announcing that it was almost noon.

I passed through the line without difficulty; there was no cash register at the end, so I just walked off through the ever-increasing crowd and found a table by myself next to the window and sat down, ready to eat.

I was attacking the meatloaf when Ariadne sat down across from me. She wore an overly friendly look that put me on an annoyed footing made worse by some of my food choices. The coffee was not going well with the meatloaf. How was I supposed to know that? Mom never let me have coffee and people on TV drank it with everything. Bleh. Meatloaf tasted different than I expected, too.

Ariadne must have sensed my disquiet because I did not acknowledge her after she sat down. “Good morning,” she said, breaking the silence. “Actually,” she continued, smile widening, “I suppose I should say—”

“If the next words out of your mouth are ‘Good afternoon,’ I promise it won’t be for you.”

She blinked in slight shock. “Didn’t—”

“Sleep well? No.” My eyes narrowed as I lied. “Something about the thought of having a load of tests run didn’t sit well with me.”

“Does that mean you’ve decided against the testing?” Did I detect a note of disappointment in her voice?

“Didn’t say that. I haven’t decided yet. Either way, I’m not enthused about them.”

“Ah.” She nodded. “Perhaps we can help change your opinion. I’ve been asked to bring you to see the Director.”