Robert Crane - Alone

“I don’t want to stay here any more,” I said. “I’m ready to leave and join you.”

He shook his head again. “Sorry, but you can’t do that. I can’t protect you right now, not from Wolfe. Soon, but not right now.”

“I just…” I crinkled my eyes, closing them as tight as I could. “I just want to get out of here. Out of town. Away from everything and everyone.” I took a breath. “I read a book about towns in western South Dakota, and it had pictures; they were gorgeous, green and mountainous. I want to see mountains, Reed, and beaches, and anything but this gawdawful snow. It’s so dim and dark all the time and I hate it…”

“This is not a problem you can run away from,” he said with a look of sadness. “Wolfe is relentless.”

“He doesn’t know where I am now, and he can’t know where I am from here on if I’m careful. My mom dodged these people for years. He’s not a psychic and he’s not infallible.”

“You don’t know Wolfe. He’s lived for thousands of years and he uses time to his advantage. You’re right: you’d likely make it out of the Minneapolis area, maybe even out of the state and the country, but he’d track you down eventually.”

He wore a look of pity and I felt something sharp inside that woke up my defenses. I didn’t know Reed any better than the Directorate people. I composed myself, pasting a smile that was as fake as any I’d ever worn. “Fine. All right.”

“I can tell you’re hurting…”

“You don’t know anything about me,” I snapped. Not sure where that came from, but I had a suspicion.

“Not much, but I can tell you’re blaming yourself for what happened to those Directorate agents.”

“I have to go,” I replied, as brusque as I could make it. “I have to wake up. They’re going to test me in the morning.”

“Just make sure you—” His words faded as I struggled and forced my way out of the dream. I didn’t wonder until later what he was going to say.

I woke up just after one in the morning. Except for a few minor aches, my injuries from the battle with Wolfe had healed themselves without much sign of anything odd. I realized I had gone to bed without dinner and that I hadn’t eaten much lunch the day before either. I left my dormitory room (always fully dressed, remember?) and wandered the halls. I didn’t hold much hope that the cafeteria would be open at this hour, but I doubted I would have a problem stealing some food.

Besides, was it really stealing? They would have given it to me if they’d been open. I came through the entrance to the cafeteria and found a few lights on, scattered throughout the place. Spotlights outside the massive windows showed snow was lightly falling outside. The smell of cleaning solutions hung in the air and when coupled with the dimness it gave the place the vague sense of what I’d imagine a hospital to feel like.

A lone figure was sitting in the corner where the two glass walls met, staring out into the dark. I crept up quietly until I got close enough to realize it was Zack, then started to tiptoe away. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, least of all him.

“I can see your reflection,” he called out. He turned, revealing a series of bandages over his nose with a piece of metal over it to hold it in place for healing. “I figured you’d be hungry sooner or later.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Hungry and tired, so I think I’ll just get something and go…”

“Why don’t you sit down?” His eyes didn’t let me retreat. They were watching me and I felt almost as helpless as when Wolfe’s black eyes were on me. I felt myself lower into the seat opposite him and he stared back at me as I did. I had the nasty feeling I knew what was coming next, but like a scene in a horror movie you don’t want to watch but can’t look away from, I was stuck in place.

“I want to talk about the basement.” He was still watching me. I didn’t like it. I hated it. I despise feeling trapped, and trapped I was. I hoped this would be quick – I hoped it was already over, actually, that maybe he didn’t see as much as I thought he had, that he’d not bothered to report it to Ariadne or Old Man Winter, and definitely not Kurt.

“About the fight with Wolfe?” I tried to keep the hope out of my voice.

“You know that’s not what I mean. Before him. What I saw…” His voice trailed off.

I remained silent. In a failed effort to be casual, I focused really, really hard on my left middle fingernail and started counting backward from one hundred.

“Sienna?” He repeated my name twice more in a bid to get my attention.

“I don’t want to talk about this.” My voice was quiet, but firm. Maybe a hint of a crack.

“You need to talk to somebody about it.”

“No, I don’t.” I could feel myself get defensive, pissed. “I’m pretty much a full grown woman at this point, and I can make my own decisions about what I want to talk about and don’t, and this falls into the territory of ‘don’t’.”

“You were locked in a house for over ten years and you never escaped? With your mother gone to work all day, every day?” He shook his head. “I’ve been asking myself since we met how a mother could keep a kid in check that long, even if they were the most passive, easygoing person on the face of the planet—”

“I gather you’re saying I’m not—”

“—let alone a stubborn, willful child that probably resisted from day one, just bucking for freedom any which way she could—”

I pursed my lips. “You make me sound like a wild horse.”

“Let’s go with that analogy,” he said, nodding, which broke our eye contact. “How does someone domesticate a horse?”

“They break it,” I said with a hint of defiance. “Do I look broken to you?”

“Looks don’t mean a thing. She did break you, didn’t she?”

I blew air out my lips and stared out the window at the snowfall. “I broke rules all the time,” I said in a tone of forceful denial. “She wasn’t home during the day, and I could do anything I wanted—”

“Except leave the house.”

The wind outside kicked up and the snow started falling sideways. I hadn’t seen that before. “No, I didn’t leave the house, but I looked outside plenty of times.”

He leaned across the table, making a bid to recapture my attention from the snow drifts that I allowed to distract me. “When she caught you breaking the rules, how did she punish you?”

I was stronger than him – I could have knocked him out and broken through a window and been gone. Gone from the Directorate and gone from this state and gone from my sorry little example of a stunted life. Tomorrow I could be living somewhere else and no one would catch me.

It was funny, because the cafeteria was hundreds of feet long and hundreds of feet wide, and the nearest table was ten steps away, and yet I felt like I was trapped in an enclosed space; it was just like…

“Yeah.” My acknowledgment came out in a voice of surrender. “That was how.”

In the corner of our basement stands a box. Made of hardened steel plates an inch thick, welded together, it’s a little over six feet tall, about two feet wide and two feet deep, when it stands long-end up. It opens like a coffin, along the longest plane. There’s a sliding door on that side, about two inches tall and four inches wide, just enough to see out of – or into – the box. There are hinges on one side and a heavy locking peg on the other.

I knew when Zack saw it that he would figure it out. But it was worse when he opened it.

“She didn’t let you out to…do your business?”

I shook my head. But he already knew the answer to that, because the smell inside it was horrific; it made the whole basement stink of rot when it was open.