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Then Clive loomed out of an open doorway, filling the hall in front of us, and I no longer needed to question what she might be frightened of. The most terrifying thing in the world was standing
right there
, brows raised in seemingly innocent question, eyes cold enough to make it clear that there was nothing innocent about him.

This was the man who'd hurt Audrey. Who'd ordered Amber killed. I wanted to kill him for what he'd done. I wanted to run like hell and never look back. The conflict was enough to turn my stomach.

“Funny thing, doc,” he said. “I went by the liquor closet to check on my new pretty thing, see how she was settling in, and she wasn't there. But Catherine was more than happy to tell me about how you'd swept through and carried my pretty thing away. I checked her records. You said she'd already been given all her vaccinations, and she's not due for a physical. So what are you taking my toys for?”

The skin around Jill's eyes tightened, a slight, involuntary betrayal of her panic. Whoever had been willing to send her here and risk her life hadn't considered that some people are just shitty liars. There's no two ways about it. “I don't suppose you'd allow for doctor-patient privilege?” she asked.

Clive's eyes narrowed. “Oh, now you're just
asking
for it,” he rumbled.

“Um, actually, I am,” I said. Clive's head swung around as he transferred his gaze to me. I broadened my brogue and spoke faster as I said, “I'm asking for it, not her. I asked her not to tell anyone. I was embarrassed, and it's been a while since I've had reliable access to a doctor, and I didn't want the other girls to make fun of me. Not that they're nasty or anything, I mean, they sort of are, because I'm new so they're standoffish and everything, you know how girls are…”

“Sweetheart, I like you, and I'd like to get to know you a great deal better, but that doesn't mean you somehow get access to a dimension where I am possessed of infinite patience.” Clive stepped closer to me, looming like a mountain in my path. It was just this side of terrifying.

I swallowed hard, and asked, in a squeaky whisper, “Do you promise not to get mad if I tell you?”

“No. But I promise I
will
get mad if you don't.”

“Um.” I slanted a glance at Jill. I didn't need to fake my concern, just magnify it until it seemed like borderline panic. Returning my attention to Clive, I said, “We were on the road for sort of a long time, and we tried to keep clean, but hygiene wasn't a top priority, and my, um, bits were, you know, starting to itch, and…”

“Are you saying you had a yeast infection?” he asked.

My cheeks flared red. It was nice to know that certain unwanted aspects of my upbringing—like my tendency to blush any time a man mentioned my genitalia—could still come in handy. “Yes,” I said. “I didn't want to tell you, because well, you're a man, and men don't always want to think about that sort of thing.”

“Real men aren't that easily disturbed, sweetheart.” Clive reached out and cupped my chin in his hand. It was an almost tender gesture, for all that it was intensely proprietary; he wasn't just offering comfort, he was reminding me that out of all the men in the world, he was the only one allowed to touch me. “I'm sorry you were all itchy and sad. Did the doc take care of it for you?”

“She gave me a pill, and some ointment that I put on my, um, you know, and I'm supposed to go see her again in a week, to make sure everything is healing up okay.”

Clive glanced to Jill, who nodded. She was doing a better job of hiding her relief than she had of hiding her dismay, maybe because we weren't out of the woods yet.

“It should clear up easily, but I want to keep an eye on it, just to be sure,” she said. “Those infections can cause extreme discomfort, and that sort of thing is disruptive.”

“Not to mention painful,” said Clive. He looked back to me, giving my chin a squeeze before he let me go. I took a half step backward, fighting the urge to scrub at my skin until all traces of his touch were eliminated. “I understand why you might have thought you were doing the right thing. Some men are awfully squeamish about perfectly natural things.”

I relaxed a little more. “Yeah, that's—”

His open hand caught me across my right cheek, hard enough that my head snapped to the side before gravity caught me and pulled me to the floor, where I landed in a heap of limbs and agonizing pain. I raised a hand to feel my jaw, tracing the spot where the skin was already hot and swollen.

Clive loomed over me, and there was nothing of kindness or sympathy in him now. This man was not my friend. He was my jailer, and hoped to one day be my lover—but that wasn't the right word, was it? The stallion doesn't love the mare. He only mounts her. He hoped to one day be my
master
, and anything more than that was just so much romantic nonsense.

“Never lie to me again,” he said, in that same calmly measured tone. “I don't care if you have diarrhea so bad you can't feel your ass, when I ask you what's wrong, you tell me. I am an understanding man. I am a patient man. I am a man who knows that we are all lucky enough to be in the possession of bodies—beautiful, temperamental bodies that sometimes do things we didn't expect. But I am not a man who can forgive liars, or those who sneak around behind my back. Do we have an accord?”

“Yes.” I didn't have to work to whisper this time: My voice refused to rise above a harsh rasp. I just had to hope Clive was cocky enough to take my fury for regret.

“Good,” he said. He turned to Jill, who flinched. He sighed. “I'm not going to strike you. You did a doctor's duty, and I should be grateful. I
will
be reducing your rations for the next three days, to remind you of who's in charge here. Nothing more than that. You can relax, doc, and you can treat her again next week. I want to be sure that nothing harms my newest guest.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“The CDC's been sniffing around. Not close enough to worry about, but close enough that if you fuck with me, I'll leave you for them to find. In pieces. Maybe that'll send them a warning about getting underfoot.” He turned back to me. “Feeling better?”

“Yes, sir,” I squeaked, and my voice was so much like Jill's that I was ashamed.

He knew it, too. He laughed as he turned and walked off down the hall, moving with the calm, self-satisfied stride of a man who knew exactly what he wanted out of life, and was confident in his ability to get it. I stayed where I was until he had gone around the corner. Then, slowly, I pushed myself back up to my feet and stood. My knees were shaking as the adrenaline began draining from my veins, leaving me feeling weak and terrified.

“Still want to wait for your friend?” asked Jill in a low voice.

“More than ever,” I said. “We can't leave him here.”

“Then we're going to have to move,” she said. “Come on.” She resumed her passage back down the hall. There was nothing I could do but follow her.

T
he girls on my work crew were still in the liquor room. They shot me suspicious looks when I came back in. A few smirked at the bruise blooming on my cheek, apparently content with the mischief their tattletale ways had wrought. I wanted to hate them for what they'd done. I couldn't work up the energy. Clive had me shaken and cowed after one encounter in the hall and one show of force. How many encounters had these women suffered through? How many times had the hand risen for them? I couldn't hate them for being the victims he'd trained them to be. I couldn't save them either. Maybe there was a time when I would have thought leaving them behind was punishment enough, but if that was so, then I hated the me who would have felt that way. She had no charity.

I had charity. I had buckets of the stuff. I also had a bruise on my face and a spike of cold ice in my stomach, and all I knew about my future was that I was getting out of here. One way or another, I was getting out of here.

The dinner bell rang. We put down our bottles and our lists and moved on to the cafeteria, leaving the guards to lock up the liquor. It was a short walk from the room where we'd been working to the food line; we were the first ones there. Piles of trays flanked the door. I picked one up. Dinner wasn't likely to be inspiring—fish, potatoes, and steamed greens—but it would fill my belly until morning, and that was what mattered.

One of the women from my crew positioned herself next to me in the line. “He only hit you once, huh?” she asked, a thin veil of friendly concern stretched across a great chasm of greedy nosiness. “That's pretty good. Usually he really goes to town for the first offense. Sasha lost a tooth. She'll never sneak cookies back to her quarters again.”

None of the girls on the crew had visibly missing teeth. My fear of Clive increased. He knew how to hit so any permanent injuries would be concealable: That spoke to special training, and special training often came with increased pain tolerance. There had always been a question, at the back of my mind, of whether he'd come from a gang or military background. I was finally ready to cast my vote with “military,” probably United States Marine, where he would've learned how to hit and how to block and most importantly, how to conduct his life with the sort of ruthless discipline that would have been utterly necessary when he was seizing control of the Maze. He looked to be in his late thirties, too young to have been here before the Rising, but this community clearly stretched back that far; a raw recruit in the beginning, then, fresh out of basic training—or whatever the jarheads called it—and following his platoon into the uncertain dangers of the zombie apocalypse.

I was willing to bet that if I pulled the records for military units dispatched to the California-Oregon border during the Rising I'd find him, smaller, skinnier, and less hewed out of the living flesh of some distant mountain, with a little more exposed skin and a few less scars. Desertion had been
easy
during the Rising. Every nation in the world had been finding members of their military scattered around in farmhouses and shopping malls since the dead began to rise, because all the media we'd had to go by had insisted that playing warlord was the only way to win. Build your walls high enough and leave the rest of the world to burn. Fuck 'em all, they sent us out here to die, that had been the philosophy of the deserter.

In his own way, Clive was no different from the laughing, milk-pale girls in the showers, the ones who'd grown up inside the compound, never seeing the sun. This place had become his world during the Rising, and he'd somehow risen to the position of heir apparent. Maybe he'd become leader the old-fashioned way, waiting for his old mentor to die and then stepping up. Or maybe he'd gotten tired of standing in the shadows and arranged for a quick, brutal assassination. Come to think of it, that was the old-fashioned way too. Everything was fair in love and dictatorship.

“He only hit me once, yes,” I said primly, sliding my tray along the counter to the milk and desserts. Blackberry trifle again. There were days when I was astonished we didn't all piss purple, the lot of us. “Not too hard. He fancies me, and I was just trying to make sure I wasn't going to be too sick to be of use. I don't suppose he's too thrilled with the folks who made him do that.”

“Obedience—”

“Obedience has to be learnt, sure, but do you really think of Clive as the sort of man who
enjoys
beating a defenseless woman because she didn't know he needed to be informed about her itchy vag?” I gave her a withering look as I picked up my tray. “I'd hoped we could be friends. Now I'm not sure that would be a smart choice on my part. You're clearly the sort who spend all their time looking for an opening, and I have better things to do than spend every waking moment watching my back. So I'll offer you this olive branch: Leave me the fuck alone, and I shan't start watching you for things to tattle about the way that you've clearly been watching me.”

Her mouth hung open as I turned and walked away from her. I didn't stop. This was a calculated gamble, and one I needed to have pay off if I was going to get the freedom to go looking for Ben. Convince them that spying on me was not only bad for them, it was counter to their best interests, and I might be able to start moving around this godforsaken place without the fear they'd go running to Daddy the second I stepped out of the room. Part of that was making sure they thought of me as the biggest threat going, next to Clive himself.

I sat with my back to them and waited. Clive was watching us, I knew that: He didn't generally grace the cafeteria with his presence, but he had his ways, and made appearances when he felt something needed to be defused. I'd seen several small fights break out between the other girls, one of which had ended with a broken nose. That had summoned him, all right—summoned him to kiss the winner and tell her he loved a girl with spirit. They hadn't gone after me thus far, but I'd been playing meek and keeping my head down. Maybe more importantly, Clive hadn't gone at me before. Oh, he'd pushed me during our first meeting, but I didn't get the feeling that counted for these girls. That had been an… introduction, almost, the sort of thing that said “hello, welcome to the neighborhood.” Now that he'd written a bruise across my face like proof that I was no longer the new girl, I was fair game.

They were good, these Maze girls: I barely heard the scrape of chair legs being pushed back on the tile floor, and I heard that much honestly only because I was pretending to chew, lifting an empty fork methodically to my mouth over and over again. I steeled myself for what I was about to do. If Clive didn't take this as well as I was hoping, I might be seeing Jill again sooner than expected, as a patient. But I had to try. If I wanted to be free to look for Ben, I had to try.

The lead girl's hand was barely an inch from my shoulder when I whipped around and buried my fork in her leg. She howled, mouth forming a perfect “o” of surprise that snapped closed when my fist slammed into her jaw and sent her crashing over backward. It was a textbook takedown, and I should have been proud of myself, but there wasn't time, there's
never
time when a real fight is going on. Seven girls on my work crew, and six of them set against me—unfair odds, even with that first girl on the floor. She was between them and me, and that was good. The dawning rage on their faces was less good.

I kicked my chair back as I stood, grabbing the second chair at the table and flinging it into the center of their cluster. I wasn't aiming to hit anyone, and I didn't; the chair sailed past them to clatter harmlessly against the wall. But it
distracted
them for a precious few seconds—long enough for me to pick up my tray and slam it against the face of the next girl in the line. Sasha, I thought it was, and going by the sickening crunching sound the tray made on impact, she might wind up missing a few more teeth after today.

At least their cluster reassured me that I was doing the right thing, and I hadn't just put a fork in someone who was coming to extend an olive branch. Most people don't bring a gang with them when they want to make peace.

A hand grabbed my hair. One of them had managed to flank me, getting into my blind spot while I was distracted with hammering poor Sasha. That was fine. The thing about going into the field with long hair is that the body learns to channel less attention into that sort of pain. I reached back, grabbed the wrist attached to the hand holding me, and twisted until I heard something snap. A girl howled. Another girl slammed her head into my midsection, sending me stumbling backward until my ass hit the table. That was convenient. I let myself rock back farther, shifting my weight onto my elbows, and slammed a foot into the face of each of the two girls coming after me. One of them yelped and staggered backward, her nose gushing blood.

This was it: the moment when Clive would get involved if he was going to save them from me. I knew he wasn't going to save me from them. Scenes like this one had probably played out a thousand times before, each unfolding in its own unique configuration, but with one constant—the new girl at the center, fighting for her place in the pack. Well, I didn't
want
a place in the pack. I was going to kick, claw, and sucker punch my way to outsider status, and if they didn't want to let me have it, I'd settle for being the biggest, baddest bitch on the block. The one no one questioned, because she might nut them if they did.

Part of me understood that I was just making myself more appealing to Clive, and increasing the chance he'd try to run me down when I got away. I shunted that part aside and kept on fighting. Playing the weak sister wasn't going to save my neck, and if my greatest fear was being too attractive to a man who wanted to destroy me, well, I could learn how to cope. Coping was a skill I was becoming increasingly practiced at.

The girl who'd tried to chat me up in line screamed and ran for me. I waited until she was almost close enough to do some real damage. Then I straightened my hand and aimed it like a knife at the soft center of her throat, letting her momentum do the rest as she slammed herself into my rigid fingers. The jolt traveled up my arm to the elbow, forcing me to pull my hand back. I folded it into a fist, waiting for the next blow.

There wasn't one. She wobbled, going pale, before she folded up and toppled to the floor, where she joined the other three girls that I'd managed to knock down. The three who were still standing hung back, glancing at me and at each other, like they were trying to figure out what happened next.

What happened next was I flipped my hair nonchalantly back, lowered my fist, and asked, “Did you lot want to go again? Because I can. Or we can wipe up all this blood before somebody amplifies and we have to explain the situation to Clive.”

Slow applause started from the doorway. I turned, unsurprised to see Clive standing there, one shoulder against the doorframe, clapping with what seemed like genuine enthusiasm. I took a chance and dropped a quick curtsy in his direction. To my surprise and traitorous pleasure, he laughed.

“That was brilliant,” he said, starting across the cafeteria toward me. He cast a hard look toward the girls on the floor, shaking his head. “Some people never learned the first rule of starting trouble. Don't do it unless you're absolutely sure of the final result.”

“Aw, go easy on them,” I said, trying to make my tone light and flirtatious to cover my genuine concern. “They were coming at me six to one. They had good reason to think they'd win, don't you think?”

“And yet there's not a scratch on you, and they're bleeding on my floor.” Clive stepped over the unfortunate Sasha, reaching out to smooth my hair back from my face with the knuckles of one hand. I didn't shudder or pull away. For that alone I should have received some sort of an award. “You have hidden depths.”

“I grew up on a sheep farm,” I said. “Turns out being surrounded by herbivores big enough to amplify will give you a bloody good motivation to study in your self-defense classes.” There hadn't been a sheep farm within twenty miles of Drogheda, but there was no reason to tell him that. Let his preconceived notions of where I'd come from direct his reactions, and let me keep a slice of the truth in reserve, for when I might genuinely need it.

“I like that in a girl,” he said, and lowered his head, and kissed me.

This was a test. I
knew
it was a test, and even knowing that, it was virtually impossible to stop myself from tensing up and pulling away. He wasn't gentle. He wasn't rapacious, either, but as I hadn't consented to what he probably considered a “romantic gesture,” the distinction didn't matter. What mattered was making him believe I was enjoying myself. I forced my shoulders to drop and my jaw to relax, pretending as hard as I could that I was kissing Audrey, and that this was all some sort of surreal dream that needed to end as soon as possible.

His tongue touched my teeth. I gasped despite myself. And Clive pulled away, eyeing me thoughtfully. For one terrible moment, I thought it had all been for nothing: that my inability to pretend to enjoy kissing a man I hated was going to blow the whole gig. Then he smiled.

“Poor thing,” he said. “I know this is moving awfully fast for you. I told you, I'm not going to push, and no one is going to touch you until your contraception implant runs out. But when it does, I promise, we're going to make beautiful babies together.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw two of the girls from my work group glaring—at me, not at him. What I had was what they all wanted. Good. They wouldn't betray me when they saw me sneaking out, then, not if it meant I might be dragged back and beaten into going along with Clive's plans for me. Better, far, to let me exit quietly, and let Clive find a new favorite who actually wanted his meaty hands all over her body.