Storm in a Teacup (38 page)

"I'm not supposed to answer your question."

"You wouldn't be here if you were doing what you're supposed to do." More coffee. The next one's in my hand without a second thought. At least this is one addiction there's no support group for. What the hell would we drink at the meetings? Booze?

There's a pause while I dig into my bagel and second cup of coffee. At this rate, I'll need the pot as well. The aroma of it suffuses the kitchen with the scent of vanilla. Sue me. I'm no coffee purist. Give me sugar and all the frou-frou frills.

"Something big's going down tomorrow. I can't tell you what."

"You mean the Mediators trying to take out all the remaining shades?"

Gryfflet starts, and his fingers stop their drumming on the kitchen table. "How do you know about that?"

"I guess that confirms it. If you get to hold stuff back, so do I." Coffee and bagels or no, I'm not going to trust anyone working with the Summit. "What I can't figure is how they're planning to find all the shades. I haven't seen more than a few together since we blew up the warehouse."

Even Mason's only found a couple at a time. I finish my bagel and rub at my eyes, a yawn splitting my face. Why am I so tired?

It's cold in here. I get up and fetch my robe from its hook on the back of the bathroom door, pulling it around me.
 

"So how are they going to do it?"

"Do what?"

"Get all the shades together."

"I can't tell you that, Ayala. They'd skin me alive."

"They're probably going to do that to me anyway," I tell him.

"They're not going to skin you."

"Fine. Jail me, strip me of my status, forbid me from patrolling, send me to train eight-year-olds how not to stick themselves with the pointy end of swords." I'd rather they flay me.

It's really cold in here.

I feel clammy, and I can see every vein in the backs of my hands.

My fingers go to my forehead and come away damp. A cramp doubles me over in my chair. Bile rises in my throat. I choke it back, swallowing hard. My skull tightens along its sutures — or at least that's how it feels.
 

Pressure builds, sending little shocks down my neck.
 

The acid in my stomach churns, and I bend in half again. My face lands on my knees. I don't trust myself to speak without vomiting. Instead I force my eyes up to meet Gryfflet's.
 

I've felt like this twice before. When I tried to leave my range and go north.
 

The chair vanishes from beneath me, and the floor rises up to slap me in the face.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

I'm not one to stare at walls.

One wall is awfully like another wall, when you get right down to it. Usually vertical, white more often than not.

It stands to reason that I wouldn't have an extensive basis for wall recognition tucked into my brain with all the different kinds of demons and that pulsing center of fear that twitches every time I think Mason's name.

But I know this wall.

It's painted gray with a hint of metallic shimmer. All the other walls here are identical, and there are more than four of them, because where I am is set up like beehive honeycomb, with hexagonal pods scrunched together in rows.
 

Recognizing this wall means that I don't have to insipidly wonder where I am.
 

It does, however, leave me with rising panic that lurks beneath the surface of my mind. It's like the metallic shimmer in the gray paint that forms a cocoon around me. Present. Hovering. Damning.

The Mediator holding cells are designed for one purpose alone: to keep people in.

Even if I did happen to get out, I wouldn't have the faintest idea where to go. Honeycomb, remember? Imagine a giant underground honeycomb the size of three football fields under the Summit building. And there are at least three layers of it. There could be people above and below me, or I could be alone.

The hallways are narrow and impossible to navigate. The hallways stretch around each holding pod. It's a geometric torture maze, meant to confuse. All the walls are the same color. No distinguishing characteristics anywhere. The only way to know where you are in relation to anything else is to have a special flashlight that reacts with the paint.
 

I don't have a one of those.
 

Did they somehow throw Mason down here? My first impulse is to believe they probably just killed him. Caught him coming back from his visit with Saturn in Forest Hills and ended him right there.

Gryfflet did this to me.

I want to know what was in that coffee. What it was that stripped me of my strength. Whatever it was made me feel exactly like I did when I tried to flee north years ago. The nausea, the cramping, the migraine.
 

Remnants of the latter still prickle at the base of my skull. I ignore it.

Nothing around me indicates the time of day or even that I'm still on the same planet. Though since I can't go very far in any direction from Nashville, I'd have to be in a low-hanging space ship. Sort of pointless.

The first time I went through this, I passed out and woke up more than thirty-six hours later. If that's true, the Mediators must have put me down here to make sure I don't interfere with their plan to take out the shades.

I'm almost flattered that they think I could interfere enough to really fuck it up.

I'm still wearing my own clothes, the same gray linen dress pants and lighter gray blouse I wore to work and subsequently fell asleep in. Both blouse and pants are rumpled, and looking down at myself I can't help but wonder if I wasn't a little prescient with my choice of clothing.
 

There's no sound down here but my breathing. I halt my lungs, holding my breath. The quiet wraps around me, muffling me, changing the world to deafness.

You never think about how much sound exists in the day to day world until it's removed. No cars, no buzz of electronics, no whoosh of fans or air conditioning. No giggles or hum of conversation from the streets below or clicks of the refrigerator turning on. No patter of feet in the hall or whooshing roar of an overhead plane.

Silence.

There's nothing really golden about this.

All silence is gray.

I don't know how much more of this I can take.

That's probably what they want, to come back to find me gibbering in an obtuse corner of this hexagonal hell, begging for their forgiveness and pulling at the hems of their shirts like a forlorn child.

I pull my legs in to sit cross-legged and straighten my back.
 

Not this girl.

There are no doors in this cage, so it comes as a bit of a surprise when the wall behind me opens.

It breaks my carefully constructed composure, and I spin around on my ass and skitter backward to face whoever's entering.

Gryfflet. And Alamea.

I re-cross my legs in front of me and place my hands on my knees.

"Welcome to my little box. Would you like to try a combo meal?"

"Ayala," Gryfflet starts to talk, but he shuts up as soon as I turn my eyes on him.

"Nice trick with the door," I say to Alamea. Maybe the metallic shimmer isn't paint after all. I never really thought about the extent of witch involvement with the Summit. I think from here on out, it'll factor more prominently into how I approach my job.

That's assuming I get to keep my job and my head attached to my body.

Both of which feel increasingly unlikely.

I sit back and wait for Alamea to say something like it's my own fault I'm in here, that I brought this on myself, that the Mediators are sullied because of my abhorrent behavior.

Instead she just looks down at me from her height of over six feet. I somehow don't care that she's trying to make me feel small.
 

They have to say something, don't they? There's not much of a chance they came down here just to shame me with their eyes for an hour. I start counting seconds. The only sound is that of three sets of lungs churning through oxygen.

When I get to seventy-three, Alamea breaks the silence. "You're coming with us now."

I don't respond, and I don't move.
 

Alamea nods at Gryfflet.

The pain in my head explodes.

No other sensation registers. When the spikes moving up and down my neck subside enough for me to breathe, I feel hands, strong hands. They're clasped around my forearms, holding me upright.

I take a deep breath and try to make out the murmur of sound.

The pain detonates again.

I wake on my side. My eyes flutter open, and my eyelashes brush against something. Fabric? I'm blindfolded.

My hands are bound around the back of my right knee. The left one tingles with the pulse of lost circulation where it's sandwiched between my two legs. The floor moves beneath me, rocking me sideways.

Not the floor. I'm in a moving vehicle.

Where are they taking me?

An itchy tickle intrudes on my upper lip. I wrinkle my nose and feel something on the surface of my skin crack. My tongue flicks out.

Dried blood.
 

My head feels like my brain's spinning about in my skull. I have another concussion. Fucking Gryfflet. I'm lucky he didn't give me an aneurysm.
 

I can't take another one of those pain-quakes he used to knock me out. The vehicle is slowing already. If he hits me again, I'll be useless.

There's only one solution I can think of. I play dead.

When I was an MIT, they taught us all these relaxation exercises. I thought they were mostly bullshit at the time, but they drilled us with them so much that I couldn't forget them if I tried. I concentrate on breathing deeply, evenly.
 

In my mind, I'm a daffodil just starting to bloom. The sun warms my petals, fills me with energy. I draw water from the earth, feel it course through me to give me strength and life, to help me turn the light of the sun to sustenance.

My breathing slows, air flows. The pumping of my heart decreases to a thub-thub, thub-thub, thub-thub. I can feel the blood in my veins, the anxious pressure fading to smooth rushing, unhindered by nervousness or fear.

Maybe this isn't such bullshit after all.

I flex my hands once, imagining them as withering leaves. My mind pushes water into them. I imagine them turning from wrinkled yellow to the bright backlit green gold of new growth.

The tingling stops, followed by the pins and needles that indicate my left hand is returning to life.

We're slowing more, rolling across gravel. I don't have to see to know we're at Miller's Field.

I was wrong about them wanting to keep me from interfering.

They're using me in this plan to kill the shades.
 

I'm not a wild card to be shut away in a holding cell until it's over. I'm the key to whatever they're planning.

And Gryfflet's in on it.

Gryfflet knows about Mason.

My heart expands. THUB-thub-thub. I am the daffodil again. The sun and the water from the earth calm me.

It works.
 

Barely.

My body rocks as the van pulls to a stop.

My insides twist with fevered hope and fear braided together like tangled roots.

Mason could still be alive.

He's the one who's rallied all the other shades.

I might be the bait.