The Girl in the Box 01 - Alone (12 page)

“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.

“How long did she leave you in there?” His eyes still appeared unreactive.

I laughed, a dark, humorless bark that rumbled through me, keeping my emotions in check behind a facade of false bravado. “Which time? There were so many. As you mentioned, I am somewhat stubborn and defiant. I was in there at least once a week. Usually for smarting off; Mom didn’t like that much.”

“How long?”

I shrugged. “An hour or two, most of the time – with the door closed on the front, so it was completely dark. And that, honestly, wasn’t so bad. It was the times when I was in there for days, those were the ones when it was bad—” The times when my stomach screamed at me because it was sick of nothing but the water that was piped in from a reservoir by a small tube. The times when I started to get lightheaded and had to sit down, where I just felt weak and near dead by the time she let me out.

If she let me out.

He grimaced, the first sign of emotion I’d seen from him since the conversation began. “What about the longest time?”

I paused, and an insane sounding laugh bubbled out of my mouth. I felt a stupid, pasted-on grin stretching my face. “A week, I think.”

His voice had grown quiet, but it was undergirded by a curiosity. “When was that?”

Silence owned me, but just for a beat. “Let’s see. After I ate something and showered, I lay down to sleep – you know, horizontally, because trying to sleep curled up in a ball inside it sucks, just FYI – and I woke up and you and Kurt were in my house. So…a few days ago.”

This time the silence was stunned. “She left you…after locking you in?”

I nodded, hoping he wouldn’t ask the dark, piteous question I’d been asking myself lately. “And I haven’t seen her since.”

That ended Zack’s questions, thank God. He said some more things after that, but I missed pretty much all of it. My head was buzzing and I couldn’t focus. I forgot that I was hungry and as soon as I could get away from him I did, leaving him in the cafeteria. He extracted a promise from me that we would talk more soon, and I didn’t argue because I didn’t have the energy.

Ever been in a fight that gets really emotional, and you may have been feeling absolutely wonderful five minutes earlier but suddenly you’re just exhausted? That was me; all my energy was shot and I dragged myself back to my dormitory. I crashed on my bed, but I didn’t fall asleep. Instead I thought about Mom again; of the last time I saw her, when she shut the door on me, even as I was screaming, hammering my palms against the steel and begging her not to – and then she peered at me through the little sliding door, her eyes looking into mine, and she said something different than the hundreds of other times she’d put me in.

“Whatever you may think, I do this all for your own good.” I wasn’t in a position to pay attention at the time (I was as distressed when I went into the box as a cat being dunked in water – I’ve seen it on TV) but her look was different than usual. Less spiteful. Less vengeful. Less pissed. I might have seen a trace of sadness in her eyes, though I didn’t recognize it at the time.

Then she shut the little door and left me in the darkness.

I thought about her again, concentrating hard, trying to focus on her as I drifted off to sleep. I awoke the next morning, an alarm going off beside the bed. I hadn’t set it, but it was blaring. I looked at the clock and realized it was timed so I didn’t miss my appointment with Dr. Sessions. Someone from the Directorate must have done it, fearing (probably rightly) that I didn’t much care if I made them wait. Probably Ariadne. That bitch.

I thought about blowing it off, but the truth is I was curious. After all, they kept telling me I was meta-human, and I believed it, but I wondered what other abilities I might have. I was hoping for flight, because that would be cool.

When I got to Dr. Sessions’s office, he was sitting behind his desk, looking at something. When he heard me enter he turned and pushed his glasses back up his nose and looked through them at me. “There you are.” He began nodding and picked up a tablet computer that sat next to the laptop on the desk. “Have a seat; I need to have you fill out this questionnaire before we begin…” He handed me a clipboard and pen, then turned to walk away. I gave him a quick smile of thanks, which caused him to back away. I sighed internally. Even when I wasn’t trying to, I could drive people away from me.

The questionnaire took an annoyingly long time and asked some invasive personal questions (“How many sexual encounters have you had in the last seven days? Two weeks? Month? Six months? Year? Five years?”) Not like it was a difficult one, since until a few days ago I’d had zero human contact outside of Mom.

There were other ones that delved into health history, how I was feeling, when was the date of my last physical (“Never!” I printed in big, bold letters), when I first noticed a difference in my abilities – and on it went for a hundred and fifty questions, covering both the important (“Do you have any known allergies?”) to the mundane (“When was your last bowel movement?”). I thought about scrawling “None of your damned business” but ultimately I just answered the questions – almost all – truthfully.

The last question – “Describe in detail any unusual abilities or skills” – gave me pause. Part of me wanted to know more, to find out what kind of meta I was. Okay, all of me wanted to know. But that was tempered by the fact that I had only been here for three days and still had zero idea of who (if anyone) I could trust. If I told them I suspected I could use my dreams to communicate with others, would that be considered some kind of power or a sign that I was slipping in the sanity department? I believed I could talk to Reed through my dreams, but it was too weird to consider normal and as yet too unconfirmed for me to know with certainty I could do it. After all, it could have been his power, not mine.

I answered the question, “Superior Strength, Speed, Agility and Intelligence” (no, I didn’t put a smiley next to the intelligence part) and left any other suspicions off. As I had filled out the form, the doctor had milled around the lab, adjusting various pieces of equipment, humming as he skittered about.

He noticed me after a minute or so, and favored me with a smile as he approached. “We’re going to do some physical tests next, then I’ll give you this – a standard, multiple choice I.Q. test – and we’ll see how you do.”

For the next three hours, he put me through my paces. I thought maybe I had pissed him off in some way, because he was not kind in his efforts to “test” me. I ran on a treadmill at the highest setting for a long time, well past the point where I was bored and into the realm of thinking of casting myself into the place where the tread meets the plastic at the back, hoping to end my life with the added benefit that perhaps the running would stop as well. It couldn’t have been an ordinary treadmill because I swear I had to be running at fifty miles an hour.

He made me breathe into a machine (to test my lung capacity), had me lift weights (I cursed him because there was no measure of how much they weighed and he refused to tell me) and hit a punching bag. Then he handed me rubber balls and had me throw them at a target on a wall at full strength, which I did (until I turned all three of them into pancakes).

“It would have been easier if you would have taken your gloves off,” he said, looking over his glasses at me.

“Sorry, Doc. Rule number four.”

A look of confusion swept over his face. He led me over to a table in the corner. “One last thing.” He bade me to sit.

“The intelligence test?”

“Two more things. First—” He reached onto the table and picked up a needle along with a strip of rubber. “I need blood.”

My eyes narrowed. “I would suggest trying your local blood bank, because you’ll get none from me.”

He didn’t smile. “In order to analyze—”

“Test what you have, Doc,” I said in a voice that I hoped didn’t allow for argument, “if none of that pans out, we’ll talk about a blood draw in the future.”

He stood there for a moment, looking like he was a broken robot, his head shaking in a twitchy fashion while he tried to come up with a response. He must have failed, because he never said anything, just tossed the I.Q. test on the table and shuffled away.

I attacked the test with a certain frustration. It was easy, and I used the pen provided to violently circle my answers on the multiple choice form. As I did, thoughts of the agents I had gotten killed kept running through my head. Zack had worked with all of them. He didn’t seem that bent out of shape by the fact they were dead.

Kurt did. That was an honest reaction. Hannegan had already disliked me; now he hated me. I circled answer D, responding to a question about square roots, bringing the pen around to give it an extra loop, and nearly tore through the paper. Whoops. Gotta be careful with super strength, I guess.

But Zack? He was more concerned about things that happened to me (an almost total stranger) instead of worrying about his co-workers being dead because of me. I came to the conclusion that he had to be planted. Like Ariadne, he was restraining his emotions, putting them in the backseat to focus on the job at hand. Had to be.

Which meant Ariadne and Old Man Winter probably told him to get close to me, because he was the nearest to my age of all their people. And hot. H-O-T. Ariadne may be dumb, but I doubted she was blind enough to miss that little fact. And Old Man Winter himself said I was more important than a hundred of their agents.

That was a harrowing boost to the ego, let me tell you. There wasn’t much on the I.Q. test about history, which was a shame because it was one of my best subjects. It wasn’t the first time in history someone’s life had been prioritized over another’s. Not even close. But when I heard him say it, it started to worry me about the Directorate.

It got me wondering if they were some sort of racial superiority group, focused on putting meta-humans into a power position. Or maybe Old Man Winter was just that screwed up in his priorities, that he could cast a hundred human lives aside without losing any sleep over it.

Or maybe he was losing sleep over it. It wasn’t like I knew him well enough to tell.

I finished the last question and looked around for the doc, but he was gone. He must have walked out while I was focused on the test. I left it on the table and walked out of the lab, heading out into the cold air thinking I might finally get that meal I had been craving since last night. A blast of windblown snow hit me in the face as I left the lab and hiked across the campus. I marveled at how smooth it looked.