Reese blinked in the dark. She was facing the center of the basement. The slivers of light that shone through the floorboards above weren’t enough to cut the gloom, but they gave her an idea of where she was.
“They should be awake again.” The voice came from a woman, but it wasn’t the woman who had come downstairs before.
“We’ll go down and check.” That was the woman from before. It had to be Torres.
“You want me to go?” Reese thought the man speaking was Wilson.
“No,” said Torres. “You stay up here and keep an eye on the boys. I don’t want them near the kids again. Griffin and I will go.”
The door opened and Reese lay still, her pulse speeding up as Torres and Griffin came downstairs. Reese heard a clunk as a box was set on the ground. The needles. A couple more thumps sounded like plastic bottles. Reese heard the women walk away from her; they were checking on Amber or David first.
“They must have really clocked him,” Griffin said. “His face is still bruised and he’s still out.”
“We don’t know how fast they heal,” Torres said.
“I should examine him. You can’t just give a kid a concussion and then dope him up and expect him to be okay.”
“Go ahead. I’ll check the others.”
Reese listened to Torres walk across the basement. She heard a moan from Amber. “This one’s almost up,” Torres said. Her footsteps came over to Reese, and a moment later Reese felt the woman nudge her shoulder. “How about you?”
Reese held still for a moment, trying to stretch her consciousness toward Torres. But the woman was barely touching her, and Reese’s brain was still so fuzzy from the drugs that all she got was a vague sensation of hardness, like a shell. She opened her eyes. Torres was looking directly at her.
“I knew you were awake,” Torres said. “Dinnertime.” She pulled Reese up to a seated position as easily as if Reese weighed nothing. “I’m gonna take off the tape, but if you make any noise, I’ll put it right back on. Understand?”
Reese nodded, and Torres ripped off the tape. Reese let out a short cry of pain. Torres considered Reese.
“I’m gonna cut your hands free so you can feed yourself. You aren’t gonna do anything else.”
Reese shook her head. Her lips were cracked and dry. “Water?”
“I got that too.” Torres turned Reese around. Reese heard the flick of a pocketknife, and then the plastic bindings were gone.
Her arms ached as she brought her hands in front of herself. Torres opened a water bottle and held it up to Reese’s mouth. She reached for it with numb hands, trying to hold it in place. The liquid sloshed over her chin but it was the best thing she had ever tasted in her entire life. She sucked at the bottle greedily, swallowing as much as she could. When she was finished, her hands were tingling, the blood surging into her fingers.
Torres unwrapped an energy bar and handed it to her. “Eat up,” she said, and then went across the room to Amber.
Reese ate the bar. It tasted like plastic coated with peanut butter, but she wasn’t about to complain. Even though it smelled disgusting, her stomach still growled. Torres had left the water bottle with her, and when she was finished inhaling the energy bar she picked it up and drank the last few drops, holding her head back to drain it. The food and water pushed away some of the fog in her mind, and she watched as Torres gave Amber the same treatment. David was still being examined by Griffin and hadn’t moved.
Torres glanced across the basement at Reese. “You finished?”
“Yeah,” Reese said hoarsely.
Amber’s face was in shadow but she said, “Reese? Are you okay?”
“Shut up,” Torres said almost automatically. “Eat your dinner.”
“I’m fine,” Reese said anyway.
Torres crossed the room in a flash, leaning over her. “I said no talking.” Torres pulled a plastic strip from a receptacle on her belt. “Hold up your hands.”
“Wait,” Reese said, desperation spiking in her. “Please. I have to—let me go to the bathroom. Please.”
Torres’s expression gave nothing away, and Reese didn’t think she would say yes. But at the last second she nodded shortly. “Fine. I’ll take you.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Griffin, you got it under control?”
“Yeah. This one’s gonna be out for a while longer. I’ll watch E.T.”
“All right.” Torres reached for Reese’s arm and hauled her to her feet. She wobbled. “No funny business, Holloway.”
The sound of her last name startled her. “I know,” she said quickly. Torres led her toward the steps, keeping a viselike grip on her arm. Reese stumbled up the stairs, nauseated from having eaten the energy bar too quickly, and Torres’s consciousness began to seep through her hand into Reese.
Torres didn’t feel exactly like the male Blue Base soldiers. Reese remembered the sensation of something being off about them, as if their brains were so wired for combat readiness that they were unable to manage ordinary thought patterns. Torres had the same dense physical interior landscape, as if her muscles were made of Kevlar and her bones out of steel, but the feeling of wrongness was different. Unlike the chaotic consciousness of the male soldiers, Torres’s brain was sharp as a blade, but it didn’t feel normal. It felt speedy. Too fast for her own good.
Reese didn’t have time to dwell on it. Torres pushed her up the stairs into the kitchen, a 1980s time warp with stained linoleum on the floor, a rickety wooden table, and appliances that didn’t look like they had worked in years. All the windows had their curtains drawn, and the lack of light behind them made Reese believe it was nighttime. Wilson, who was standing at the back door with a machine gun in his hands, was surprised to see them. Torres said nothing to him and only propelled Reese through the kitchen into a dimly lit hallway, where she nudged open a door with the toe of her boot.
Torres came into the bathroom too. She let Reese go, but stood with her back to the door. “Do your business,” Torres ordered.
Reese’s face reddened, but she didn’t bother to ask for privacy. She went to the toilet and did what she had to do. “What day is it?” she asked. “How long was I out?”
“I told you no talking,” Torres growled.
Reese flushed the toilet and glanced at Torres out of the corner of her eye. She was hardened, but she didn’t look too much older than Reese. Maybe she was in her twenties. Reese wondered how Torres had gotten to her position. The men were clearly afraid of her. Reese figured she should probably be afraid of her too, but she couldn’t forget that Torres had been the one to stop the soldiers from assaulting them.
Reese turned on the sink and found a bar of yellowing soap on the counter. She washed her hands, running her fingers tentatively over the welts from the plastic restraints. Above the sink, the mirror on the wall was cracked. Her face was sickly pale, her hair tangled, her eyes bloodshot. There was a raw red line in a rectangular shape around her mouth where the tape had been ripped off. She saw Torres watching her.
“It’s Tuesday night,” Torres said.
Reese briefly caught Torres’s eye in the mirror. Why had she answered? Reese rinsed the soap off her hands while she worked out what exactly that meant. She, David, and Amber had been taken from the UN on Monday just before noon. They had been gone for thirty-six hours by now. There was no sound of traffic outside, so Reese doubted they were still in New York City. Maybe Torres had mixed feelings about taking them—or at least about keeping them here, wherever they were. She decided to push her luck.
“Where are we?” Reese asked.
“Doesn’t matter.”
There was a rusty towel ring dangling empty on the wall near the sink, but no towels in sight. Reese flicked the water from her hands. “You’re from Blue Base,” Reese said.
Torres reached for her and spun her around, her fingers digging into Reese’s shoulder bones. Reese swallowed a cry of pain as Torres glared at her. “No. Talking.”
Even though Eres Tilhar had told Reese it was against Imrian ethics to access someone else’s consciousness without their permission, she decided this situation was an exception. She kept her gaze on Torres’s face as she reached out with her mind. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but she knew she had to make use of every advantage she had. Torres and the other Blue Base soldiers obviously had been genetically modified, but they
