I could feel the camera on me. I knew there were eyes on my skin, fingers in my mind, and it took all I had to hold myself together a few seconds more. Each breath came slower, softer, until everything was still inside me, the quiet on the surface of the river, barely moving, sluggish in summer’s heat, giving the handler what he wanted. The quiet one.
The good one.
The obedient one.
The one who never caused any problems.
And then I dove through the surface and opened myself to the raging current beneath.
2
There was no worry of not being able to breathe under the raging waters of my mind. This was my quiet place. This was my escape from the guards and doctors. From the reality that was not real.
With the constant cameras on me and the fingers of my handler palpating my mind, this disappearing act of turning inward kept me from losing my fucking mind. Visiting this deep, quiet place gave me a chance to let my mind rest from the constant barrage of think nothing, do as they want, you believe them, you trust them, this is where you need to be, think nothing, do as they want, you believe them, you trust them, this is where you need to be.
I knew my body sat on the small bed in the small room, but another part of me stood amidst the frothing mouth of the river as it kissed the sea, then the water turned into an insubstantial gray fog I could walk through as if it were mist.
Here, my hair was black as night, not the dyed blond they told me was my natural color. I pulled the braid over my shoulder, like an anchor.
A scream cut through the dark of the fog, and I spun in shock.
This was a first. I’d wandered this strange darkness alone day after day, trying to figure shit out and memorize every possible detail about the facility. No one from the outside had ever shown up, which wasn’t a surprise since the only other person I knew who could find me here was someone I would never, ever summon. My son . . . I would never risk him by trying to reach him from here. While I’d tried to find other prisoners who could meet me, it had never worked before. I wasn’t sure the others could do it, for one, and it wasn’t the sort of thing you could explain in a word or two.
A stolen word or two was all I ever got.
I knew my handler had his eyes on me.
I knew that I was watched more than any other inmate. They were waiting for me to make a mistake, or to give them something they could use. They were waiting for me to flex my proverbial muscles.
I’d seen how the other abnormals were killed, seen their lifeless bodies dragged out of their rooms after going to sleep. The handlers were the key. I was sure of it.
But I’d passed lie detector tests in my previous life, and I continued to do it now, though it was harder to fool the handlers.
Another bellow echoed through the dark space, and it deepened into a slurry of creative cursing that made me grin.
“You look like a fucking pig in a sausage skin three sizes too goddamn small!”
There was really no question about what I was doing. I sprinted in the direction of the thundering voice that belonged to the kid I’d just settled in his room. A shadowy figure lay on the floor, his cowboy boot kicking out at someone I couldn’t see.
I watched until he went still, until he stopped yelling. He wasn’t all the way here, though; the details of his body and clothes were blurred. Maybe it was a sort of semi-comatose state of mind.
Between us was another layer of fog, like a thin veil of material, gossamer and transparent enough that I was tempted.
Could I reach through it? What if I could bring him in here, with me, all the way?
Only thing I could do was try.
“Cowboy?” I called the moniker I’d given him to see if he could hear me.
His head turned, slowly, as if he couldn’t believe what his ears were telling him.
Now or never.
I reached through that thin veil of fog and grabbed his hand. There was a moment where I thought my fingers would slide through his, that I would be the ghost to his reality. But then his body stiffened and his palm was hot against mine—skin to skin—and in that instant, I yanked him into the darkness with me. How the hell was this possible? What was different about him and me?
“Holy fucking prairie dogs.” He stumbled onto his feet and into me as if I’d dragged him up out of a reverse limbo. His eyes were on mine, but they slid downward and then shot right back to my face.
I braced my arms against him and looked down, realizing the spectral version of me was still buck-naked.
“Get over it, kid. We have more problems than you getting a raging boner.”
“I—” he stammered, his eyes closing and then opening but locking onto my face.
“Listen to me: I don’t know how long we have here, or if it will ever happen again, so I need you to listen, hear me, and do exactly what the fuck I say.”
I kept my hands on his forearms. “Out there, you will call me Fiona. Here, you can call me by my real name. I am the Phoenix.”
God, to say that out loud gave me a shiver. I was the Phoenix. I was the killer that every abnormal knew and feared. But in the facility, I was the good girl, the one who conformed more than anyone else. Because I knew that they knew who I was, and if I gave them one iota of a reason, they’d kill me.
And I wasn’t
