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“No,” she mumbles reluctantly.
“Cheater. Get out of here. You’re not supposed to be in here, you know that. It’s dangerous.”
She goes to climb out of the cart but stumbles. One of the guards reaches down to help her out, to stand her up until she’s there in front of us, vibrant with flushed cheeks, a clean face and hair and a daddy out there somewhere looking for her.
My throat begins to close up, making it hard to breathe.
“My mom lets me in here all the time,” she whines.
“Yeah, when it’s empty and it’s just you and her. Seriously, sweetie, scram. Your dad will kill me—“
The doorway is filled with a tall man with brown hair, only one hand and brilliant blue eyes. Eyes the exact shade of the little girls.
It’s her dad and my eyes are on fire.
“Taylor, have you seen Beth?” he asks.
Taylor silently points one stern finger at her face.
The man sighs with relief. “Come on,” he tells her, his voice a
She walks toward him reluctantly, taking her sweet time. “But I was going to help Taylor with the prisoners.”
“You’re eight years old, baby. Let’s worry more about taking your bath and less about becoming a warden.”
“Called it,” I breathe, watching her go.
“What?” Ryan whispers.
I ignore him. I keep my eyes glued on the girl. On her dad.
“Hey, brat,” Taylor calls after her, holding up a small, rustic doll that had been in the cart with her. It’s ratty from use. Kind of an ugly thing. “Don’t forget Little Miss, Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong here.”
The girl smiles brightly, giggling as she runs back to him to get her doll.
“Why do you call her that?”
“You don’t know that song?”
She shakes her head, hugging her doll.
Taylor looks at the dad sadly. “Come on, man. You aren’t even raising her right.”
“Blow me,” the dad deadpans.
“What does that mean?” the little girl asks Taylor.
“It means don’t repeat it. It also means Music Education in the rec room in an hour, you hear me?”
She smiles happily up at him. “Yes!”
“Alright, beat it.”
She goes to leave with her dad, but she casts one last look over her shoulder at us. I see Trent, a tall blond blur in the corner of my watery eyes, waving to her. She lifts her hand to wave back but then her eyes catch on me and she hesitates. She stares at me, her sweet little girl face searing into my brain as she clutches that ugly, creepy doll that she loves so much. As she takes her dad’s hand, his only hand, and walks out of the room.
“Joss, what’s wrong?” Ryan asks me, his hand on my back.
I shake my head mutely, unable to speak without falling apart. I know my limits. I know when I’ve hit a wall and I just slammed headlong into a big one. But it’s not the worst thing in the world. It’s actually kind of… beautiful. Almost comforting. Because somewhere out there, despite everything that’s happened, everything I’ve lost, there’s a little eight year old girl with a daddy and a doll and a smile.
Chapter Sixteen
After three days, we’ve developed a routine. Wake up, fight with Taylor about leaving, eat our breakfast, give blood and tissue samples to whichever nurse or doctor they have on duty at the time, hang out in our cage until lunch, fight with Taylor about leaving again, eat, stare at each other, eat our di
It’s when one of the nurses, a thirty-something dark haired woman, is taking a sample from me that my injured arm finally comes back to haunt me. She’s holding my hand, pulling on it lightly to keep me still as she looks for a vein. I’m not paying enough attention and she twists it, making me breathe in sharply.
Her eyes snap to mine. “What’s wrong with your arm?”
“Nothing,” I say tightly, waiting for the pain to subside. It’s not terrible, just intense and surprising.
“She broke it,” Trent tells the woman. He’s watching us closely from his favorite corner. “Badly.”
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“She threw up when she saw it. The bone was sti—“
“Okay, it was bad!” I snap at him, looking at him hard. “But it’s been healing.”
The woman is gently probing my arm now, all the way up to the elbow. When I jerk and hiss again, she frowns.
“This needs to be casted,” she tells me.
“What? Like a hard cast? Something I can’t take off?”
“Exactly. Your arm needs to be immobilized, probably all the way through the elbow.”
“Pass.”
She raises her eyebrows. “It’s not really a question.”
“You’re right, it’s not because it’s not happening,” I tell her evenly. “I can’t survive out there with a cast on my arm.”
“You can’t just leave it like this.”
“Ryan splinted it, we can splint it again.”
“I splinted it because it’s all I could do,” he calls from the bathroom, shouting through the shut door. “If I could have casted it, I would have.”
I glare at the closed door. “Just do your business and don’t worry about us out here, alright?”
“Do what you want, but you should let her cast it.”
I turn to the nurse. “That’s kind of creepy right? I don’t know much, but I feel like talking to someone on the toilet is creepy.”
She nods seriously. “It is, it’s weird. But he’s right. We need to do more than splint your arm.”
I shake my head. “Not happening.”
“Fine,” she says with a sigh. “I’ll splint it, then. But don’t come crying to me when it heals wrong and hurts when it rains.”
“Deal. Once I’m gone, I’ll never come back.”
“You just got here. You’re that eager to leave us?” she asks, going back to her business of looking for a vein. She’s taken hold of my other arm, leaving my injured one alone.
“Taylor is pretty clear that we’re not wanted here.”
The nurse smiles. “Yeah, he’s not subtle. But it’s not up to him. It’s up to the council. If you can be of use to us here, they’ll let you stay.”
“We don’t want to stay.”
“What do you want, then?”
“Help.”
She pauses, looking up at me. “Help with what?”
I swallow, not sure what to say exactly. Help fulfilling my promise? Help getting The Hive to agree to fight with us? Help freeing people from the Colony up north? Help taking down all of the Colonies? Help bringing down the Westbrook guy who’s ru
“Help taking down the Colonies,” I tell her adamantly, “ending the roundups and the kidnappings. Help making the resources the Colonies hoard and hide from us available to everyone willing to work and trade for them so the world isn’t so damn cutthroat and horrifying.”
She stares at me for a long time saying nothing. Not even moving. I can feel Trent staring at me too and I wonder if Ryan heard my rant. I try not to picture him right now, though.
“Those are some lofty goals,” she tells me quietly. “You’ll need a lot of help for that. Help we won’t give you.”
My heart plummets. “Why not?”
“Because as much as we hate the Colonies, we have something of a truce with them. They leave us alone, we leave them alone. Trust me, I’d like nothing more than to tear their buildings down on their heads with my bare hands, but I have a bigger picture to think about. Something bigger than my need for revenge.”
“What did they do to you?”