Maybe this is a present after all.
* * *
I woke with a start in semidarkness, the sheets tangled around my legs, the memory of my last meeting with OB, only a week ago now, still running down the back of my throat like blood from a cracked nose. And no matter what I did, I couldn’t get rid of his voice in my head.
“Come work for me and I will fix everything that is broken about your family. I’m promising you and Anna a better life.”
Sweat had dampened the hair at the back of my neck and plastered it to my forehead. To calm myself, I went to the large window that looked out over the beach. The moon was nearly full tonight, and glittered on the water in slashes of silver. Crusted snow still clung to the sand and dune grass. It was a harsh landscape this time of year, but still beautiful. Like an ice queen. I could hear the faint noise of the waves crashing into the shoreline, the beat of the wind against the glass. I pressed my fingers to the window and closed my eyes.
If my super power was fearlessness, OB’s was persuasion. Saying all the right things at exactly the right time. He had known what I needed to hear to convince me to come to this place.
And here I was.
My stomach growled, bringing me back to the present. The clock on my nightstand said it was four in the morning. I decided to see if I could find some fruit in the lounge.
The hallway outside my room was lit only with rope lighting embedded in the edge of the floor, so it was like walking down an airplane runway. When I rounded into the lounge, I froze.
There was a boy at the dining table. He was hunched over a thick textbook, reading, and an untouched apple sat on the table next to the book.
“Hey,” I called out. He looked up. There were bruises all over his face. A black eye. A dark black bruise on his lower jaw. A healing, yellowed bruise on his left cheek.
“What happened to you?” I found myself asking, before even introducing myself. I stepped closer, into the space lit by the one light that was on.
“What happened to me?” A ghost of a smile touched the corners of his mouth. “Haven’t they told you anything about this place?”
“No.” I swallowed the lump of unease growing in my throat. “Actually, I looked for you earlier. You’re Sam, right?”
He hesitated, flicked his eyes downward, then back up again. “Who’s asking?”
“I’m Dani.”
He grabbed the apple, and polished it with the underside of his black T-shirt and stared at me.
“So…” I started, “I wanted to find you, to ask you about the training. Connor didn’t tell me anything.”
“They never do. Nobody tells me shit around here. Everything I know, I’ve experienced firsthand.”
I sat in the chair across from him. His dark hair was cut on the short side and neatly combed back. His greenish eyes were piercing, analyzing, but amused.
“Have you been through training then?” I asked, and he nodded. “Tell me about it.”
He took a bite of the apple, chewed, and swallowed before answering. “It’s a lot of hand-to-hand combat at first.”
Must be where he got the bruises.
“Endurance training, too,” he continued. “A lot of memory challenges, you know, so you can memorize assignment facts without writing them down.”
“Have you been on an assignment yet?”
He shook his head.
“How long have you been here?”
He chewed slowly on another bite of the fruit and waited to answer. “A few months.”
For someone who’d been training that long, he didn’t look like he was in that great shape. He wasn’t fat, but he wasn’t muscular either. His arms were scrawny. His cheeks, hollow. Maybe the training was more like torture than anything else.
Sam looked up, past my shoulders, and his eyes widened briefly, his mouth clamping shut with a click of teeth.
I turned around. Connor stood in the doorway. What was he doing here at such an ungodly hour? Did he live here, too?
“Dani,” he said calmly.
“Yeah?”
“Can I see you for a moment?”
“Good luck,” Sam whispered as I shoved my chair back.
His well-wish felt more like a warning.
At the doorway, Connor stepped back and motioned me to take the lead. “Where am I going?” I asked.
“To your room is fine.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“No.”
The whole way, Connor stayed two steps behind me. My stomach fluttered, as if he were a spider making its way up my spine.
At my room, he followed me inside and closed the door behind us. I hadn’t turned on the light when I left, so the room was still mostly dark, save for a pool of moonlight stretching from the floor to my bed.
I made my way to the window, feeling somehow safer there. “So, what’s up?” My heart thrummed in my neck and in my chest and in every other pulse point. My tongue felt heavy as a sandbag.
Connor came across the room and stepped into the light with me. It only hit half his face, leaving the other half in shadow. He looked down at me, and all the blood in my veins drained to my toes. My knees grew weak.
He looked absurdly handsome right now, even though it was the middle of the night. Where my hair was disheveled, matted in the back, flat on one side, his was messy in a way that seemed deliberate, as if he’d just gotten out of the shower, run his fingers through it, and called it good. Several locks fell in front of his eyes, but he still managed to keep his gaze settled on me.
“What did he say to you?” Connor asked, his voice quiet, but heavy on the inflection.
“Nothing.”
The corner of his mouth quirked. “You can trust me, Dani. I’m not going to reprimand you. I just want to know.”
“Usually if someone needs to tell you they can be trusted, it means they can’t.”
He smiled but didn’t say anything more.
I thought about the bruises painted across Sam’s face. “Maybe it’s not me I’m worried about getting reprimanded.”
Connor narrowed his eyes inquisitively. “You barely know that guy.”
“So?” I furrowed my brow. “He looks like he spent the day getting the shit kicked out of him.”
Connor tilted his head, as if he were listening for the things left unsaid. “Spoken as if you know something about the subject.”
My throat tightened and tears burned immediately in my eyes. I did know. I knew too damn well. And I wondered if Connor knew, too. How much had OB told him?
“He only said there was a lot of training,” I answered. “Endurance. Memory. Hand-to-hand combat. That’s it. He didn’t say anything else.”
Connor watched me too closely. I didn’t blink. The less I gave away the better.
“Good,” he finally said, and turned to the door. “Try to get some more sleep. Six AM will come quicker than you think.”
And then he was gone, but his presence had left an impression on me, and I knew sleep was going to be impossible.
Was he trying to rattle me?
Because if he was, he’d succeeded.
* * *
I ate breakfast alone and waited in the lounge area for someone to come get me, to tell me what it was I was going to be doing today. Or what I was going to be doing at all.
After Connor left me earlier in the morning, I’d taken a shower and dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a black tank top with the black Nikes. It was a comfortable outfit, but not what I was used to wearing. At least I had my makeup, so I could still feel slightly like myself.
When I heard footsteps nearing the lounge, I perked up and expected it to be Connor coming to retrieve me.
It wasn’t.
My immediate disappointment caught me off guard.
It was a woman who stood in the doorway, staring at me. She didn’t seem much older, or taller, or stronger than I was. Twenty-two, maybe. She didn’t seem much of anything, actually. She was unremarkable. Unadorned. Unattractive, but not ugly.
“Are you just going to sit there?” she said with the quirk of an eyebrow.
I stuttered for a second and silently chastised myself. I must have sounded like an idiot.
“No,” I finally got out. “I’m coming.” I scooted the chair back and in my rush nearly knocked it over. She raised her eyebrow higher.
When I came up in front of her, she offered me her hand. “I’m Natalia. I’ve been assigned as your instructor.”
We shook hands, and I was surprised to find a lot more strength in the shake than I had anticipated. A lot more strength and a lot more confidence.
Maybe there was more to Natalia than her modest appearance.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
She smirked. “Wait until tonight,” she said as she walked away. “You’ll be taking that back.”
* * *
I was slammed on the blue mat for what felt like the millionth time, and the pain didn’t register quite as much as it had the time before. I wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or a bad one.
As I lay on my back, trying to call the air into my lungs, I stared at the round overhead lights hanging from steel rods and enclosed in steel cages, and I wondered if that was me in some symbolic way. Hanging by a thread but trapped in a cage at the same time.
Maybe I was delirious.
“Get up,” Natalia said.
I could hardly feel my legs, but I managed to roll over onto all fours and suck in a gulp of air. I was used to being kicked around, after all. I could do this. If it meant saving Anna, I could suffer through anything.
“Hurry. No assailant will wait for you,” she reminded me, and I lumbered to my feet.
“Who would be assailing me?” I asked as her fisted hand landed a punch to my lower jaw, sending a shock wave of dull pain through every tooth root.
I was on the mat. Again.
“It’s not your job to identify your attacker.” Natalia appeared overhead, blocking out the lights. For a second, I thought I’d gone blind and dumb. “It’s your job to identify danger first, risk second. You should be able to predict where they’ll move and how they will attack by their body language alone. Everything else is a distraction.”
“Okay,” was all I said, and we started again.
She went easy on me after that. Her movements were slower. She gave me instruction as we grappled: “Put your hand here,” “Swing from here,” and, “If you twist this way, you’ll get more leverage.”
We did that forever. I had no idea how long exactly. We were in a gym below ground, so there were no windows to mark the daylight. There were no clocks, either. Natalia had strapped on a watch when we first came down here, but I was too proud to ask her what time it was.
I worried I’d run out of energy before we were even halfway through the session, but I somehow managed to keep going. And just when I thought I might die before Natalia called an end to the training, Connor showed up.
Sweat had soaked through every dry patch of my clothing by that point, so I’d stripped off my shirt and now wore only the sweatpants and a black sports bra. My mascara had all but melted off and smudged beneath my eyes. Several hunks of hair had come loose from my ponytail and were now glued to my forehead and the back of my neck.
Still, I felt Connor’s eyes trailing the curves of my body. “Is she done?” he asked Natalia.
“I guess.”
He slid his hands into his pants pockets. “She either is or she isn’t.”
Natalia crossed her arms over her chest and let her high ponytail swing to the side as she cocked her head and narrowed her eyes at Connor. I could feel the ice crystals forming between the two of them.
“She is,” she answered, and marched out of the room.
Connor finally turned to address me. “I apologize if my sister was hard on you.”
I frowned. “Natalia is your sister?”
He nodded. “Half, actually. But that rarely matters when you share a mother. It’s sharing a father that makes it different.”
* * *
I woke with a start in semidarkness, the sheets tangled around my legs, the memory of my last meeting with OB, only a week ago now, still running down the back of my throat like blood from a cracked nose. And no matter what I did, I couldn’t get rid of his voice in my head.
“Come work for me and I will fix everything that is broken about your family. I’m promising you and Anna a better life.”
Sweat had dampened the hair at the back of my neck and plastered it to my forehead. To calm myself, I went to the large window that looked out over the beach. The moon was nearly full tonight, and glittered on the water in slashes of silver. Crusted snow still clung to the sand and dune grass. It was a harsh landscape this time of year, but still beautiful. Like an ice queen. I could hear the faint noise of the waves crashing into the shoreline, the beat of the wind against the glass. I pressed my fingers to the window and closed my eyes.
If my super power was fearlessness, OB’s was persuasion. Saying all the right things at exactly the right time. He had known what I needed to hear to convince me to come to this place.
And here I was.
My stomach growled, bringing me back to the present. The clock on my nightstand said it was four in the morning. I decided to see if I could find some fruit in the lounge.
The hallway outside my room was lit only with rope lighting embedded in the edge of the floor, so it was like walking down an airplane runway. When I rounded into the lounge, I froze.
There was a boy at the dining table. He was hunched over a thick textbook, reading, and an untouched apple sat on the table next to the book.
“Hey,” I called out. He looked up. There were bruises all over his face. A black eye. A dark black bruise on his lower jaw. A healing, yellowed bruise on his left cheek.
“What happened to you?” I found myself asking, before even introducing myself. I stepped closer, into the space lit by the one light that was on.
“What happened to me?” A ghost of a smile touched the corners of his mouth. “Haven’t they told you anything about this place?”
“No.” I swallowed the lump of unease growing in my throat. “Actually, I looked for you earlier. You’re Sam, right?”
He hesitated, flicked his eyes downward, then back up again. “Who’s asking?”
“I’m Dani.”
He grabbed the apple, and polished it with the underside of his black T-shirt and stared at me.
“So…” I started, “I wanted to find you, to ask you about the training. Connor didn’t tell me anything.”
“They never do. Nobody tells me shit around here. Everything I know, I’ve experienced firsthand.”
I sat in the chair across from him. His dark hair was cut on the short side and neatly combed back. His greenish eyes were piercing, analyzing, but amused.
“Have you been through training then?” I asked, and he nodded. “Tell me about it.”
He took a bite of the apple, chewed, and swallowed before answering. “It’s a lot of hand-to-hand combat at first.”
Must be where he got the bruises.
“Endurance training, too,” he continued. “A lot of memory challenges, you know, so you can memorize assignment facts without writing them down.”
“Have you been on an assignment yet?”
He shook his head.
“How long have you been here?”
He chewed slowly on another bite of the fruit and waited to answer. “A few months.”
For someone who’d been training that long, he didn’t look like he was in that great shape. He wasn’t fat, but he wasn’t muscular either. His arms were scrawny. His cheeks, hollow. Maybe the training was more like torture than anything else.
Sam looked up, past my shoulders, and his eyes widened briefly, his mouth clamping shut with a click of teeth.
I turned around. Connor stood in the doorway. What was he doing here at such an ungodly hour? Did he live here, too?
“Dani,” he said calmly.
“Yeah?”
“Can I see you for a moment?”
“Good luck,” Sam whispered as I shoved my chair back.
His well-wish felt more like a warning.
At the doorway, Connor stepped back and motioned me to take the lead. “Where am I going?” I asked.
“To your room is fine.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“No.”
The whole way, Connor stayed two steps behind me. My stomach fluttered, as if he were a spider making its way up my spine.
At my room, he followed me inside and closed the door behind us. I hadn’t turned on the light when I left, so the room was still mostly dark, save for a pool of moonlight stretching from the floor to my bed.
I made my way to the window, feeling somehow safer there. “So, what’s up?” My heart thrummed in my neck and in my chest and in every other pulse point. My tongue felt heavy as a sandbag.
Connor came across the room and stepped into the light with me. It only hit half his face, leaving the other half in shadow. He looked down at me, and all the blood in my veins drained to my toes. My knees grew weak.
He looked absurdly handsome right now, even though it was the middle of the night. Where my hair was disheveled, matted in the back, flat on one side, his was messy in a way that seemed deliberate, as if he’d just gotten out of the shower, run his fingers through it, and called it good. Several locks fell in front of his eyes, but he still managed to keep his gaze settled on me.
“What did he say to you?” Connor asked, his voice quiet, but heavy on the inflection.
“Nothing.”
The corner of his mouth quirked. “You can trust me, Dani. I’m not going to reprimand you. I just want to know.”
“Usually if someone needs to tell you they can be trusted, it means they can’t.”
He smiled but didn’t say anything more.
I thought about the bruises painted across Sam’s face. “Maybe it’s not me I’m worried about getting reprimanded.”
Connor narrowed his eyes inquisitively. “You barely know that guy.”
“So?” I furrowed my brow. “He looks like he spent the day getting the shit kicked out of him.”
Connor tilted his head, as if he were listening for the things left unsaid. “Spoken as if you know something about the subject.”
My throat tightened and tears burned immediately in my eyes. I did know. I knew too damn well. And I wondered if Connor knew, too. How much had OB told him?
“He only said there was a lot of training,” I answered. “Endurance. Memory. Hand-to-hand combat. That’s it. He didn’t say anything else.”
Connor watched me too closely. I didn’t blink. The less I gave away the better.
“Good,” he finally said, and turned to the door. “Try to get some more sleep. Six AM will come quicker than you think.”
And then he was gone, but his presence had left an impression on me, and I knew sleep was going to be impossible.
Was he trying to rattle me?
Because if he was, he’d succeeded.
* * *
I ate breakfast alone and waited in the lounge area for someone to come get me, to tell me what it was I was going to be doing today. Or what I was going to be doing at all.
After Connor left me earlier in the morning, I’d taken a shower and dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a black tank top with the black Nikes. It was a comfortable outfit, but not what I was used to wearing. At least I had my makeup, so I could still feel slightly like myself.
When I heard footsteps nearing the lounge, I perked up and expected it to be Connor coming to retrieve me.
It wasn’t.
My immediate disappointment caught me off guard.
It was a woman who stood in the doorway, staring at me. She didn’t seem much older, or taller, or stronger than I was. Twenty-two, maybe. She didn’t seem much of anything, actually. She was unremarkable. Unadorned. Unattractive, but not ugly.
“Are you just going to sit there?” she said with the quirk of an eyebrow.
I stuttered for a second and silently chastised myself. I must have sounded like an idiot.
“No,” I finally got out. “I’m coming.” I scooted the chair back and in my rush nearly knocked it over. She raised her eyebrow higher.
When I came up in front of her, she offered me her hand. “I’m Natalia. I’ve been assigned as your instructor.”
We shook hands, and I was surprised to find a lot more strength in the shake than I had anticipated. A lot more strength and a lot more confidence.
Maybe there was more to Natalia than her modest appearance.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
She smirked. “Wait until tonight,” she said as she walked away. “You’ll be taking that back.”
* * *
I was slammed on the blue mat for what felt like the millionth time, and the pain didn’t register quite as much as it had the time before. I wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or a bad one.
As I lay on my back, trying to call the air into my lungs, I stared at the round overhead lights hanging from steel rods and enclosed in steel cages, and I wondered if that was me in some symbolic way. Hanging by a thread but trapped in a cage at the same time.
Maybe I was delirious.
“Get up,” Natalia said.
I could hardly feel my legs, but I managed to roll over onto all fours and suck in a gulp of air. I was used to being kicked around, after all. I could do this. If it meant saving Anna, I could suffer through anything.
“Hurry. No assailant will wait for you,” she reminded me, and I lumbered to my feet.
“Who would be assailing me?” I asked as her fisted hand landed a punch to my lower jaw, sending a shock wave of dull pain through every tooth root.
I was on the mat. Again.
“It’s not your job to identify your attacker.” Natalia appeared overhead, blocking out the lights. For a second, I thought I’d gone blind and dumb. “It’s your job to identify danger first, risk second. You should be able to predict where they’ll move and how they will attack by their body language alone. Everything else is a distraction.”
“Okay,” was all I said, and we started again.
She went easy on me after that. Her movements were slower. She gave me instruction as we grappled: “Put your hand here,” “Swing from here,” and, “If you twist this way, you’ll get more leverage.”
We did that forever. I had no idea how long exactly. We were in a gym below ground, so there were no windows to mark the daylight. There were no clocks, either. Natalia had strapped on a watch when we first came down here, but I was too proud to ask her what time it was.
I worried I’d run out of energy before we were even halfway through the session, but I somehow managed to keep going. And just when I thought I might die before Natalia called an end to the training, Connor showed up.
Sweat had soaked through every dry patch of my clothing by that point, so I’d stripped off my shirt and now wore only the sweatpants and a black sports bra. My mascara had all but melted off and smudged beneath my eyes. Several hunks of hair had come loose from my ponytail and were now glued to my forehead and the back of my neck.
Still, I felt Connor’s eyes trailing the curves of my body. “Is she done?” he asked Natalia.
“I guess.”
He slid his hands into his pants pockets. “She either is or she isn’t.”
Natalia crossed her arms over her chest and let her high ponytail swing to the side as she cocked her head and narrowed her eyes at Connor. I could feel the ice crystals forming between the two of them.
“She is,” she answered, and marched out of the room.
Connor finally turned to address me. “I apologize if my sister was hard on you.”
I frowned. “Natalia is your sister?”
He nodded. “Half, actually. But that rarely matters when you share a mother. It’s sharing a father that makes it different.”
