Morrow’s energy.
It clings to this place the way smoke clings to clothes. It’s trippy as hell that I can sense him, feel the fact he was here—but obviously he was here. He would’ve had to set this up for us.
I use Dad’s dog tags to ground myself and try to ignore the sound. Nico is looking worse. Sweat beads along his hairline despite the cold, and his skin has gone pale and clammy. He may say he wants to kill me, and I don’t know what he’d do to me if I let him down from there, but the Game Master wants me to become someone who can watch another human being slowly lose circulation to their hands without doing anything about it. I refuse to let him turn me into that person.
An electronic voice stops me cold before I can reach the cleat. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
I pause, glancing up at the speaker secured to the column over our heads.
“Should you release Subject One prematurely,” the Game Master continues, “you will join him on the tower.”
I look back at Nico, who angles his chin up.
I want to untie him anyway, but what good would it do for both of us to be tied up together?
“Good girl,” the Game Master purrs when I step away from the rope, and I want to punch his eyeballs out of his head for even saying those words to me.
I pick my way around the room until I find something that’ll work: a section of two-by-four, maybe eight inches long.
Nico narrows his eyes as I approach. “What are you doing?”
“Stand on this. It’ll take some of the pressure off your wrists.” I crouch down, positioning the block under his feet.
His boot lashes out, catching me in the shoulder. I tip back onto my ankles.
Anger burns through me as I spring back up onto my feet. “What thefuckis your problem?”
He’s breathing hard, chest heaving with the effort of kicking me while hanging from his wrists. But he says nothing.
Fuckingfine.
My heart feels like it has rug burn, and I can barely look at him without wanting to cry, which only serves to piss me off. I fling the two-by-four in front of his boots and go back to my column.
Nico ends up using the wood, bracing his feet flat against it, which seems to help marginally, but there’s not much that could help the position he’s in. His trembling, which started as small shivers, has grown into full-body spasms that rattle the chains.His head keeps lolling forward, then snapping back up like he’s fighting to stay conscious.
Nico’s head falls forward. The chains go still.
“Nico?” I ask.
No answer.
I’m on my feet before I realize I’m moving, eyes locked on his chest, but then I see the barely perceptible rise and fall and realize he’s unconscious. Or asleep.
I snatch up the blanket and creep toward him as quietly as I can. His head is slumped forward, chin brushing his chest, and up close, I can see how the blood on his face has dried in dark streaks.
I wrap the blanket around him, tying the ends together in front of his chest so it won’t slip off. It almost looks like a superhero cape draped over him.
I return to my spot, clenching and unclenching my fingers and toes. One time, Dad told Rosie and me about a winter training exercise he did in Alaska, talking all about how he’d rub his hands together every few minutes, stomp his feet, wiggle his toes, anything to keep blood flowing. That entire winter, I was wiggling my hands in my mittens when waiting for the school bus or playing in the snow so that I could prove I could be like Dad.
Closing my eyes, I pretend IamDad sitting in the snow somewhere in Alaska, as the minutes pass by. I don’t know how long Nico is out. Could be minutes. Could be an hour. I’m opening the chocolate bar to have one square when he comes back to consciousness.
His body jerks against the chains, metal clanking as he tries to pull his arms down. His eyes are wide and unfocused as he thrashes, and his toes scrabble for purchase on the floor. His upper body swivels, taking in his surroundings with the franticenergy of someone waking up from a nightmare. Only in this case, he’s waking upina nightmare.
His eyes find mine, and his expression darkens. Then he looks down.
His face goes through about five different emotions in the span of two seconds, landing somewhere between furious and baffled. He tries to move his arms, but they’re still cuffed on either side of him, and the blanket is tied too tightly for him to shrug it off.
“What the hell is this?” he hisses.
