‘Talking in riddles isn’t exactly—’
‘Just—!’Lachlan shakes his head, eyes closed.‘Just take me to the border.’
‘Fucking hell,’ Kade mutters under his breath.‘Fine.’
?
Kade trudges through nettles, thorns, thistles and burdock, following the same route he’s tried to take several times before.Every attempt ended the same way.The closer he got, the worse it became, first the dread, sudden and overwhelming, then hideous dizziness and a vicious fucking headache that drove him back to the Tower half-blind, head swimming, debilitated.
He has no intention of testing it again today, but he can at least show Lachlan the point where it starts.Crows caw from the tops of the dark trees.Kade hangs back when he sees the point looming up ahead.
‘It’s there.Past the big tree, about thirty paces.’Being this far from the Tower is making him nervous, light sweat stinging in his armpits from the memory of all the times before.PTTCD is fucking brutal.
He’d do anything to fix it.
Lachlan stomps on, casting around, rifling through overgrowth, pulling ivy from the base of a tree, heedless of nettles and thorns.‘Could be subterranean installation,’ he says, mostly to himself.
‘Are you gonna explain—?’
‘I invented it,’ he cuts in, visibly terse, ‘ten years ago.I had a friend who could craft pretty much anything.I got her out of a tight spot once, we stayed friends.I had her make an acoustic perimeter field weapon.’
‘What did it do?’
‘It induced nausea and imbalance by targeting the inner ears.It was debilitating.No one could withstand it.It would have been set up as a barrier between the grounds and the outside world, that was my plan, but I never implemented it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I didn’t think it up to keep people out,’ he admits.
‘You created it to keep the kidsinside?’
‘I said I never implemented it.’
‘But, what?You think my boss did?’
‘Exactly.’
‘If he did then it was to keep peopleout,’Kade insists, hackles rising once more even while a few things quietly make sense in the back of his head.‘Not to keep us in.’
‘Just you, Kade.’
‘No.’
‘Doesn’t seem to be on right now.Did you ever try to leave during the day?’
‘Obviously not.’
‘Then it may well be a defensive measure, but it makes a lot of sense that’s what you encountered.I’ve never in my life heard of PTTCD.’
‘You’ve been in prison for a long time, and my boss would have told me if we had this kind of thing installed.He would have told me what was causing me to… to feel that way.I’m head of security, I oversee—’
‘Are you being purposefully stubborn or can you really not see it?He’s keeping you prisonerjust like your father!’
‘I’m his bodyguard!’
‘The Riley Harker I knew of wouldneverhave needed one!Why do you think his own father locked him up like that?’he demands, gesturing to the top of the Tower as he strides over to Kade.‘He’s older than you!’
‘Riley doesn’t handle things like other people, you don’t know him.’
