Page 50 of The Girl Beneath the Sea

No one has discussed it with me. They haven’t told me what the test is for or why I am taking it. Perhaps they think it is obvious.

More likely, it is because, again, I do not need to know. I don’t need to know anything. I don’t need to know if I am pregnant. I don’t need to know what to say before I am given the cue cards. I don’t need to know who they intend to match me to.

I don’t need to know anything other than where to find my cue cards. Obedience is all. That’s the mantra drummed into the omegas of Monteverra. It’s meant to be a positive thing. We don’t need to worry about anything. We don’t need to be bothered with the little things in life. All we need to do is obey our alphas and life goes on.

And I do not need to know if I am pregnant and if I am about to become a father. It is, apparently, irrelevant.

I am not human. I am not a person. I am a thing that can move on its own.

I always knew that I didn’t like it, but after these days with Roan, it’s unbearable. For a few days, I was human again with a man who looked at me like I was a real person.

He might not be dead.

Please don’t let him be dead.

And if he is gone, then let me be carrying his child.

Please.

I wash my hands and go back out, putting the cup down on the paper towel.

The doctor takes it to the desk, unwraps the stick and dips it, then he looks at his watch, and we wait.

We always wait in silence. He never speaks to me other than to say “Your Highness” when he comes in and bows and “Goodbye, Your Highness” when he leaves with another bow.

The older one does not speak to me at all.

I watch the television while we wait.

It is on with the sound turned low. I’ve had it on every day. Nobody has told me to turn it off. I suppose they don’t care what I think or what I see. I’m not really a person after all. It doesn’t matter if I am exposed to media that is banned in Monteverra.

I have learned a great deal.

The first week, the search for Roan focused on the river. I watched boats in a line across the water, moving slowly upstream with men in black rubber going over the side.

Once there was a helicopter, low over the water in the afternoon with a camera hanging out of the door, and the anchor saying that the search had entered its fourth day and that hopes of finding the suspect alive were fading. That was the word she used. Hopes.

I don’t think that any of them are hoping, except me.

Every time they cut back to the river, I felt my body lean forward. I could not help it.

They put a map up with a red line down the water showing how far a body might travel in the current. I looked at that map so long that I could draw it now.

I sat here waiting for a shot of a boat with something being lifted over the side but it did not come. Then they stopped showing the boats.

The second week, when there was still nothing in the water to show, they went looking on land.

Roan Kessler, thirty-four, born in a town in Ohio I have never heard of. They showed the house. Somebody had gone and stood in front of it with a microphone.

It was a small white house with a chain-link fence and a car in the yard. The woman who lives there now said she had no idea, she had bought it years ago, but she looked pleased at being interviewed.

He told me about the foster homes, in the dark. He did not tell me where they were.

I know now. I know things about him that he may never have known about himself.

They tracked down three of his foster homes and asked the people there if they remembered him.

I wasn’t sure if they were allowed to do that. Roan was a juvenile when he went through those doors.