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12
JASON
I’m standing in front of my desk with no fucking memory of how I got there.
A breath is lodged in my throat. Panic lurks in the dark corners of my mind. What the fuck happened? Why can’t I remember? What was I doing?
The old scars on my back and shoulders itch and pull. The newer ones burn. Bracing my hands on the desk, I let my head drop forward and do my best to regulate my breathing.
In, out. In, out.
You’re not tied up to a post anymore. You don’t have to kneel and take whatever they dish out. You’re out of there.
Goddammit.
I pull out the chair and sit down, my legs trembling. I must have been… in training. Scale-ball. The match is tomorrow. That’s it. Though outside it’s dark and it feels late. My top isn’t even wet with sweat, though the grass and mud stains tell me I was at practice at some point today.
I stare at the darkness outside the window—the branches of a tree and a piece of night sky. No stars. Clouds, dark as the sky, hang over the buildings.
My hand closes over a piece of paper. I turn it over and I see scribblings on it. My scribblings. I’ve tried to write something but like always my writing is so fucking bad I can’t decipher it.
Scrunching it up, I throw it against the wall. I’m fucking shaking. Was it a note to myself? Too bad, self. Can’t even write a fucking note. Useless brain. Can’t focus, can’t remember. What are you good for?
After I was freed and returned to my people, I often found myself standing somewhere with no memory of the previous hour. Memory is a funny thing. Malleable, the school therapist had called it.
Unreliable is what I call it. At least sometimes. It likes to remember some fucked-up things you’d rather forget, and then denies you the knowledge of random things you had no reason to let go of. And sometimes… Sometimes it blurs and blends memories into one another.
Occasionally I’m grateful for that. For how it blurred some of my time as a slave. Some of the worst times. But then sometimes the memories return in dreams. And in dreams, just like in real life, you can’t escape.
Okay, back up. Don’t go down that rabbit hole, idiot. You know that it only leads deeper and deeper, trapping you inside the nightmare.
Think of today. What happened?
Did I go to class? I remember eating at the refectory with Ophelia and the guys. Yeah, I remember that well, though the images seem… foggy. I can’t remember what we talked about. Did we talk at all?
Weird.
And then I had practice… obviously. I remember entering the field, my team already hard at work. I must have joined them.
And then?
Very slowly I bend and pick a twig out of my pant leg. A twig. That’s not from the field. It’s as if I was out, under the trees.
A flash of cruel dark eyes. A hand on my face. A pull on my magic and a sense of helpless anger and formless fear that hits like a fist to the stomach, leaving me breathless.
I jerk back, my chair scraping on the floor. What the hell?
I’m still trying to catch my breath when my door swings open. Fuck, I didn’t lock, who would dare…
The eyes that peer at me are wide, probably mirroring mine, though they are dark and full of stars. Pointy ears glinting with silver hoops and studs poke through the blue and black hair.
“Sin?”
“You…” He’s panting, too, I realize, his face white, jaw clenched so tight he can barely speak. “Did we have lunch together?”
A strange question under normal circumstances but since it’s one of the few things I remember from today… “Yeah. Do you know what we did after?”
“No, I…” He steps inside my room and presses his back to the wall, letting the door shut. “Can’t remember.”
