AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER 14
Chicago
DAMN!I WAS impressed. She never missed.
The target was a male silhouette made of plywood. Meed’s knife hit the upper left chest, right where the heart would be. It was my job to retrieve the knife after every throw. When I handed the knife back, Meed threw again. And again. Overhand. Underhand. Over the shoulder. A kill shot every time.
The next time I returned the blade, she wrapped my fingers around the grip. “Your turn,” she said.
I looked across the room at the target. I squinted. From a distance, it was nothing but a dark blur to me. I felt the weight of the blade in my hand. I did my best to imitate Meed’s stance. I whipped my hand forward and heard the blade clink off the brick wall.
“Can you hit the side of a barn?” said Meed.
Now I was pissed. I was tired of being a joke. I lost it.
“You’re the one who stomped on my glasses!” I yelled. “How the hell do you expect me to see anything??”
Meed pulled herself up next to me and waved a finger in front of my eyes. She lifted my eyelids one at a time and peered into my irises.
“You have convergence insufficiency,” she said.
“No,” I corrected her. “I have congenital corneal astigmatism.”
She took another look, deeper this time, waving her finger back and forth.
“That, too,” she said. “Your adjustment might take a little more time.”
She flipped the blade over her shoulder. Another kill shot. I could tell without looking.
“Visual training starts tomorrow,” she said. “I need you to be able to hit a target.”
I knew better than to ask why.
By then, it was almost time for lights out. She was very strict about that. I needed my REM sleep, she kept saying. Good for tissue repair and muscle growth. I knew the drill. I walked over to my cell and let myself in, like a trained dog. I pulled the door shut and heard the click of the electronic lock.
I sat down on my cot and watched Meed walk up the two steps to the door of her bedroom. At least, I assumed it was her bedroom. For all I knew, it could have been a passage to another apartment or another whole building. Maybe there were other rooms with other prisoners. Maybe she was assembling an army of mind slaves. Why should I be the only one? Or maybe she had a night job as a dominatrix. I’d gone from a world where everything was predictable to a world wherenothingwas.
From my cot, I could see one of the big flat-screen TVs that hung from brackets all over the loft. Some were tuned to CNN, some to the local news channel. Usually, the volume was down and the caption setting on, but sometimes during my workouts Meed turned up the sound. I always kept my ears open for news about a missing anthropology professor.
But Meed was right. There was nobody looking for me. I was starting to believe what she kept telling me, over and over. “You have only yourself.”
CHAPTER 15
Eastern Russia
17 Years Ago
MEED, NOW THIRTEEN, felt the blood rushing to her head and with it, the sickening feeling of defeat. She was upside down, bound with thick rope, hanging from a long wooden beam ten feet off the ground. She was wriggling and red in the face, trying her best to get free. But nothing was working. The situation was even more humiliating because she was the last to finish. All the other students had already completed the assignment. She could see their inverted faces below her in the school courtyard. They were looking up at her with eerie smiles.
She saw Annika’s face most clearly, just inches away. Annika reached up and tapped Meed’s forehead with her index finger.
“Time’s up, Meed,” she said. “Do what you need to do.”
Meed sucked in a breath and clenched her teeth. Of course, she knew the last-resort procedure, but her brain was telling her not to do it. Would not allow it. So she simply overruled the warning, pushing past logic and fear and reason, as she’d been trained to do. There was no other way.
She hung limp and then, with a violent twist and flex of her torso, she wrenched the ball of her humerus from its socket. The pain was like an electric shock, stunning her into semi-consciousness. The muscles in her arm spasmed and tingled. Her vision dimmed. But through it all, Meed focused on the next step. As her upper arm dislocated forward, the ropes slackened around her chest—just by millimeters. But enough.
She pushed through the agony and flexed her body upward. She grabbed the middle coil of rope in her teeth and jerked her head back, pulling the rope with it. The other coils loosened. More wriggling and struggle. More excruciating pain. A second later, Meed felt herself slipping down. Then, suddenly, she dropped from the beam, landing on her back on the hard dirt. She was writhing and grimacing, but refused to scream. Her classmates crowded around her. Through a haze, she saw Annika nod to Irina.
