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“How’s that?”
“They’re direct with the extortion. You’re sly about your offers of freedom. It’s tempting, but it’s dangerous, Row.”
“You got me down here,” I remind him. “I’ll get you and your wife out if there’s a chance. I’d hold the door and let you both go first, even if it means I don’t make it. I owe you that.”
“Why?”
“Because if I don’t make it… you’d take care of my family, with or without the blackmail.”
Alex isn’t in my vision when I’m outside with Dean. That could mean he gets out, that I helped him escape. I hang on to that belief with everything I have, wanting to repay him for what he’s done, and hoping my family goes with him.
“We’ll see,” he sighs. His words muffle into his blankets, and I roll away, ready for sleep. “Good night.”
I shiver from the cold, my bare feet stepping down an empty corridor. Only a few lights shine down the long hallway, sending a dark shadow across the emptiness. Goosebumps cover my legs, and I pull on the shirt that skims my thighs, walking aimlessly forward.
Numbered doors appear every few steps, and I rest my ear against one, listening for a sound. Again and again, I listen, but there’s nothing. I trace my hands across the digits, all of them starting with twenty-seven.
This is an odd-numbered floor where people live, and they’re asleep. Looking at myself in a window, I see the clothes I went to bed in the night before.
It’s still night. I’m sleepwalking… sleep dreaming.
I speed up, trying to remember which door belongs to my family, but there’s no memory of that. The last time I saw them, I woke up inside their home.
Where did Alex say they lived?
I rack my brain to remember, but I’m foggy, still feeling half asleep.
Forty-something. Forty-one?
Two guards turn a corner, and I jump back, throwing myself against a wall. They’re silently walking side-by-side, eyes forward with no spark of seeing the woman in Alex’s shirt right in front of them. I turn to run but stop myself. They pass me, unaware I’m standing in between them, feeling their presence rush through my shoulders.
I’m not here, and I have to remind myself of that fact. My body rests next to Alex in his room, sleeping in his bed.
My heart thuds in my chest, and I sprint down the hall, determined to find the reason I’m here. My feet don’t echo, and there’s no sign of anyone else wandering the halls. I make myself move faster, weaving through the unfamiliar space.
When my gut sours, passing by a long window, I worry I might get sick. I slow down, but that only worsens the sensation, and I walk forward until the feeling subsides. I’m about to turn down another corridor, the churning in my stomach fading with every step, when I stop.
I take one step backward. It feels right and wrong all at once, letting the sickness rise in my stomach.
Another step back, and without thinking, I turn around and run toward the feeling. The nausea strengthens, unbearable, and threatening to make me give up.
I think of Gemma and her words.“Do you feel it? Here.” She touched her stomach and looked at mine.
Back at the window, the queasiness becomes almost painful until I’m sliding inside the connecting room. I wonder what happens if I vomit during a vision, but I’m surprised when the feeling stops as quickly as it came.
I run my hand over my stomach, looking around the space full of strangers. I recognize the look of these people, and some of them I’ve seen today. Adherents sit at tables in their robes, unaware I’m standing in their presence. The normal sense of importance that they radiate everywhere they go isn’t here. I sense their nervousness, their fear. I can taste it in the air, filling my lungs with dread.
“They’re a good distraction,” one adherent says. He’s young, maybe twenty at most, and I think his voice might have cracked when he spoke. “We won’t get another chance. Now’s the best time.”
“You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. You think this is our chance? It will be our ruin.” It’s Frederick speaking. I recognize him in the crowded room, his face more haggard than ever. “Dean Rigg’s father was an Eminent, and what I’ve heard—”
“And how are you getting your information, Adherent Frederick?” The young man cuts him off, enunciating his title with spite. “How are you graced with a telephone when the rest of us sit in the dirt waiting for permission to play outside?”
“Don’t be a fool,” Frederick spits, slamming his fist on the table. “You forget, or maybe you never knew, how bad things were in the beginning. You’re not thinking through what could happen.”
“Enough.” One man stands up. “We vote.”
A few men grumble, frustrated with the decision. The Assembly is as far from a democracy as one can get, but they give him their attention as he walks to the front of the room.
