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“They haven't figured out who we are,” Debbie clarifies. “Just that we exist.”
“Which means we have about a week to figure it all out and get her to safety.”
“Viking Virgin,” Lauren says quietly. “I wonder what her real name is.”
Something in me melts a little.
I wonder what she’s thinking, trapped and forced to enact a billionaire’s fantasy, convinced it’s all of her own choice.
Does she have hopes and dreams, beyond what she's been told? Does she question the irrational world she's been brainwashed to live in? At any point, has she had doubts?
I did. Not until I was eleven or so, when more and more cracks in Gaia's strange set of social rules began to form in my mind.
Why did my mother and sister have to learn to eat air, but Dad and I could have steaks?
Why did women disappear into the private quarters of the Maharishi, and five months later have swollen bellies, when we were told he was celibate?
Why couldn't we talk to Mom's parents, and why did they come to the gates once, pleading with Mom through the iron bars, fingers stretched for us, especially me and my sister?
Why the hell were there iron bars in the first place?
Why didn't I run to them that day and launch myself at them, begging for them to take us?
Because I was a little kid who didn't know any better.
And our target is in the same situation.
A cult killed my sister.
I won't let that happen to Paigelynn.
I don't even know her, but we're connected. We have been abused in similar ways.
And that's all that matters.
Chapter Seven
Paigelynn
* * *
The water is a hug that loves me so purely, touching every pore.
I'm floating, weightless, suspended and offered up with my face, smiling at the sky. It's dark, the moon on hiatus, resting somewhere else, taking a break from its steadfast role.
Only stars blink in the inky sky, clustered in groups, as if they're too lonely to live alone. It's cold, but I'm not shivering, my arms outstretched, my legs in a V, hair brushing wet against my shoulders and spidering out behind me.
The saltwater stings my eyes, but I just blink, the pain almost secondary to the joy of knowing how much the moon loves me, even in its absence.
There is a cadence to my breath, a rhythm and flow as air passes through my nose, sounding like the roar of the ocean inside my head, then leaving as I exhale.
All I have to do here is float. All I have to do here is be. All I have to do here is let the water displace from the weight of my simple existence. I am in it, but not of it. My soul could dissolve, and my spirit rises as I breathe in and exhale my hope. And yet I am here, separate from everything else at the same time that I am wholly at one with the universe.
A meteor shoots across the sky, the light like a saber, the sky a shield. Snow begins to fall, each flake clinging to my nose, my cheekbones, my forehead, the flurries becoming a blizzard covering me with a thick white layer designed to bury.
I sit up and thrash in the water, the snow thickening until it is quicksand. Terrified, I swallow hard, until my mouth fills with an acrid, bitter flavor, like blood.
I'm standing, my feet slipping on ice as I rush to reach shore, except there is no end.
