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Orion was worried about her, truth be told.
Sure, it wasn’t really surprising that Jaclyn had dived headfirst into about a thousand different coping mechanisms, each more damaging than the last. Orion wasn’t really the picture of adjustment, fantasizing about stalking and murdering a certain doctor.
But with Jaclyn, it was worse. Every time Orion saw her, she’d lost more weight. Her hair looked flatter, paler, grayer. And mentioning it, as gently as possible—which, for Orion, wasn’t at all gentle—did not end well last time. Orion had never seen her so angry. So rabid.
Orion had given her space, even though it went against all her instincts. Not that she could really trust her instincts since they were all founded on memories of having Jaclyn six feet away and chained to the wall across from her.
“Jaclyn, you really should light a candle or open a window in here. It smells like—”
Orion stopped talking the second she rounded the corner into the living room. Air, words, and life was snatched out of her. Jaclyn’s white, rigid body sat on the sofa with a needle sticking out of her arm.
She didn’t scream. She’d screamed enough for twelve lifetimes. And it wasn’t a shock to see Jaclyn like this, not really. Hadn’t she seen it in her already? The weight loss, the empty eyes, the life draining slowly from her? Hadn’t she lost countless nights of sleep over this exact scenario?
Orion walked slowly toward the sofa, food packets crunching under her feet.
She reached out her hand to check what she already knew.
Jaclyn was cold, dead, and already starting to rot.
Orion left her hand on her cheek, cupping it with a gentleness that Jaclyn hadn’t known in her short, violent life.
Then she sank down to the floor, opened the bottle of vodka, and drank, sobbing like she was fourteen again, blubbering and messy. She cried out Jaclyn’s name into the nothingness.
She was surprised at how much it hurt. How deep the blade cut.
Orion was experienced in death, in having friends die. Having parts of herself rot away and decay inside of her.
She thought she had a place inside of her to retreat, to hide away from the cold, hard world. A heart of stone without emotions, reason, or weakness. One she needed to survive through all of that death and despair, if that’s what she was doing.
Surviving.
That’s what the media called them, survivors. Among other things. Orion had figured their novelty would’ve worn off by now. It had been long enough. She had learned that society had a short attention span, but when it came to serial killers and kidnapped girls, buried bodies and torture, it was focused.
Maybe because of all the other girls still lost. It gave the parents, sisters, and friends some kind of hope. DNA would be coming back anytime now, and the parents of those lost girls could get closure, and could start their “recovery.”
But there was no hope. No one ever came back from The Cell. Not really.
It took her a decent amount of time to call the proper authorities. She couldn’t seem to get herself up off the floor, to feel her limbs. She couldn’t seem to stop drinking the bitter liquid that made her want to vomit but also softened the edges of reality.
It took her back to The Cell.
“We have to get out.”
Orion rolled her eyes at Jaclyn’s words. She had been saying it since Mary Lou was taken away, as if she felt her own time was coming soon.
It was only the three of them: Jaclyn, Orion, and Shelby. Shelby was inconsolable. Orion had lost hope. Every single time they took her, she wished they’d kill her. She wished she’d never be dragged back into The Cell, even more broken and defiled than before.
But somehow, she endured. She closed her eyes and floated away, off to a distant land.
“We are getting the fuck out of here, Orion,” Jaclyn growled, fire in her eyes. Orion had not seen such vigor in Jaclyn in years. “No. Fucking. More,” she said through gritted teeth.
Jaclyn had been steadfast in that philosophy, and she believed in their ability to escape. She was the one who pushed Orion, the one who devised the plan. She lit the fire that had long since died within her. Her fresh eyes spotted the weakness, the places they could exploit. The fact that Thing Two was skinny, addicted to drugs, and would be the easiest to overpower. The times he’d come and get one of them when Thing One left the house. He had been caught and beaten by Thing One before, and he became more paranoid, more skittish. Jaclyn knew that was their chance.
She was the reason they escaped.
And now she was dead.
Orion didn’t know how to grieve her. She didn’t really know her. She’d known the version of her that The Cell had turned her into. Not who she was without all of that. Maybe she was nothing. Maybe they were all nothing outside of those chains.
