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She lay down on the floor, and Evan did the same, their hands reaching for each other, fingers linking, a movement that now felt as natural as breathing air. She exhaled, and for a moment, they simply stared into each other’s eyes. His eyes were an oasis to her now, an island in a deep, dark sea. Something to cling to. A reason to hold on. The knowledge that she was not alone.
She thought of the man with the voice like velvet who had given her pleasure that made her moan.Let it make you angry, Noelle. You’re sohotwhen you’re mad. Would I ...break... the rules?And then he’d left a pencil for her to write him a note. A pencil that could be broken to extract something that could be used to create fire. Was he helping her? Them? It couldn’t be, could it? He was using her. Playing with her. Some confounding game within a game. But she—they—had no choice but to play along.
And tomorrow, the stakes would rise.
Fear shimmered inside, a nuclear blast in the distance rocking her world and making her want to shut her eyes, hit the ground, and never look up. Instead, she stared into his eyes.
Evan’s expression was more desolate now, even though they’d been—mostly—successful in getting the codes to their cages. Noelle didn’t know if it was because they were closer than they’d been but still so damn far away, or perhaps, like her, he was considering that the level of horror was about to rise in the morning. Or maybe it was because of something that had happened to him upstairs. She wouldn’t ask. They’d come to an understanding, and she didn’t want to talk to him about what happened to her up there, either, the way her body had been used, her soul disregarded.
Like the road to hopelessness, if she started to go to that dark place inside, she wouldn’t return.
She was already standing at the intersection of so many bleak crossroads.
She tightened her fingers on his, creating what felt like an unbreakable link.
We leave here whole.
We leave here together.
Much later, their dumbwaiters dropped, and the doors opened. They both dragged themselves upright and then crawled to the backs of their cages. Noelle pulled out her tray. There was only one slice of white bread and one cup of water to eat and drink, respectively. But she stared down at what was on the other side of the tray, picking them up gingerly and turning them this way and that.
A tiny pair of nail scissors, dull and slightly bent at the end.
A grooming tool?
She turned to Evan, who held something of his own.
“Nail scissors,” she said, holding up the small tool and looking with confusion at what he was holding.
A hammer with a rubber head? “What is that?”
“It says on the side it’s a chime mallet,” he told her. “Like, an instrument or something.” He turned it over, staring down at it for a few seconds, and then tapped it on his open palm. It looked light, less than two pounds. The head was rubber, solid but unlikely to hurt anyone. And it would definitely lose against a Taser and a gun. Disappointing.
Evan raised it uncertainly and paused before dragging it along his bars. He let out a small huff that might have been a laugh. “Ah,” he said, “accompaniment for our songs. Someone enjoys our singing.”
Or is mocking us for it.
She looked down at the scissors. They were small and flimsy. They wouldn’t successfully go up against a Taser either. Even if she managed to hide them and bring them out at an opportune moment, they’dprobably break when they struck something solid. Not that the guard ever got close enough for them to do something like that anyway. They were useless. Except ...
Noelle sat down, inspecting her long, dirty fingernails. She’d chewed a few off, and another couple had broken. But those ones were jagged and bothersome. Yes, she had aches and pains and had suffered in ways great and small, but her instinct was to groom herself, and the fact that she could not had stolen a bit of her humanity. She took a few minutes to trim them all while Evan experimented with the sounds the chime mallet made on the different bars of his cage.
She turned toward him. “Here,” she said, sliding the small pair of scissors across the floor. “Clean yourself up.”
He scoffed. “Not exactly running for prom king here.”
God.The thought of school or dances hadn’t been something Noelle had thought about for what seemed like forever.Prom.Ha. How ridiculously simple. Maybe she’d even have worried about it in her old life. Would someone invite her? Or would she pretend not to care and make plans for a girls’ night with Paula? She’d never even considered being prom queen. But Evan ... Evan had been a shoo-in for prom king.
King.
All those half-drugged girls, naked and draped in gems. They made him feel like a king.
His voice. Unbidden. She pushed it aside and mustered a chuckle. Evan put the mallet on the floor and sat down to trim his own nails. She watched as he did it, seeing that the small grooming errand was making him feel, if not like a king, at least a tad more human too. That was good. Perhaps whoever had sent them had done so understanding the small pleasure. Or maybe it was worse than that. Maybe whoever had sent them had been given some advanced notice that their fingernails would be torn from their fingers in the morning, and this was a sick inside joke. She swallowed, refusing to let her mind go there. In any case, she had a specific use for them in mind, and it wasn’t just to trim her nails.
Evan started singing low and slow, mostly under his breath, as he focused on his chore. She turned away from him and pretended to pick at a scab on her arm but listened intently to what he said.
Her heart raced as he sang and then plummeted as he explained what he was going to do.
Evan ... no.
