Broken(3)

    I blinked and he was gone, and it was just my mother and I, with the sword between us. “I told you that you weren’t ready,” she said with a shrug. “I told you he was using you like a puppet.”

    “Who?” I asked.

    The light came back, outside the glass, faint, and I could see snow on the ground, as far as the horizon. It was a painfully gray day from the sky above to the horizon line, clouds covering every inch of sky. “You know.” My mother gestured to the world outside the glass walls. Flurries came down from above and the glass turned white with a sudden, icy accumulation. I heard the windows freeze and crack, straining like the time last year I had walked on the frozen surface of a pond after it had started to melt—

    “Winter.” She brought her gaze back to me. “I’m sorry I couldn’t meet all your friends.” She looked to my right, stared with a finger in her mouth for a moment, then leaned in closer to me. “That one doesn’t seem quite right, daughter of mine. Are you sure he’s … well?”

    I turned, slowly, to Zack, who was still sitting next to me. He was staring blankly ahead, his tanned face white, white as though the snows had covered him. His pupils were unmoving, and the light was out of the coffee-brown eyes. I looked down into the mug in my hand and it was in there, the same color his eyes had once been, but when I looked back his were shut, and the table was gone, and I was sitting, my knees around my chin. It was a field, and snow was coming down around me, and Zack lay, eyes open, stretched out over the cold ground—





2.





    I didn’t scream, but only because I was still in the grip of the paralysis of sleep. I came to in the box, the smell of it heavy in the air, hard metal against my back and pinching at my toes in front of me. I jerked my head up from where it had been slumped forward, my neck lolling as I came back to wakefulness. The smell was foul; I didn’t know how long I had been in the box, but it had been days, days in which I’d only left occasionally, when needed, to drink, to eat, but not to shower. My body smelled foul, every inch of it, and I didn’t care. I took a breath, and the air within hit my tongue, stagnant, almost stained with the stench. I braced myself against the wall and let the back of my head hit metal, a quiet thunk that I repeated twice more, trying to trade pain for clarity.

When my head cleared, everything—my memory of all that had happened that had brought me here—rushed back and I wished I my brain was still shrouded in fog. My dream had seemed so much better than the reality. My mouth was dry, and I smacked it open and shut twice.

Need to drink soon, came the quiet, rasping voice in my head. Little doll is slowly wasting away.

“Your concern is touching,” I rasped myself, more from a scratchy throat than anything. “In fact, why don’t you take your touching concern and go touch yourself with it? Over and over, preferably.”

No need to get so nasty with Wolfe.

“I thought nasty was how you liked it.” I could feel him, the first to stir, but the others were coming to life now, too. I didn’t care. They were bastards, all of them. Well, all but one of them. Bastards who talked and talked and talked at me all day long, from when I woke up to when I fell asleep, all but the one I wanted to talk to me. He had been nothing but silent.

Wolfe thinks you should—

“Don’t care.”

The darkness is insufferable, came the thick, Norwegian accent of Bjorn.

“You’re from Norway, aren’t you? Isn’t it dark like twenty hours a day there in the winter? Deal with it.” How did he speak in an accent in my head? Dipshit.

We should leave this place, Bjorn said, leave it behind, go find Janus—

“No.”

There came a third voice, more reasonable, if slightly pleading. My sister, Klementina. She lives—

“Not if I get hold of her, that traitorous bitch.”

—she still breathes—

“I could fix that.”

—and now she remembers—

“She is not your sister.” I let the rage fuel me, thinking of the blond-haired demon who had sold the Directorate out to Omega, thought of how she hid behind Janus until he told her to come out, like a good little— “You said yourself there’s nothing of Klementina left in Kat.” I exhaled hard, forceful, angry. “Nothing left but an Omega shell now. A puppet.”

But we could—

“No.” I ran a hand down my cheek, felt the stiffness in the skin, as though it had salted over. “I don’t wanna leave.”