I rolled onto my side and saw Max sitting in the corner opposite me, knees against his chest and his face hidden by his crossed arms. He looked like a little boy, frightened into silence by the bogeyman.
“Max,” I rasped, but he didn’t acknowledge me. I wondered if he had even heard me, being that my voice was hardly audible—idly, I wondered if I’d been throttled as well as punched. I tried to rise, but every time I raised my head my stomach protested. Then my field of vision was obscured by a glass of water.
“It’s clean, as far as we can tell. The water and the glass.” I propped myself up on my elbow and saw Sadie standing next to a standard-issue water bubbler. Beside it was a wooden bookcase, its shelves stocked with cellophane-wrapped packages. “There are cookies and crackers, too.”
Is hell an office break room? Figures. I pushed myself into a sitting position and picked up the glass, wincing only a bit as I brought it to my mouth.
“He whaled on you pretty hard,” Sadie said, crouching in front of me. I pressed the glass to my cheek and jerked my head toward Max.
“Did they hurt him?” I asked.
“No. Not like they hurt you.” Sadie dropped her gaze. “Why did you have to mouth off like that?”
“It’s what I do.” I drank, ignoring the pain in the side of my head, then I put down the glass and crawled over to Max. Walking was still a bit beyond me. “Hey.”
He made a grumbly noise, but that was all. I poked him, just to make sure he was conscious. “Goddamnit, what?” he growled.
“Just wanted to make sure you were in there.” Now that I was next to him, I could see that he was shaking, and that rivers of sweat poured down his face and neck. “Are you okay?”
“This is just like the cell they kept me in during my trial. For all I know, this is the same cell.” He made a snuffly sound that I assumed was supposed to be laughter. Then he raised his head. I could his pupils were dilated, and his jaw looked painfully clenched. “Yeah, I’m real fucking okay.”
I blinked—of all the things I’d expected to witness, my brother having a panic attack was not one of them. “I thought you went to them willingly.”
“I did,” he replied. “That doesn’t mean they were glad to see me.”
I shuddered at that, more than aware of the atrocities the average Peacekeeper was capable of. I noticed that Max was shivering, and that he was barefoot. I wasn’t surprised that the Peacekeepers hadn’t retrieved Max’s shoes from where he’d left them by the dock.
“What are you doing?” Max asked when I started shedding my own footwear.
“You’re gonna freeze to death,” I said. I slipped my socks onto his feet—if he hadn’t been so cold, he would have protested a bit more forcefully. Once the socks were on he shut up, and leaned his head back against the wall. I stuffed my feet back into my sneakers and laid my head on Max’s shoulder. Sadie sat in front of him and took his hand. The two of us made a Corbeau fence around him, protecting him from anything the Peacekeepers might do. While a few decades of therapy would have been a much better option, we’d always been good at working with what we had.
And it worked. After an undetermined amount of time (don’t havewhy don’t jail cells come with clocks?) Max’s breathing slowed, and his heartbeat was no longer ragged. Once he’d relaxed enough to stretch out one of his legs, I asked the burning question on all of our minds.
“Do you know where we are?”
“Hell if I know,” Max replied. “All these cells look the same to me.”
I munched on a cookie—gingersnap, not one of my favorites—while I considered our situation. “Warded against dreamwalking?”
“Yep,” Max replied while Sadie elaborated, “Max tried while you were out. It’s what pushed him into PTSD mode.”
Max glared at our sister, and I felt more than a bit of sympathy. Sadie had always been a tattler. I shoved more cookies in my mouth while I considered our options. We didn’t seem to have any, other than to wait for our captors to open that door.
“So, Dad was taken who-knows-where, we can’t dreamwalk, and Micah and Mom don’t know where we are,” I listed. “Awesome.”
Max nodded—Sadie, deflated, slumped against the wall. Me, I refilled my glass at the bubbler and pressed the damp coolness against my bruised face. We would think of something. We had to.
15
The three of us sat rotting in that cell for what seemed like eternity. Since there weren’t any windows, we couldn’t even determine if a day, or days, had passed.