False Sight (8 page)

I

wake up in a room.
I’m on my back, heart pounding so hard it hurts. Above me, a single yellow bulb is so dim the filaments are visible.

My stomach churns. I roll onto my hands and knees, open my mouth. Fire rushes up my throat and spews from my lips into a black puddle between my hands. The black stuff coming out of my mouth terrifies me. I’m dying. If you’re puking black sludge, you’re dying.

I’m surrounded by three walls of rough gray rock and one wall of vertical iron bars. The bars are orange and brown with surface rust.

Not a room, a cell.
Somehow my suit is gone, gloves too. The floor tilts under me, and I close my eyes to wait for the sensation to pass, but it doesn’t.

I remember everything before my leap of faith, which means someone
stole
my armor and dressed me in these ragged cloth garments that barely cover my legs and chest. The shirt is sleeveless, with a tight collar around my throat. Basically a burlap bag with a hole cut for my head. The shorts are rough scratchy fibers poorly sewn together. The thought of someone undressing and dressing me while I was unconscious sends a violent shiver across my shoulders.

I remember leaping over the emptiness. Peter’s cry and Rhys’s gasp. Then nothingness. It was only a second ago.
I spit leftover black goop from my mouth, run my tongue over my teeth. The rock floor is so cold it’s sucking my body heat. I sit on my butt to keep as little skin contact as possible. Behind me, something bounces off the floor. I spin around, rising to my feet with my hands up, ready to tear its eyes out. It was just a pebble that came loose from the wall. It rolls next to a wooden bucket in the corner, just outside the reach of the feeble bulb. I let out a miserable half-crying sound and squeeze my eyes shut, nearly falling back on my butt. A single tear escapes onto my cheek.
Under theballofmyrightfootisacrease,alinethatbisects the floor of the cell. I feel a vibration through it. I go down on hands and knees again, next to the sludge that I threw up, and

FALSE SIGHT
put my ear to the cold, smooth rock. I hear a rushing noise . . . liquid. Water gurgling under the floor, maybe.

I’ve always wondered if my experiences made me better prepared for anything. I liked to think I was more capable than your average girl, and not just physically. But I don’t think I am. I’m two seconds away from tucking myself into a ball and crying myself back to sleep. Seconds ago I was jumping into the lake, and now I’m here, dressed in different clothing, a prisoner for the second time in less than twelve hours.

I crawl to the bucket. It’s filled with water. The wooden lip is too thick to drink from, so I cup some of the water in my palm and lift it to my mouth. It’s cool and clear, exactly how water should be. I slurp a few more handfuls until the foul taste in my mouth weakens. The drink calms me a little, which isn’t the best thing, because then I can think. Jumping against Peter’s wishes has made me a captive of...well, who really knows. My money is on the creators.

If Peter and Rhys followed me, they probably share the same fate. My fault. I had to jump in like some kind of don’tgive-a-shit badass.

I want to go to the bars and call out to them in the hopes they’re stuck in a nearby cell, but I’m afraid. Afraid Peter and Rhys won’t answer. Afraid they will.

But I say something out loud anyway, just to hear my own voice. “I’m all alone.”
“No you’re not,” a voice says behind me. I whirl around, hands balled into fists again. Noah stands in the opposite corner of my cell.

I
’m dead.

Some of the confusion drains away, leaving me empty but less afraid. I may be dead, but you can’t hurt the dead. “You’re not dead,” Noah says. “At least, I’m pretty sure you’re not. Yeah, no. You’re not. I’d know.” His eyes glitter black, little shards of onyx. His eyes fit right in with this place. The black scales of his suit hide where his wound should be. However he got here, we obviously didn’t come the same way. That leaves one other possibility.

He seems to know what I’m going to ask before I ask it. “I’m not a different version of me, either,” he says. “Remember the peanut butter?”

“Yes. So where am I?”
He shrugs. He wears his armor, but no weapons. “No clue,” he says. “Not anywhere I’d like to hang out, but

who would?”

I laugh. It bursts from my mouth painfully and echoes off the cramped stone walls. “Then what are you doing here?”
“This is going to sound crazy,” he says with a smile, and I laugh again. I can’t believe it’s him. He looks so real. His smile, the dimple that sometimes appears in his right cheek. Tears are streaming down my cheeks.
“Try me,” I say.
“Everything is fuzzy right now.” He crinkles his nose. “But there’s something I’m supposed to remember, something I didn’t know before, but I do now. That sounds crazy.”
“Kind of.”
I step closer, entering the haze of light, and so does he. The light casts V-shaped shadows under his eyes. I reach out, slowly, and touch his neck with my fingertips. I peel the black scales off his neck.
And feel his flesh underneath.
His unmarred flesh. Whole. Uncut.
And impossible.
“This isn’t real.” I close my eyes.
When he speaks, his breath touches my cheeks. “It’s real in your mind. I feel you the same way. I can’t explain it.”
“Can you hear my thoughts?”
He shakes his head. “Only when you want me to. Can you hear mine?”
I shake my head back. The secret of my short past is safe.
He puts a finger under my chin and tilts it up. Rubs his thumb across my lower lip. I taste the salt of my tears. I can see him, feel him, smell him. My knees shake.
“But you died,” I whisper.
“In a way,” he replies, then leans forward and presses his lips against mine.

The lightbulb flickers, buzzing. My eyes snap open and my hands are raised in front of me, curled, like I was hugging someone and now they’re gone.

Noah’s gone, like he was never there to begin with. “Where are you?” I whisper, not expecting an answer. “Here.”
Noah’s voice. In my head, but like he’s talking right next

to me.
I can only manage one thought—
How?
“I don’t know.”
“Come back. Let me see you.” I don’t want to be alone. I

feel his phantom kiss on my lips still. I don’t know why I did that. It felt terribly wrong and terribly right at the same time. “If my voice in your head is a little strange, guess how it feels for me.”

I spin around. Noah is leaning with both shoulders against the wall, arms folded. A cocky, careless pose. So Noah.
“And you’re not really here. . . .”
“I thought that part was obvious by now,” he says. He’s pretending like we didn’t just kiss, which is fine with me.
“Are you okay?” Such a stupid question. I regret it even as my lips still form the words.
He blinks rapidly. “Not really. But I’m managing. You know I always do. Something hurts though.” He taps his head with the heel of his hand. “I’m supposed to be doing something.”
“What?”
“I still don’t know. Give me more than thirty seconds.”
It really is him.
“So where the hell are we?”
“It looks like a prison cell.” He smiles. He doesn’t smirk.
For a second I think everything might be okay. If this isn’t a dream, or hell, and Noah really is here . . . well, I’m not alone. Even if he’s just in my head.
“It’s you. Really,” I say, unable to keep the tears out of my voice.
He nods grimly, frowning. In life, he only frowned when he was trying to show he was telling the truth. He pats himself on the chest and legs, making sure he’s all there. “Is this how you remember me?”
A chill covers me when I realize that being imprisoned holds a greater danger than boredom—my memory shots are out of reach. I’ll be okay for a while, but I can’t expect to be going home anytime soon. Even if I manage to survive in here a day or two, it’ll all be for nothing if I can’t keep my memories. Soon I’ll be clueless, confused, without an identity.
“I don’t have any shots,” I say, mostly to myself. “You don’t happen to have any, do you?” It’s a half joke.
Noah pats where his pockets would be if he had any. “Fresh out. But don’t worry about that yet. Worry about—”
The floor begins to vibrate through the bottoms of my freezing feet. A mechanical buzz that almost tickles. More pebbles tumble down the walls.
And the floor begins to split apart at the seam.

S

lowly, the two sides of the floor retract into the walls. In the middle, a black gulf grows wider, and I see I was right—there is water under the floor. Black water. As

black as the lake I jumped through, but broken with vibra - tions from the moving floor. It reflects the yellow light of the bulb above.

“Move!” Noah shouts.

My feet are on either side, slowly pulling me into a split. I push off with my right foot and step onto Noah’s half. It takes me that long to realize that, yeah, the cell is about to dump me into the black water. And there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

“Do something!” Noah says, grabbing my shoulder.

It’s not just me in here, it’s Noah. I lunge for the bars and try to stick my feet through them, but the floor outside the cell iscoveredintinyspikesIdon’tseeuntiltheycutme.Hotblood slicks the balls of my feet.

The gulf takes up a third of the floor now; I won’t have a place to stand much longer.
“Do something, Mir.”
I stop being a slow idiot and plant my foot on the remaining meter of floor, then kick the door where it’s most discolored at thehinges.Myfootleavesasmearofbloodontherustedbars. Hot pain lances up to my knee, which happens when you kick solid iron. I kick twice more, leaving thicker smears, blood oozing freely from my cut foot now.
“C’mon, Miranda! Kick!” Noah stands off to the side. He claps his hands. “DO IT!”
I kick again and again, until the door is out of reach and my toes are numb. My foot aches, the cut burns. The bars thrum in their frame. I grab the bars to gain a little more reach, then awkwardly kick the door a final time. The wrong part of my foot connects; my ankle twists painfully and I cry out.
“Again!”
“I
can
’
t
.”
“Shut up.
Again.
”
I scream and leap onto the door as my footing disappears, grabbing both bars and then planting my feet vertically to

DA N K ROKOS

either side. I pull with everything in me, arms shaking, shoul - ders burning, back aching as I hover over the water. “Don’t you dare give up!” Noah says.
My legs are throbbing hot and red, and my head is about to burst. The hinges groan like the rest of me, but do not budge. My whole body is on fire.
I’m holding on to the cage like a monkey. My arms shake, yet I hold fast. The floor is gone now, the black water behind me waiting to swallow me whole. I cling to the cage with my knees, not wanting to put my throbbing feet back on the spikes. I tremble from top to bottom, and the door rattles quietly in its frame. If I could only rest for a moment, take a deep breath, I could hold on longer.
I crane my head around, but Noah is gone.
“Don’t leave me alone,” I say aloud.
I stay alone.
He’s not ignoring me; I don’t feel him anywhere.
The thought of losing him again makes my brain fuzz gray, like it refuses to even imagine the possibility. I groan and knock my head against the bars, like it’ll shake him loose.
“I’m here,” he says in my head.
“Where did you go?” A terrible realization sets in—I won’t be able to hold on forever. Even now my fingers are numb from holding most of my weight. There’s a steady
drip drip drip
as blood from my foot drops into the water.
“I don’t know. I can’t control it. It’s like your mind is trying to push me out. I can only show up when you’re calm.”
“I’m calm!” I scream, as the muscles in my arms cramp into rocks.
“I don’t belong here. Not enough room—”
He cuts out.
“Noah?”
Then the bolts holding the top of the cell door burst down like tiny bullets, pinging off my shoulders and shooting into the water. I feel tension release in the door and only have time for a breath before the whole thing falls inward and dumps me into the water.