Count. It takes him four seconds to trace my jaw and retract his finger.
“I told them, of course you didn’t. You have always been the epitome of grace.” An IV has been removed from my arm, and it dangles from a bag of fluid by my bed.
Vaughn arranges needles and tools, and I focus on the ceiling tiles. They are much clearer today than most days. I can see the punctures on them like pinholes. Nothing crawls behind them. A pop in the air duct makes me flinch.
“Grace,” he repeats, “and class. You’re steely. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“That’s a new one,” I say. My brother always called me too soft.
“Well, there shouldn’t be any more procedures as gruesome as that,” Vaughn assures me. “What that did was record the inside of each eye. Like a scope. The footage should be all I need.”
The memory makes my skin swell with goose bumps. My fists clench against the restraints.
“How have you been feeling?” Vaughn asks. “I thought we might try solid foods next week, since you’ve been so cooperative.”
I remember Claire’s pancakes, dripping with butter and syrup. But I was so depressed, they were only like paste in my mouth. Or was it really depression? Was it just the start of this illness taking over? If I could sit at Claire’s breakfast table again, I’d savor every last precious bite. I’d take longer walks through Manhattan. I’d kiss Gabriel until I lost my sense of gravity. How could I have squandered that freedom? The illness I felt during that time, the listlessness—all of that was Vaughn’s hold on me, and I didn’t even know it.
“No?” Vaughn says when I don’t answer him. “Perhaps later, then.” He holds out my arm, presses his fingers to my wrist, and goes silent, nodding slightly in time to the throbbing in my vein.
“Heart rate is down today,” he says. “Beautiful. I was worried you were going to go into cardiac arrest for a while.”
“One of the perks of dying young,” I say dryly, “should be that my heart won’t have a chance to go bad.”
He laughs, sterilizes my forearm, and draws a vial of blood. “I couldn’t have anticipated your reaction to any of your treatments, darling. You are something of an enigma.”
I don’t tell him that Cecily has been botching his experiments behind his back. When she comes to see me, she unplugs my IVs. After the retinal procedure she kept bedside vigil until dinnertime, when she was told Linden had been looking for her. Before she left me, she whispered, “We have to get you well enough to get out of here, don’t we?” And when nobody was looking, she slid the needle from my wrist. Without the contents of that IV, I finally slept without nightmares until Vaughn returned and she had to replace it.
Now Vaughn is reading through notes the attendants left for him. His expression is deadpan. His green eyes are bright, though, like Linden’s reveling in his latest sketch at the very end, when everything comes together even better than he’d hoped. My husband is a prodigy, and Vaughn knows it. That’s why he keeps him so blind.
“Did you dissect your son?” I ask. “The dead one, I mean.” Now that Vaughn has seen the insides of my pupils, we’ve moved past rigid formalities. Several months ago he told me of a son who had lived and died before Linden was born; I’d been too horrified to ask for more details back then, but it takes a lot more to frighten me now.
“‘Dissection’ is a cruel term,” Vaughn says simply. “But yes. And do you know what I found?” He looks at me over the edge of the notebook. “Nothing. Absolutely no indication that anything was amiss. A vital, young heart. Excellent body mass index—he was a swimmer and quite the runner. Healthiest kidneys I’d ever seen.”
“You just cut him open,” I say. “Like he was nothing?”
Vaughn closes the notebook, sets it on one of the humming machines. “If he were nothing, I wouldn’t have bothered, would I?” he says. “It just so happens he was everything. And I’d failed him. As a father, as a doctor. I owe it to Linden to do better.”
“Do you experiment on him, too?” I ask. “Behind his back?”
“You’re full of questions this evening,” Vaughn says, giving me a smile I can’t read.
“All you need to know is this: You are helping me save lives. It’s best not to wonder at what cost.”
Vaughn tells me with delight that he’s trying a new drug on me. He says it won’t cause nightmares.
I suppose he expects me to be grateful. But without the nightmares there’s silence. I can no longer hear Rose in the air ducts, or the footsteps upstairs, or Cecily and Linden and the creaky mattress coils. The original drugs brought me to a state of madness, a murky twilight in which my fear took other forms. Now all I see is a sterile room. Fake lilies in the window. I feel the cool spot on the mattress where Gabriel would sleep beside me when we were at Claire’s. And before him it had been Linden climbing into my bed, or Cecily, or Jenna. And before them, my brother and the shotgun keeping watch while I slept.
I had thought Vaughn was feeding me these drugs to torment me, but maybe he had only meant for them to keep me company.
You have a different kind of strength, love, my mother had said. But what would she say now? Her daughter, exhausted, bound, buried deeper than the dead in a madman’s labyrinth. A twin without her brother. One half of a whole.
I’m helping to save lives, Vaughn says, and don’t wonder at what cost. He talks about solid foods like they’re some sort of luxury. He tells me I have grace, but he straps me to a mattress. Wasn’t it only a few days ago that I felt the Manhattan breeze in my hair?
Or maybe it’s been weeks.
Or months.
And maybe I was kidding myself to think my brother could still be looking for me. He thinks I’m dead. He dug up the small treasures our parents had left us. He burned down our home.
It doesn’t even matter that I’m still alive. I am a root in the earth that will never grow. I am so far down that the footsteps of the living world don’t even rattle me.
I stare at the ceiling for a long time, until the pinholes in the tiles begin to look like constellations. Then I look at the IV line lying on the mattress where Cecily pulled it from my forearm. She’s stalling for time. She thinks that if she can keep me lucid, she can find a way for me to be free. She doesn’t understand how impossible freedom is.
After a while I wriggle one of my hands from the restraints using the trick Deirdre taught me, and I fit the IV back into place.
Chapter 26
IT’S BEST not to wonder at what cost.
Freedom is the only price to pay for anything in this place.
The tracker in my leg is throbbing; and as long as it’s there, I will never be free. I have nightmares that my leg has been sawed off, and when I finally, finally tear myself awake, I know what I have to do.
Freeing my wrists from the restraints is easy, but freeing my ankles is more difficult because my feet have swollen to twice their normal size. I unplug the needles, one by one, and stagger out of the bed. It’s the first time I’ve used my legs in I don’t know how long, and they fail me.
I have to crawl across the cold tiles and hoist myself up on one of the machines until I can reach the water pitcher. It’s the only pretty thing in this room, light blue with a diamond texture that reminds me of the pool water breaking in the sunlight.
I’ll never leave the mansion. I’ll never find my brother or see Gabriel again. I’ve accepted that. But I cannot take another minute as one of Vaughn’s experiments. Cannot bear the thought of him finding me no matter where I go. If I can cut this tracker out of my leg, I know I can find a hiding place. There is a man thrashing through the lilies in the hologram; I could let him kill me. Or I could wander the hallways until I’ve found a dark place to die quietly. If I’m lucky, I’ll decompose before Vaughn finds me, and I’ll be too far gone for him to dissect what’s left.
I throw the pitcher to the ground, and it shatters. I crawl among the pieces until I find one that’s sharp enough, and I cut into my thigh.
On some distant level there is pain. I hear a scream. But I ignore these things because something much more important is at the forefront. This invasive thing is keeping me tethered to my father-in-law, and it must be removed.
Hands try to stop me. My name is being shouted. At first I think Rose has finally found an opening in the air ducts and made her way to me, but then those hands grab my cheeks, and it’s Cecily’s brown eyes I’m staring into. Blood on her shirt. Hysteria all over her face. “Rhine, please!” she shrieks.
All of my nightmares come screaming to the forefront. The cacophony of sounds. The man stomping through the lilies. The dead sister wife crawling through the vent. And Cecily, right in the line of danger. “You have to go upstairs,” I tell her. “It’s not safe for you here.”
“Stop!” She’s trying to take the glass from my fist, and then she’s trying to stop the bleeding with her open fingers, and she won’t listen to a word I’m saying about it not being safe for her here and the tracker needing to be bled out.
Finally she runs off, and I hear the chime of the elevator.
She comes back moments later, Linden gasping and pushing past her in the doorway, saying words I don’t understand. I know he can’t be real. He let me go, abandoned me like I abandoned him. But still he runs toward me, shouting something that sounds like my name.
Cecily lingers in the doorway, cloaked in an impossibly bright light. In her arms she’s hugging a bag of writhing snakes, and the snakes have a baby’s cry. The cry is bright red; it washes over everything.
“Get Bowen out of here,” Linden says, in a voice that’s too calm. “He doesn’t need to see this.” He’s wrapping something white around my leg, and the white is becoming red because of the crying and the blood.
“Yes,” another voice says. It’s Vaughn, coming to finish me off. “Show some common sense, darling. You are his mother, after all.”
“Linden,” Cecily cries over the wailing snakes. Her voice is shrill. “Do something—she’s bleeding to death!” The snakes are slithering out of the bag, coiling around her throat, disappearing under her clothes. The word echoes. Death. Death. Death.
“What have you done to her?” Linden says to his father. I close my eyes so I don’t have to see what’s happening to Linden. The flesh is melting off his skull; his too-green eyes are bulging from their sockets. “How long has she been here?” he demands. “Why wasn’t I told?”
“It’s an experimental drug I was working on. It boosts the immune system. Like vitamin C, really. There’s just some mild hallucination involved.” Too close. Vaughn’s voice is too close to me. No matter where I go, he’s always moving closer. He can track me using whatever he’s planted in my leg. He can lure me to his laboratory like a fish caught on a hook.
