Now that she’d eaten, it seemed easier to think, though she still had a pounding headache. She wished she could believe that she had been spotted at Burning Man by someone from the Home, but the likelihood of that was nil. No one from the Home would ever attend a festival like Burning Man. No, she had been followed there and then taken, though for how long she’d been under surveillance she could not even guess.
Joan shivered, hugging herself. Had her parents been found, too?
She wondered if they had been captured.
Or if…
She started to cry, but quickly stopped herself, wiping away tears before they even spilled from her eyes. There was no time for that now. She needed to keep her wits about her if she ever hoped to get out of here.
Joan glanced up at the framed photo on the wall. Once again, she told herself that Father would not allow anyone to kill Gary and her friends. But this older Father looked different from the man she had known. Not harder—he had always been hard—but crueler, somehow. She could imagine him doing things not merely because they needed to be done but because he wanted to do them. That frightened her.
Could her friends be dead?
No. They might have been drugged, as she had been, temporarily taken out of commission so that she could be abducted without opposition, but they would not have been permanently harmed, and she took solace in the fact that they were out and free and knew something had happened to her. Gary would make sure that she was found, even if he had to go all the way to the FBI to do so. Whether he was back in California or still in Nevada, he would find a way to track her here.
But what if Gary and the others were not free?
What if they had been brought here, too, and were in rooms of their own? What if they were right now being brainwashed and beaten into submission just down the hall?
She continued to stare at the photo of Father, at his new white beard, at the flintiness of his eyes.
It was possible.
Joan lost track of time, but for what felt like the next several hours, she went back and forth on this subject. Deprived of any outside stimulation, her mind kept going over the various possibilities, trying to decide what had happened to her friends, her family, Gary. She knew this was a trick of Father’s, knew that this was exactly what he wanted her to do, was why she had been left alone like this, but she couldn’t help herself, and she was grateful when she heard the sound of the lock turning in the door.
She sat up in bed as the door opened. This time, the girl brought in her bag of food a chunk of cold cooked beef, a slice of freshly baked bread, another carrot and more apple juice. Joan realized that this was dinner. Which meant the last meal was lunch, which meant that she must have awakened in the morning. Along with the food came a book: Father’s version of the Bible. Joan felt like throwing it across the room, felt like dumping it in the half-filled bedpan, but she took it from the girl, forced herself to smile gratefully and said, “Thank you.”
The girl grinned, pleased, and Joan noticed that her teeth were exceptionally small, like twin rows of little Chiclets. Although she was at least fifteen or sixteen, it looked as though she still had her baby teeth, as though her permanent teeth had never come in.
There was no man accompanying the girl this time, and Joan knew that was a test. Father wanted to see how she would react, what she would do. So she made no effort to get away, made no effort to get information out of the girl, but simply accepted the food and the Bible, and then waved good-bye as the girl backed out into the hall and closed the door behind her.
She was still famished. A side effect of whatever she’d been drugged with, no doubt. As well as the fact that her lunch had not been that filling. She was also thirsty, and while she continued to have doubts about the odd-tasting apple juice, she had no choice but to drink it. She ate first, finishing everything, then waited for several moments, trying to discern any changes in her thoughts or emotions. When there was none, she took a sip. Again she waited.
It took some time, but eventually she finished the juice. She was still thirsty, though, and hungry, and she wondered if that was intentional.
Probably.
Father always had a plan. He left nothing up to chance.
Over the next half hour or so, the ceiling light began to fade in a rough approximation of nightfall, and before it grew completely dark, Joan crawled into bed. She could have turned on the lamp in the corner, but what was the point? She was alone here, and there was nothing to do. She was also tired, although whether that was a side effect of being drugged, a reaction to sensory deprivation or merely the natural workings of her body, she did not know.
She lay there under the thin covers, thinking about her parents, half hoping that they’d eluded capture and were free, and half hoping that they were here somewhere, at the Home. She would not feel so alone if she knew her mom and dad were nearby.
And where was Gary? she wondered. What had happened to him?
Maybe she’d never see him again.
Gary.
She thought of his open smile and his kind face and the tender way he looked at her when he thought she wasn’t watching.
Tears came to her eyes as she stared up into the blackness. She said his name aloud, “Gary,” and the sound comforted her, made her feel less lonely, though it also filled her with a sadness so profound that her silent tears were converted into sobs, and she could not stop herself from crying, great hiccuping sounds emanating from deep within her gut. She turned over, burying her face in the pillow, trying to muffle the noise.
She cried herself to sleep.
“Gary,” she kept repeating. “Gary, Gary, Gary…”
Day two.
Or was it? Joan had not been allowed to see outside, had been kept in this room since she’d first awakened here, and although she’d been served lunch, dinner and breakfast, it was possible that the intervals were off, that dinner had come six hours after lunch and breakfast had come one hour after dinner. Breakfast could have been served to her at four in the afternoon and lunch at midnight.
Father was capable of that.
Of more than that.
Boredom made her pick up the Bible after breakfast. She stood next to the curtains, pretending to herself that there was a real window behind it, and opened the book at random, to a page where parents were instructed that disobedient children were to be stoned to death. Immediately, she slammed the covers shut, a chill passing through her, an echo of the fear she had lived with every day until she and her parents had left this place. She’d been gone for five years, had gotten used to life in the outside world, and she’d almost forgotten what it was like living here. That harsh passage brought it all back.
She glanced back at the table, where, next to the toast crumbs and empty apple juice bottle, a prayer scroll lay that had been brought by the boy who had delivered breakfast. Like the girl, he’d been one of the Children, and not only had one of his legs been considerably longer than the other, but his head had been unusually large.
The thought of the Children intensified her chill.
She walked back to the table, dropping the Bible on top of the bread crumbs. Though Father insisted that it was the foundation of everything, the Bible had never held much sway with her. For one thing, there were too many narrative inconsistencies. She could never believe in things like the story of Exodus. After maintaining their religion through two thousand years of slavery, after seeing the Red Sea part, after being provided with manna from heaven, God’s chosen people forgot all about Him and started worshipping a golden calf because Moses was late coming down from the mountain? It didn’t make any sense. And there were weird anomalies like the story of Adam and Eve, who were kicked out of Eden because God was afraid they would usurp His power. In a strange conversation with what appeared to be another god, He said that humans had already eaten from the tree of knowledge and knew the difference between good and evil, and that they needed to be expelled before they ate from the tree of life and also became immortal.