She twisted his arm around. He was fighting now, reaching through with his other hand. He clawed at her. Alix jerked her face away from his reaching fingers. She fought to hang on, twisting his arm harder. Just a little more. In a second she could put him in real pain. Pull his arm out of its socket maybe. Force him to take the keys off his belt. Then she’d open the cage—
He yanked back hard. Alix’s fingers slammed against the bars. She yelped as her fingers went numb. She gritted her teeth against the pain and held on. He yanked her against the bars again and again. It felt like her fingers were being smashed by hammers. He was terrifyingly strong.
Too strong.
With a sharp twist, his wrist ripped free. Alix tried to recapture him but he was too fast. He jerked his hand clear. Alix lunged, jamming her arms through the bars, reaching for him. “Come here, asshole!”
He leaped back. “Jesus Christ, girl! Goddamn!”
Alix withdrew, glaring at him. Her body shook with adrenaline. She clenched her hands, trying to shake off the numb pain in her fingers. She watched him carefully, hoping she’d get another shot but knowing she wouldn’t.
He was pacing in front of her, glaring. Massaging his wrist, then reaching up and touching his bruised face. Blood dripped from a cut on his brow, running freely, staining his eye. He pressed the heel of his hand to the wound.
“I was trying to be nice to you,” he growled.
“Fuck you!”
His experession hardened. “That how you want to play it? We can play it that way.”
A door opened, a searing rectangle of daylight spilling in.
Alix gasped. With the light from the door, she could see that the room she was in was huge. A vast, black, echoing tomb. She spied high beams overhead, iron trusses, and nothing else. An empty warehouse space of some kind.
Shadowy figures came dashing across the emptiness.
“What’s going on!”
A girl’s voice. For a second Alix’s heart leaped. Cynthia, she thought, inanely.
But no. This girl was short and vicious-looking, dressed in a black T-shirt and black jeans. She had a pierced nose and wide-bore tribal earrings and electric-blue hair. Black eyeliner, done heavy on top and bottom eyelids shocking against her pale skin. The goth girl who’d helped grab her. The one from the rave. And with her the Latino boy, the feral little kid.
Blue-haired goth looked from 2.0 to Alix. “You okay, Moses?”
“Moses?” Alix laughed, despite herself. “Your name is Moses? Like parting the Red Sea Moses?”
2.0 glared. “Keep it up, girl. Keep it up and see what happens.”
Alix shut her mouth, suddenly aware of how vulnerable she was. For a moment she’d felt powerful. Dangerous, because she could hurt him. But now she was acutely aware that she was the one locked in a cage and that there were three of them out there and they could do anything they wanted with her.
The goth girl was smirking, looking from her to 2.0. “What the hell did you do to her?” she asked.
“I didn’t do shit! I offered her water for her headache.”
The girl laughed darkly. “No good deed goes unpunished.” She reached up to see Moses’s face, surprisingly tender. “Let me see.” Moses bent to let her inspect the cut. “I need better light,” she said. “Looks like you’ll have a nasty bruise, for sure.” She frowned. “Did she chip a tooth, too?”
Moses touched his mouth, surprised, then gave Alix a cold look. “Guess she did.”
Alix could see the glint of blood on his teeth as he spoke. He touched his lip again and winced.
“Don’t let her grab you, Tank,” he warned.
“I won’t.”
The feral little kid was pacing around the perimeter of Alix’s cage. For a second Alix thought he might be worried about her, and she felt a flood of warmth for him, but then she realized he was actually inspecting the bars of her cage. His eyes went from one bar to the next, studying each joint carefully. Finally, he nodded with satisfaction.
“Told you I could figure out the welding,” he said to the goth. “It’s way easier than rigging something to explode.”
“Sure, Tank. You’re the Wizard of Welding. Good for you.”
The kid laughed and started so say something, but his words were lost as his breathing took on a sudden rasp. He pulled an inhaler out of his pocket and took a quick hit. It was a routine movement, fast and efficient.
“Wizard of Welding,” he said on the exhale, grinning. “I do like the sound of that.”
The goth girl smiled over at him, affectionate. “Don’t let it go to your head, kid.”
Alix didn’t like how they ignored her entirely. It made her feel like she was an animal in a cage.
“Hey!” Alix said. “What is this? Why are you keeping me here?”
To Alix’s frustration, they continued to ignore her. The blue-haired girl kept checking out 2.0’s wound. “You’ll be fine,” she announced. “You really are an idiot. First you let her bite you, now this?”
2.0—Moses—examined the blood on his hands and eyed Alix. “Yeah. Girl’s fierce all right.” His expression was unreadable, a blankness that made Alix feel more like an object than a person. It chilled her the way they talked around her or looked right past her but didn’t bother to talk to her.
“Why are you doing this to me?” Alix asked again.
“Come on,” the blue-haired girl said to Moses. “Let’s get you checked out. I really need better light.” She led Moses away. “Come on, Tank,” she called back. The short kid followed. As he left, he scooped up the electric lantern, carrying it swinging with him, casting shadows as he went.
“Hey!” Alix shouted after them.
“Hey!”
They walked out the door.
The door closed.
The darkness was total.
“You can’t just leave me here!”
Her voice echoed in the blackness.
She shouted again, “Hey!”
Alix kept shouting for a long time, but the cavernous darkness swallowed all her calls for help.
16
ALIX SLEPT. LATER, BY FEEL in the blackness, she found the water bottle and drank from it, gulping. Convulsive. She kept the empty bottle. She didn’t know why. She wanted to think it might be useful as some kind of tool, even though she knew it wouldn’t be.
Exhausted and demoralized, she slept again. When she woke, she felt groggy and had to pee, and it was still pitch-black. She had no idea how long she’d been asleep. It could have been hours, or days, or minutes.
Alix shouted for help some more, but her voice just echoed back.
“Hey! I’ve got to go to the bathroom!”
She began to wonder if they had left her alone in the building. Maybe they’d decided to just let her starve to death. Maybe someday people would find her: stupid Alix Banks, the girl who’d walked right into the hands of the people who killed her.
The pain in her bladder was killing her. Alix shouted and shouted and, finally, gave up. She went over to one side of the cage, hiked her skirt, and peed in the darkness, relieved and horrified, hoping that her urine wouldn’t run the wrong way and soak her cage.
She paced carefully to the far side of the cage. She tried to orient herself in the direction that she thought the door might be, and, leaning against the bars, she wrapped her arms around her knees and listened in the darkness.
She wasn’t even really sure exactly where she was in Hartford. She’d never come to this area, and with Cynthia driving, it was hard to follow. The route had seemed twisty and confusing. Probably on purpose, now that she thought about it. God, she’d been stupid. Trusting Cynthia. Alix leaned her head back against the bars and kept running her situation over in her head, trying to figure it out. Trying to understand.