Still, it was warm and steamy, and the tubs were always bubbling. But there was never anyone in here but me.
I lowered myself into the tub on the farthest side from the door. My clothes lay tangled a few steps from the rim. I’d hurled the ice pack halfheartedly at the shiny new garbage bin set by the sinks, and it hung over the edge, melting water dribbling onto the floor.
I couldn’t even care.
The cloudy not-really-water bubbled. It smells like minerals, a flat palate-coating tang, and it doesn’t feel like regular water. It’s too jelly-thick. For a few seconds it’s so hot it stings. Then it coats the skin, and the bubbles turn sheer instead of translucent. Time spent in the tubs speeds the healing process up like crazy. Which is a good thing, because the combat training here is full-contact.
If you’re a boy.
I’d felt kind of weird about walking around in the locker room by myself. It was like having a whole suite to myself while the boys slept in dorms. And none of them had empty bookshelves, or a CD player of their own, or a personal advisor watching over their every sneeze. Or a computer all to themselves, with Internet shopping sites already bookmarked and a credit card registered to “Sunrise LLC” lying in a neat paper sleeve next to it on a rosewood desk, plus an info sheet telling me where to get stuff delivered to, PO box and mail stop.
Creepy. Dad never used credit cards. Not his own, anyway. Liquid resources for hunting were best. But these guys were the Order. They were big, it took money to run a place like this.
Still, it didn’t seem as big as Christophe had made it sound. Which was something else to think about. And I never went to any useful website, like a GPS ping to find out exactly where I was or county records to find out who owned this chunk of land, not to mention going hunting to find out if there were any news reports about my disappearance or Graves’. That kind of information would have been useful, but there was no point in leaving tracks on a machine I knew wasn’t private.
So, no shopping and nothing useful about the computer. It might as well have been a mute hunk of plastic.
A class schedule, Aspect Mastery, History, Algebra, Civics, had been tacked to my door two days after I’d gotten here, but after the first day of stupid boring remedial crap I’d wadded it up in a ball and started bugging Dylan to give me something challenging. Even the Aspect Mastery class was nothing special, just a social hour for a group of five boy djamphir who spent the time telling nasty jokes and watching me in their peripheral vision. History was run by some blond teacher who stared at me very hard between sentences, as if he was willing me to disappear.
I hadn’t stayed in any classroom for very long. Hanging out near the armory seemed like a better deal.
Graves was always on me about it. You shouldn’t skip, Dru. It’s important.
Yeah. Like I needed a civics class, for God’s sake. Like anyone cared what I did as long as I stayed inside. Like I cared, now that my whole world was upside down.
Now that Dad was gone.
Don’t think about that.
The stone was slick and gritty at the same time. I found a bench and coughed, cupped some of the heavy not-really-water in my palms and smoothed it over my face. It crackled, soothing heat working its way past the ache of a pair of developing black eyes, and I let out a sound that was half-sigh, half—sob. Echoes fell flat against every clean, hard surface. The mirrors were fogged, as usual, but sound bounced off them nevertheless.
I wondered, like I did every time I sat here, if my mother had ever chosen this tub. If she’d ever sat here and heard her own voice bouncing off the stone and glass and metal. If she’d ever felt lonely.
She’d been a part of the Order, or so Christophe and Dylan had told me. But nobody would really talk about her, as if she were an embarrassment. And I didn’t know if she’d ever even been here; this complex was big enough but still tiny in the scheme of things.
Small school, about four hundred students. It wasn’t the kind of place that could scramble helicopters on short notice. But I could have been confused, since Christophe hadn’t exactly been giving out information left and right.
I was just avoiding thinking about it for as long as I could. It wasn’t working.
My eyes flew open, not-water cracking and falling away in little shards of white. Wet hair hung in strings, the curls struggling to spring up. I touched the smooth curve of metal at my throat and winced as if I’d poked at a bruise.
The locket lay just below the notch between my collarbones. Heavy silver, as long as my thumb, the heart and cross etched on the front and spidery, foreign-looking symbols on the back, their edges resting against my skin. I’d gotten so used to seeing the silver gleam on Dad. He never went anywhere without it.
Now whenever I caught sight of it in the mirror or brushed it with my hand, a shock would go through me. Like I’d stuck my finger in a light socket. It was just wrong to be wearing it.
The next hurtful thought arrived right on schedule. I couldn’t put it off any longer.
Dad.
He walked down the hall, and the buzzing got so bad it shook everything out of me, the dream running like colored ink on wet paper, and as it receded I struggled to say something, anything, to warn him.
He didn’t even look up. He just kept walking toward that door, and the dream closed down like a camera lens, darkness eating through its edges.
I was still trying to scream when Dad reached out his free hand, like a man in a dream, and turned the knob. And the darkness behind it laughed and laughed and laughed….