When Phil stops walking, I reach my hand out again, but he shakes his head and motions me forward. “Over there.”
I don’t want to move even a single step away from the water, but then I smell something amazing. Fried, meaty, and rich, making even my dehydrated mouth salivate. My head snaps around, and I see Beckett sitting on the floor against one curved wall. Not just sitting. Eating. His zip ties are gone and he’s cramming fried chicken into his mouth with grunts.
Two steps and my own hands are in the bucket, my mouth full of greasy meat. Even if it were poisoned or rotten, I’d still be eating it. I could weep with relief. The entire world is this—crunching and snuffling and almost choking in my haste to get the food into my system.
Too soon the chicken is nothing but bones, bones we suck until they are smooth and clean as marble, until my stomach hurts, but there’s water, an entire flat of bottles. I fall on my knees, fumbling with my slick fingers to twist off the plastic caps. I drink one and then another, even though my stomach clenches with pain. I’ve been dimly aware of Beckett, his hands groping for chicken alongside mine, the sound of him gulping water, but now I raise my head and look at him. He’s standing, sweaty and pale. He must have eaten even more than I did, and just as quickly.
“Sit down,” I tell him. “Let it settle.” Because we can’t get sick. Our bodies need this food. We need to stay strong.
I press my back against the wall, breathing slowly, willing the food and water to stay down. I force myself to catalog every detail of our surroundings, even though my heart is pounding. The room is circular, with track lights running around the joint between wall and ceiling. The door we came through is now shut and sealed. Against one wall is a broad table with two laptop computers, an external hard drive, file cabinets, and empty shelving.
Beckett and I have scant assets—the remains of the flat of water, a single folding chair, and a paper bucket full of bones.
Phil is struggling with something affixed to one wall, and Cristina goes to help him. Together they pull a metal scissor gate free and drag it, screeching, across the room. Another cage.
I scramble to my feet, my stomach flipping over and over. “No. No. You don’t need to lock us in.”
Phil pauses, but Cristina ignores me. “Get the other side,” she tells him.
I run forward, but not fast enough. The two halves of the fence meet just as my hands slam against the harsh metal. Cristina snaps three padlocks into place.
Ignoring me, she stands up and looks at Phil. “Did you get all the paperwork set up?”
“I did.” But the expression on his face implies he’s not so sure he did it right. I know that look and I assign him a role—henchman, the weak link, the one I have the best shot at defeating.
Cristina gives a short sigh. “I’ll look it over now. Everything has to be in order for tomorrow.”
She crosses the room in two steps, flips open one of the laptops, and motions to Phil. “Show me.”
I want to see, have to see what he has. If I knew what they wanted, why they captured us—but I can’t see enough, not with the implacable cage holding me back.
Phil pulls a sheaf of papers out of one of the file cabinets. Even from across the room I can tell they’re crumpled and not precisely lined up. Cristina stares at him a moment, then reaches into a desk drawer and pulls out a clipboard. She takes the papers, squares them up, and clips them into place.
My face presses up against the cold metal of the fence as I try to fathom exactly what kind of scenario is playing out. This doesn’t look like the setup for cannibalistic serial murders or satanic blood rituals; instead it looks almost … scientific.
Phil seems stung at Cristina’s implied criticism. “Everything’s online anyway. The paper records aren’t necessary for publication.”
If they plan to publish the results of an experiment, Beckett and I must be the lab rats. I slip my fingers between the bars of the metal grate fencing us in, clenching it with ice-cold, trembling hands, willing myself to be the strong hero I need. God knows Beckett won’t be. Our first, more important weapon will be information.
“Screw publication. We’re going to sell it.” Cristina still sounds impatient.
“How can we sell something we have to keep secret?”
“Classified crap gets sold all the time. To governments, mega-businesses, the military. Where do you think the tech for smart bombs or computer viruses comes from? They just need a better plan for the human problem.”
I can’t breathe. This is the answer to why we’re here, Beckett and I—somehow we are the answer to the “human problem,” and Cristina doesn’t care that we know.
She sets the clipboard down carefully, then leans over the computer to check something on the screen. “Reverse-engineering SERE was stupid. And then the APA got involved and it was all human rights this and ethics violations that. This is the right way to go. Nancy knew that. She was on the edge of a breakthrough, but the idea of publishing, of getting peer reviews and public approval, held her back.” She sounds like she’s making an argument she’s made in her own head a dozen times.
“Nancy and Walter,” Phil adds.
Hearing Phil name my mother and father is like being given a jolt of anesthesia that blows my consciousness up and out of my body. I know the word SERE—the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape techniques used by CIA operatives. This isn’t the first time my parents’ names have been associated with this kind of research, but I can’t even feel the inevitable fear and grief though the dizzying storm of disbelief.
Reverse-engineering SERE, the phrase Cristina mentioned so dismissively, was the kind of program that yielded the enhanced-interrogation atrocities of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. My parents aren’t warm or loving, but they couldn’t have anything to do with torture.
I glance back at Beckett for confirmation, but he’s sitting against the wall with his head in his hands, not even listening, and the flash of anger I feel snaps me back to reality. I want to shake him awake. This isn’t the time for his feckless beautiful-dreamer routine. We both need to pay attention.
Cristina scowls at Phil. “Screw Walter. It was her idea, her vision. And then she just … lost her nerve.”
Cristina’s words wake all the worst fears I had about my parents—that they don’t care about people, that they don’t care about me, that they only care about research. If you substitute writing for research, they’re the same charges Zoe has leveled against me.
I fight the bile back down. No, there’s absolutely no way my parents have anything to do with this, and I’m nothing like them.
Phil doesn’t let it go. “Like you said, it was illegal. And the funding dried up.”
When I was doing research about torture techniques for a novel, a familiar name came up—James Spiegler, someone I knew my parents had worked with in the past. But they worked with so many people over the years, it wasn’t as though these old “enhanced interrogation” studies were based on their current research.
Nancy and Walter. Mom and Dad.
My body goes heavy, sagging against the metal fence. The metal protests with a creak and Cristina’s gaze flicks in my direction, then away again dismissively. The separate pieces of the puzzle—the kidnapping, this strange location, my parents, psychological testing—are all swirling in my mind.