From my perch in the bed of the truck, I stared beyond the slanting electrical towers, craning my neck to see around the twisty bends in the road, searching each sickly creature for some kind of reaction.
The nymphs didn’t lift their heads, didn’t shift their pupil-less eyes, and didn’t falter in their determination to plow ahead. Some wore shreds of tattered clothes. Others were completely nude, their skin baked by the sun. My chest ached as I watched them trudge along, their cadaverous frames jerking with each step, their backs bowed under the affliction of the virus. I couldn’t feel their pain now, but I remembered it clearly. They were as trapped as I was.
When was the last time I felt one of their chilly whispers through my gut? Virginia? Right before I’d lost consciousness for two weeks? Had something changed in me then? Or did I lose the ability to sense them when I came into my new power?
Whatever the catalyst was, it was a blessing. Crippled to a state of seizures and vomiting was not how I wanted to arrive at our destination.
A hairpin turn spit us out alongside the Colorado River, and up ahead, some kind of checkpoint halted our caravan. Bracketed by the river and a steep rocky wall, there was nowhere to go but forward or backward. We motored slowly, stopping and starting toward the dam and presumably the Drone who now presided over it.
Barbed wire gates barricaded the passageway, guarded by twenty armed men. The road continued beyond the gates and across the dam, the monolithic wall curving inward against the pressure of the river. On top of the dam’s entrance sat a tall, plain concrete structure. I assumed it housed one of the elevators that went to the tunnels in the canyon below.
I struggled to see around all the vehicles as the guards checked each one, pushing aside the gates, and stepping back to allow entry to the dam. They wore the same blank expressions. No talking. No gestures. Mindless fucking robots.
As we inched forward, the nymphs on the road moved past us, stooping, shuffling quickly, keeping close in line, and intently following some unseen path. Why?
The reason waited just outside the gates.
My heart crashed into my ribs as I took in the row of ten women—cured women—chained to concrete posts. Their postures sagged, faces pale, bodies nude, their hair sticking to their heads in matted clumps. A few women weakly jerked their arms against the shackles. The rest simply hung in defeat, their blinking eyes the only indication of life.
My chest heaved and my breathing ratcheted, the struggle to suck air made worse when I saw the lumps of bodies at their feet. Skeletal frames. Thin skin. Long, jagged nails. Comatose nymphs. None were crawling out of the bottom of the pile, which meant someone was dragging them off before they woke. To take them where? To do what with them?
The sharp, sickening talons of fear and shock flayed the lining of my stomach. Why would the Drone create nymphs only to cure them now? Why do it by cruelly hanging women to posts outside the dam? My blood boiled, and my jaw clenched with pain. I gripped the cage wall, shaking it with horrified anger. Where had these women even come from?
The answer darted out the door of the concrete structure, smiling and running straight for our truck, her belly round with pregnancy and her eyes locked on Michio.
Elaine.
Elaine approached with hurried steps, clutching the bulge of her belly, her upturned face alight with excitement. The sight of her, alive and pregnant, seized me by the throat and stole my breath. There were so many opposing reactions whipping through me, but the strongest feeling settled in my gut. Don’t trust her.
Her wide, smiling eyes were fixed on the cab of the truck, her entire visage radiating with health and actual fucking emotion. But why wasn’t she in a cage like me? Why wasn’t she expressionless like everyone else here? And why was she so over-fucking-joyed to see Michio?
My hands clenched against the wire walls of my prison. I needed to give her the benefit of the doubt and hear her out, even as every muscle in my body burned to attack her. A jealous tantrum would not get me out of this.
Our truck parked against the guardrail atop the dam, and she stopped beside the passenger door.
“Elaine!” I rattled the cage. “What happened to you?”
Her throat bobbed with a swallow, but she didn’t look at me. Slowly, her smile widened, aimed at Michio.
If he smiled back at her after depriving me of emotional interaction for two weeks, so help me God, I would slice his cheeks from mouth to ears and stretch his smile so wide his jaw would open like a bear trap.