Page 28 of Burning Love

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SOPHIA

Sophia lay on the cot. She could barely move. Instead, she stared at the peeling ceiling. It felt as though her mind was just as trapped as her body. Alex was nowhere to be seen. The weight of the silence around her felt so oppressive. She could hear the faint rustle of movement, the soft shuffle of boots on cracked concrete, and the muffled buzz of voices. It wasn’t Alex. They were male voices.

She had been ready for death, for the moment when her body would betray her, when the fever would become too much to bear, and her soul would depart, leaving only hunger behind. Everyone else had expected it too. And Alex. Alex had been almost ready to end her.

Her skin had burned. She remembered the sensation. Her bones had ached, a fire racing beneath the surface, fierce and unforgiving. It was as though she had tasted the sharp bite of infection—the kind that had taken down so many people. She had felt it. She knew the hunger would follow soon after. She remembered wanting Alex to see it through.

But then it hadn’t happened.

The heat that had consumed her body had slowly faded, leaving her drained, hollow, but still very much herself. Still Sophia. As she had later proved when she and Alex found themselves alone.

She wasn’t sure if or how well she had slept, and time had become a blur. Her thoughts seemed to be slipping between moments of clarity and the haze of what she believed were memories. All she knew was that…

She wasn’t one of them.

But it was when they realized she wasn’t turning that the panic set in. The real panic. Not turning was almost worse somehow.

She could hear it again—rising voices outside, frantic and disjointed. The news had, of course, spread like wildfire. Sophia wasn’t dead. She hadn’t become one of them. How?

Some people thought it was a miracle. Maybe even a blessing. Some whispered about a cure, about hope. She had heard the wordcurespoken in hushed tones the night before, like a prayer, like a lifeline. Maybe they had seen her survival as the first sign of something more, something that could lead to salvation. Who was it they’d wanted to send for? Some scientist?

But others? Ellen and her cronies? Tromer? Henry? Miller and the other soldier-types? Sophia could only imagine that fear must be clawing at them, growing like a weed in the dark. How would they ever accept that someone had survived, that someone had made it through the transition?

But Sophia wasn’t a miracle. She was an anomaly, sure. An error in the system, maybe. But she no longer believed in miracles.

Alex’s quarters felt like a cage. She knew there’d be people standing guard outside the door. She could sense the tension in the air as the powers-that-be were obviously trying to figure out what to do with her. She no longer felt like one of the survivors. She felt like an experiment about to happen. But where was Alex? Alex would never let it happen. Would she?

“Has anyone tested her blood? Back at Redford, we—” She heard a woman’s voice, cold and analytical, demanding answers.

“What are we even testing for? She’s different. We don’t even know what happened to her. The fever broke?—”

“Then it’s a miracle. Let’s see what she’s capable of,” the woman replied. It wasn’t Ellen. So, who was it?

“I’m not some lab rat,” Sophia whispered to herself so that nobody would hear. She wanted to scream it, though. She wanted to shout it into the silence, but her throat felt like it was filled with glass. If they believed she was a miracle, what would they do to her? Was she one?

She closed her eyes in an attempt to steady her breathing. It wasn’t her fault that she was alive. She had expected to fall into the abyss. But somehow, the disease had slipped past her, as if it had found no purchase in her veins.

And now, those in charge wanted to know who exactly, or what, she was. Could they figure out how to replicate it? Is that what they saw her as? A tool? Something to be used in their quest for control… or power?

“Keep her under watch,” a voice said just outside the door. She recognized it. It sounded just like Henry, and there was no mistaking the authority in his tone. “Orders are that we need to learn more about this. Whatever she is, she can’t leave until we know what’s going on here.”

Where the fuck are you, Alex?

* * *

Sophia woke up, no longer in Alex’s room, but in what she imagined was once a sterile, white room, with a dead fluorescent light just above her head. The walls around her were a blank canvas of coldness—a small window above the door was the only source of light.

Have I been drugged? How did I get here? Where are you, Alex?

She felt like she had somehow entered a place beyond time itself, where seconds and minutes meant nothing. As she lay there, the last twelve hours or so came back to her.

They must have moved so quickly, isolating her under the pretense ofprecautionary measures. She had been too stunned by the suddenness of it all to question it at first. All she could think was,Where’s Alex? Where’s Alex?They’d promised her she would be treated for her injuries and that they were making sure she was okay. But it had quickly turned into something else. The first tests had been simple—blood work, temperature checks, and samples taken with clinical efficiency. But where were they even getting these things tested? She had agreed to them without hesitation. She hadn’t dared refuse.

The first few rounds of questions had seemed like nothing beyond what she would have expected.

“What exactly did you feel when you were bitten?”

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