Page 27 of The Quiet
They’d begun to call her Marnie’s shadow and Baker had enjoyed the name. As if to show some resistance to Jolie’s harshness, Baker placed a hand on Marnie who looked down at her and smiled, clutching her small fingers and kissing them.
Jolie walked off, and soon so did everyone else until only Marnie and Baker remained in the dining hall.
“I can’t believe I almost went up a yellow staircase,” Marnie said.
Startled, Baker stared up at her. Was that what troubled her so much?
Baker touched her again, but this time Marnie didn’t respond at all. She got up from her table, head low, shoulders hunched, and scurried out of the room. Baker ran after her, incited into a panic by Marnie’s strange rush as she raced up the stairway back into the Bleeding Grin. Their cleaning hours were almost coming to a close, and anyone was fair game for Amiel then.
Baker sprinted after Marnie now, who turned a sharp corner, Baker catching a glimpse of her dress as she turned another corner again.
There was complete silence. Baker lost her. She wandered into the hall and then out of it, checking the same hallways multiple times as her panic continued to increase. She wanted to call her name, but could only listen until a few minutes later, a faint, weak sound drew her to a cracked door.
The scene of the squirrel being eaten by a hawk flashed into her mind. Baker raced to the cracked door as she heard the sound again, stopping in her tracks when she saw what waited inside.
Marnie was splayed out across the bed, her eyes full of tears, her face vacant as she cried and looked off into some distant place. Strike Yun lay on top of her, her arms and legs splayed wide and limp as he crouched and moved over her, clawing and biting at her skin.
Baker’s fingers gripped the door as her heart raced in horror. She thought of the hawk tearing and eating, the squirrel’s body split wide, much like Marnie’s now with her helpless whimpering. Strike Yun moved her limp form with his own. Her body looked dead as he stroked and kissed the fear out of her skin.
Nausea gripped Baker’s stomach and she clutched the wall as lightheadedness sent her mind sailing. Her heart beat so loudly she was convinced it would give her presence away and she wanted to cry out as a horrible feeling of dread turned her stomach. Death had come for Marnie at last.
Tears stung her eyes as she tore back through the doors and down the hallway. She ran past the other servants and buried herself under the covers as she sobbed into the blankets, struck by the sight of Marnie’s nakedness and how utterly lifeless she’d seemed in Strike Yun’s arms.
Baker cried herself into stillness, Jolie saying nothing as she returned into the room. Later that night, Marnie returned, crawling into bed and slowly looping her arms around Baker. Disgusted, Baker shoved her away and scrambled out of the bed.
Baker saw the hurt in Marnie’s eyes which only made her want to run faster. She curled up on the floor at the base of Jolie’s bed. Marnie knelt down beside her, prepared to join her on the ground.
Baker shoved her back again, running into the dining hall until she was sure Marnie hadn’t followed her. She curled up under one of the tables, and drew her legs up under her dress with her head lying against the ground. Seething with a core of indistinguishable emotion, she was relieved to be left alone to sleep
She fell asleep with two recurring thoughts.
The first was that Valentine had betrayed her for Amnesia. The second was that Marnie had become a traitor too.
She woke up with a blanket over her body, Marnie sleeping on the dirtied floor beside her out in the open. Baker could not explain, but now she knew why everyone ignored Marnie, and why Jolie seemed to hate her.
Marnie represented the weakness they had all come to despise. It was the weakness that made them slaves. It was the weakness that made them human. Marnie gave herself freely to the Strike without any sense of shame or self-preservation. She consented to being their prey. Only now, did Baker truly grasp the indignity of it.
Baker felt a deep revulsion in the pit of her stomach and wondered if now she hated Marnie too.
Nevertheless, she reached her hand out, and wrapped it around Marnie’s cool fingers. Waking up, Marnie reached forward, stroking Baker’s hair. Baker resisted the urge to pull away.
“Good morning, little bird,” Marnie said as if incapable of seeing the anger in her eyes. She smiled as if nothing had happened between them the night before.
Marnie did not see darkness in the world. She did not feel rejection. She did not tolerate fear.
The Strike had eaten too much of her.
CHAPTER 9
CURSED
ELLA CLAWED THROUGH the water, a stabbing pain needling through her lungs as she longed to escape the pool.
The last thing she remembered were strong feelings of longing, feelings strong enough to reach through time and take hold of the ROSE before waters crashed in on all sides and she was spinning in a cocktail of adrenalin, confusion and fear.
A flickering light like the sun guided her through rippled water, but all else was now darkness, Ella fighting with everything she had left to make it to the surface.
She gasped for air as she burst through the waves, breaking into a net of hands that dragged her violently onto the steep incline of the bank. The cool ring of a handgun shoved her head down against the sand as she squinted through the lapping salt water.
