Page 66 of The Quiet
Ella lifted a foot and the mire tugged at her feet. She pushed toward the entrance, undeterred by the foreboding of such a malicious symbol.
“I guess there’s no point in objecting any longer,” Jackson said behind her.
“This is why I’m here,” Ella replied as they muddled forward.
She couldn’t resist the draw of the Bleeding Grin. Scarred and empty, it was a coffin that held all her buried secrets. It held the world’s buried secrets.
She knew it was a risk, but the draw of her past was irresistible now, and she was convinced that someone, something, had created this for her.
CHAPTER 18
NEVER GONE
COMPARED TO WHAT he’d given, Peter had never asked much from her, but his one request had required more from her than she thought she had.
She still had bruises to prove it, spread over her body like green and purple paints. New ones appeared each week as she trained at Amiel’s mercy.
“You still resent me?” Peter asked as he caught the look in her eyes. He entered his study on commanding strides.
Baker jolted from her book at the study table, having not seen the man for several weeks. He’d been deep in the lab below the Bleeding Grin, a practice in which he lost himself and could vanish for up to a month at a time.
Baker knew her responsibilities, scrambling for a large wooden bowl beside the sink. She filled it with warm water as she grabbed two cloths and draped them over the edge. She moved as fast as she could manage back toward the white table, clearing off her things before setting the bowl in the center.
Sitting down, Baker glanced across the table to find Peter still standing, gazing out a nearby window over his desk as he slowly wiped bloodstained hands in a cloth he carried with him. Blood spotted up to his wrists. She waited for him to return from his thoughts, a rare lightness in his eyes. For a fraction of a second, Baker was reminded of her father, a mechanic. She’d recollectedbroken memories of him as she’d recovered her voice, as if her past and her words were connected somehow.
He'd return from work, sometimes with a similar white rag sticking out of his pocket. He’d wipe his hands on it to remove the grease from repairing machines.
For a moment Peter held the cloth in his hands and she watched as he rolled it slowly, the cloth dissolving into mist until his hands were empty. He only used his powers to serve himself so casually when he was in an excellent mood. It always came and went in a flash, Peter emerging from the deep, burdened mire of his thoughts with a gasp before they pulled him back down again.
Peter glanced over at her and Baker hid her eyes.
“You’re getting better. Amiel told me,” he said.
Amiel is a cruel teacher. A despicable monster.She must have thought in similar words because Peter caught the thought and replied to that. Baker had never known she could hate anything as much as she hated Amiel. She knew the feelings were mutual.
“The world will hit harder than Amiel. It isn’t the way I would have things, but it’s the way that things are.” He’d told her the same when he’d made the decision to have Amiel train her. He’d flipped the coin. It had landed on heads, and he’d promptly ordered the arrangement.
He relied on that coin frequently. He relied on chance frequently, citing to her multiple times that she’d be better off with chance than with his choices. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what that meant.
He pulled out a chair, legs dragging across the carpet before he sat across from her, resting his hands in the water. Baker took his hands and used the cloth to wipe the blood off them. She pushed the truth from her mind that the blood belonged to someone else. Peter was a mechanic in his own right. For the past few weeks, he’d used his hands to exchange and fix pieces of a different sort.
“I don’t want to fight,” Baker said out loud. Lately, Peter had required her to use her voice, not just her thoughts.
“You’re trapped in the mind of the victim,” Peter replied. “In this case, fighting is the only cure, I’m afraid. You can’t express yourself through words. You’ll learn to speak with your body.”
Baker didn’t object. She didn’t know if Peter was right. All she knew was that Amiel was a severe teacher of the martial arts and that her fear of pain was constant.
“You don’t know what it’s like to fight Amiel,” she said.
“We fight constantly.”
Baker looked up. “No one fights you.”
“With wills,” Peter explained. “Constantly.”
She’d much rather Peter rule than Amiel. She looked down, and in her mind, she urged Peter to keep fighting. She couldn’t imagine a more awful place than one where Amiel had final say.
The water and cloth turned pink as she washed his hands, revealing the marks he often hid under gloves. The black, broken arrows extended past the first joint of his fingers to the next.
