Page 116 of Tell Me Why
The moment had been a lie, the one with the knife on the table and the binding on her wrist just a fraction loose.
She’d imagined it.
Made herself out to be the hero, the one who rescued herself.
Her time was up.
Even if she hadn’t been counting it correctly for days, it was done.
“Tina,” a voice said.
Tell’s voice.
She’d hallucinated it a dozen times, even before the faux escape attempt. She kept thinking, hoping that he really was still going to come back, that he wasn’t dead.
“Tina,” he said again. “Listen to me. You have to fight. You can do this, but you have to fight.”
Cruelty.
Here, at the end of things, he was going to tell her to fight?
There was nothing for her to do.
She pulled her arm against the restraint, just to show herself, but the arm moved freely.
She looked around.
Eyes.
It was like she’d forgotten them, they’d been so unreliable.
The room was purple and infinite, but the size of a box, up tight, the corners just… there… where she could reach out and touch them.
Tell had great, black hair that stuck out from his head like he’d been electrocuted, and his face was long, like it had been stretched.
But he was there, next to her, his chin resting on the table next to her.
She blinked, trying to make him go away.
This would be easier if she didn’t have to try to convince herself that he wasn’t here.
Just.
Let go.
She was tired.
There was gibberish from her other side, but… Tina frowned… it had been coherent gibberish, rather than incoherent gibberish. Or, rather, it had been a sequence of words that hadn’t made any sense to her at all, rather than words that were tantalizinglycloseto meaning something to her.
In Ginger’s voice.
She hadn’t hallucinated Ginger.
Not once.
That was new.
“They really have advanced,” the woman said. “This was my technique, you understand, but they’ve evolved past it in the most fascinating ways.”
