Page 115 of Tell Me Why
Light,dark.
Hot, cold.
They werethingsthat happened outside of herself, now.
She had no idea what was actually going on, but she’d made her attempt. They’d turned their backs, given her a moment when they thought that she was all the way gone, and she’d… well, it was… It wasn’t fuzzy. The problem was that it had been in super-bright colors that streaked and wailed, and she thought that they’d been about to take her apart again to put something new inside of her that would remain deep down inside her chest as she healed again, but she’d taken them apart first, which was… not like her?… or was it? She couldn’t remember.
They’d left the weapons in reach and underestimated her and she’d run.
She’d memorized the layout of the building from the inside, but it hadn’t been until near the end that they’d taken her anywhere with an external-facing door.
It had a red ‘exit’ sign over top of it, absurdly. Up to code.
She knew every inch of the ant-trails that they’d followed, taking her to and from her cell every day, so while she was reasonably sure that it wasn’t theshortestpath, the one that she’d taken to get herself out, she’dknownit. There had been no guesswork.
Now, whether she’d been on her feet the whole way, she didn’t have any idea, or where she’d gotten someone else’s feet, either, and her elbows hurt, but pain was good because it meant that she still cared.
The days that the pain had slipped away from her… those had scared her.
Those were the days that she had nearly died and maybe they would go ahead and harvest her because they’d pushed her too far, too fast.
They talked about it in front of her.
Someday, maybe, she was going to have to go back through all of it and try to figure out which parts were real and which were… well, whateverelsehad been going on.
How many men had she attempted to kill who hadn’t been there at all, and how many she’d actually made a lethal attempt on.
She didn’tthinkshe’d actually killed anyone, because they were vampires, and a blade didn’t have the ability to take their lives, even if it was a very fancy one that… where had it ended up? She couldn’t remember.
Probably inside of one of them.
She didn’t think she’d had it when she got outside.
It had floored her, theoutsidelack of cover from the setting sun, and that? that moment she remembered with clarity.
That moment stood out as the only lucid thought of the entire event.
She had had to choose if she was going to live or die.
If she was going to live, she had to walk.
That was all there was to it.
She didn’t remember much about after that. Couldn’t swear that shehadwalked, but she’d lived, so she must have.
The rest of it from there was a hall of monsters.
Doors that opened to nothing or to everything, knowledge that she couldn’t have possibly had, which meant that all of it was hallucinated and none of it was true, things that hissed and recoiled and threatened, the grip of spiders’ legs across her skin, a voice she couldn’t turn her head fast enough to make out.
She was out, and if she died of exposure, that was better than being eaten.
If only for spite.
She wasn’t going to go easily.
A needle pierced the skin of her shoulder and she realized.
She realized that they’d caught her. That maybe she hadn’t escaped at all, that it had all been doors and mirrors and a fevered brain trying to remember what the story of reality even looked like.
