2

I stumble across the floor as they drag me down the hall. I finally get a good look at myself in the polished mirrors of the next room they place me in, this one designed to madden me through disorientation. The room is shaped like an octagon, with eight mirrors touching the floor, and eight more in the shape of triangles that end around another small, octagonal mirror on the ceiling. The door to the room has a mirror that matches almost seamlessly to the rest of its wall. Sixteen doors will open when they come to feed me, but only one will be real. It’s designed to madden me, dizzy me, make me ripe for them to come and coax the code from.

However, I do the one thing they don’t expect.

I crawl in the corner, facing my reflection, and I sleep.

I sleep easier here. I know what is around me. I don’t have the hypersensitivity to touch and light, because they have, in their attempt to madden me, returned to me the gift of sight. When I wake, disoriented from the mirrors, I flip over and touch my reflection, feel the cool glass under my fingers, hear the glass squeak as my hand drags across it, and then I am sure which one is real and which is a reflection. I wake when they feed me, I acknowledge them to hear my voice, and by what is probably the third day, they’re trying to keep me awake by dousing me with water, trying to scare me by turning out the lights at random intervals, trying to disorient me by pulling me from the wall into the center of the room.

I crawl back and sleep on.

Finally, finally, the man in the suit returns.  He snatches me up, “You think you’re unbreakable, aren’t you?”

His eyes are green and his features are young, too young, suspiciously young. I nod.

He shakes me, “You’re not, you know. You’re just some useless brat.”

“Not too useless.”

He tosses me to the floor, and I slide back and crash into the mirrored wall. It vibrates a warning of its fragility, and he eyes it as he crouches in front of me, “You’re right. You’re a vaguely useful brat. But my team of code crackers has been working on this code for years now, and it won’t be soon before they crack it. You’re just a slightly more convenient means of acquiring it.” He pulls a gun from his waist band, waves it, and presses it into the center of my forehead, “I could kill you right now, you know. I could kill you and it wouldn’t be a loss. Now what do you have to say to that?”

“I’d laugh in your face if I had the energy and spit in your eye if I had the fluids. You’re a bad liar by the way. You’re not close to cracking the code at all, otherwise I’d have been dead long ago. That gun isn’t loaded, either, now is it? There’s not even one in the chamber.”

He looks at me and drops the clip from the gun. It’s empty.

“You got me,” He laughs, “You called my bluff. All of them.”

I pull myself closer to the wall behind me. That was easy, too easy, and no Professional in his right mind would admit that he was wrong without challenging me to prove it though a task that would kill me if I was wrong, something like pointing the gun at my head and pulling the trigger.

He smiles again, and it is twice as unnerving in the light as it is in the dark, “Now here’s one you probably never thought of.” He fills his clip, loads it, grabs the gun by the muzzle and strikes the wall behind me once, twice, three times. I cover my arms with my head as the glass rains down, and he grabs me by my arm, pulling me to my feet.

“Run, Marina. Run. Follow me.”

I wrap my fingers into the back of his tailored suit as alarms go off, and use it as a tether as we weave through people who are too shocked to fully realize what’s happening. I’m loaded into a big SUV and he drives, where to, I don’t know.

I’m too busy searching for a weapon.

He reaches for my hands as a seize a gun from the glove compartment, “Please, calm down. I’m on your side. See?” He takes his hands off the wheel and peels back a flesh colored strip of adhesive on his wrist. There is a small tattoo, the acronym AMP.

Armaments Management Project. I have the same tattoo, with the exact same regs; exactly one inch wide and a half of an inch tall, exactly half of an inch in from either side of the wrist, and exactly half an inch below the hand. There are appropriate recalculations for wrists of different sizes of course, but that is beside the point. The point is that he is a Winterist, and is on my side.

Or maybe…

I pin him to his seat by his throat at a stop light, and scan his face with the still-intact scanner disguised as a watch I was allowed to keep. I run the tattoo under a black light I found in the glove compartment as well, and it fluoresces bright blue with purple flecks as his stats beep on the screen of the watch.

His name is Austin McBride, aged twenty, and is most emphatically a Winterist going deep undercover in the world of the Professionals. His job was to get in for a year, get information, and get out without blowing his cover. Unfortunately, he missed the bus when they said “do not blow your cover under any circumstances” and did so to get me out. I thank him, and climb into the backseat. I roll down the windows, listen to the wind and the birds and the traffic, and enjoy the fresh air until the car lulls me to sleep, numbers dancing on the surface of my consciousness.

I am safe.

Author's Note

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