Raging Sea (Undertow, #2)(39)

The hardest part is the food. It’s always the same, always rancid, and there’s never anything to drink, but I eat every bite. It’s the only way I’m going to get stronger. I wish I could just gorge and swallow it fast, but I know it will make me sick to eat too quickly, so I close my eyes tight and try to think of my mother’s spaghetti and meatballs, or meatloaf, or anything. Even the charred black stuff my dad made while destroying the kitchen every morning is better than this. His burned eggs and toast and scorched oatmeal sound delicious.

I think about pizza from Famous Ray’s, and chili dogs from Nathan’s, and cotton-candy afternoons. I think about fried oysters and clam strips at Rudy’s Bar. I think about everything but barfing, and aside from some gagging, it works. I lick every crumb in the bowl and tell myself it will turn into muscle. I’m still working on the rotten apples when the slot opens. I snatch what I can as the bowl is pulled out of my hands, skitters across the floor, and disappears.

I crawl to the door and laugh.

“I ate it all!” I shout. “You couldn’t get it before I was done!”

And I pray. Not like Arcade, but certainly inspired by her. My father is a nonpracticing Catholic, and Mom has her Alpha beliefs, so we never really went to church on a regular basis. I know the basics, but I’m not really talking to God or Jesus or the Great Abyss. I’m talking to whoever is out there and is listening. Sometimes I imagine that it’s Henry from the little church in Shafter. He tells me to pray out loud, unapologetic and vulnerable.

And the rest of the days, I lie on the mattress, silent and mindful. They must think I’m sleeping, but that’s not at all what I’m doing. I’m listening to the noises, the ones that used to drive me insane. I’m counting their rhythms and taking mental notes on their patterns, quickly discovering my meal delivery is a fairly reasonable time-keeping method. I can’t know for certain the exact time of day it is, but I know I get three meals and then there is a long run until the next one arrives. I assume that span is nighttime, when everyone is supposed to be asleep, including me. So the first meal is the beginning of a new day. In between those meals, I’m counting how often someone checks the lock on my door—nine times. I’m noticing that someone demands I step into the circle eight times. There are three times each day when there are lots of people in the halls—shift change. All of it soon forms a predictable schedule, in which I know what’s happening outside my door without ever seeing it. Their routines are telling me plenty about how this place works.

The only thing that breaks up my training is when they steal me away to run tests. I never expect it, and it occurs in the nighttime when I’m asleep. I assume they pump some kind of knockout gas into the room, but I never hear the hiss. During the tests, they poke and prod. The nurse takes blood and tissue samples. She studies my eyes. They drop me into a tank and film me as the scales appear on my arms and neck. They examine the gills on the undersides of my jawline and the webbing between my feet and toes. They want urine and skin samples, and they scan and x-ray me to the point where I’m concerned about getting cancer, but I don’t fight them. My strength is reserved for other things.

“This one needs a bath,” Calvin complains.

“Well, ask Spangler if you can give her one,” the nurse snaps.

“Damn, Amy. You’re a real pill.”

Amy. That’s the nurse’s name. She’s the one who shaved my head. She stitched me up and inserted the IV needles. Amy. Such a nice name, a name that seems kind and pleasant, like it’s associated with springtime and flowers, and yet there’s such ugliness inside her.

“I’ve got a brother in the Guard, and he’s stationed in Brooklyn,” she snaps at him. “Those things nearly killed him this week, so excuse me for not being Little Ms. Sunshine.”

She reaches into her pocket and takes out a tube of lip gloss and spreads it across her ugly mouth. Then she selects a needle off the tray and injects it into my bag.

I would kill for lip gloss, I think, feeling their sedatives crawl through me.

“Oh, sorry. Is he okay?”

“He can’t tell me anything,” Amy says calmly. “My mother is in hysterics. She’s got two kids working around sea monsters. She keeps blaming herself, like she did something wrong.”

“You told her?” Calvin says. “I thought all this is classified.”

She shakes her head. Calvin is intolerable to her. I can’t help but laugh at her misery.

“It seems like every couple months something uglier crawls out of the ocean,” he adds. “Did you see what they brought in here the other day?”

Amy grunts. “Disgusting.”

“Did you read that story about the captain who spotted the giant squid?”

Amy scowls. “I had an uncle who was on a fishing boat. He was always drunk too.”

“Unless it’s true,” he argues.

“Jeez, you were right, Calvin. She does need a bath.”

“Can’t we hose her off or something?” he asks. “She’s not going to hurt anybody. She can’t even keep her eyes focused.”

Amy shrugs, grabs me by the jaw roughly, and flashes a penlight into my pupils.

“Yeah, get the hose.”

The nurse pulls the IV needle out of my arm, swabs my skin with alcohol, and puts a bandage on the wound.