Daylighters (The Morganville Vampires #15)(63)

It was screaming.

Treatments.

Claire felt her knees go weak. She sank down on the bed, wincing at the shrill squeak of the springs, and took a deep breath. I have to get out of here.

She felt around the back of her pants to where she’d stashed the paper clip.

It was still there, tangled up in thin acid-washed threads. It took time and patience and cramping fingers to work the paper clip free; after she’d finally succeeded, she took a break, working her sore, still-pinned hands and trying to get some feeling back into them. The guards who’d taken her in had, not unexpectedly, put the cuffs on too tightly, and she had throbbing pain around her wrists. Her hands felt bloated and tingly, and for lack of anything better to do at the moment, she stretched out prone on the bed and held her hands up at a painful angle to reduce the blood flow. The tingling faded in a couple of minutes, and the fingers felt better. Still clumsy, but better.

She sat up again, took a deep breath, and started working with the paper clip. It took a long time to pick the lock on the handcuffs. Myrnin had drilled her, at one time, in the finer points of the art; he’d felt it was a necessary skill to have, in Morganville, and it turned out he was almost certainly right. Still, she was rusty, and it took too long to bend the tough, thick clip into the right shapes, and to maneuver it into position. Then she had to fight her own burning, cramping muscles to delicately trip all the little triggers inside the lock, but finally she felt the first of the cuffs slip free. The second took only about a third as much time, now that she had the right angle on the problem.

Freed, she took a few seconds to breathe and silently celebrate. Then she checked the drawers of her little room. As expected, there were ugly cotton undies, in a variety of sizes, and some equally ugly sports bras (though she quickly switched out what she’d been given back at the Vampire Mall, since even this stuff was an upgrade). Then she pulled on the drawer and found it slid smoothly, in and out.

Good news.

Claire padded the area beneath the drawer with the pillow from the bed, emptied out what was inside, and yanked hard on the mechanism. It caught firmly, refusing to slide out. She worked it up and down, side to side, until one of the small wheels inside slipped free of the guides, and then the left side popped free. From there it was simple enough to wrench it loose from the right, but the drawer was heavy and awkward, and she was glad she’d put the pillow in place to catch it as it fell or the noise would have echoed down that hall—quiet, now that the screaming had faded away.

Once the drawer was out, she saw the metal guides screwed into its sides. Perfect.

Claire worked on her paper clip until it was twisted into a makeshift screwdriver that slotted into the heads of the screws. Working with it took muscle power, sweat, patience, and more strained muscles, but she managed to loosen two out of three fasteners on one side, and the third didn’t matter; she torqued the metal until it ripped loose.

She’d started handcuffed, armed with a paper clip. Now she had a ten-inch strip of metal with sharp edges, handcuffs, and a paper clip. Her odds were improving all the time.

There wouldn’t be time to fashion the metal properly, but she found that using the heavy edges of the wooden drawer, she could press on the metal and fold it into a sharp point. An extra pair of undies wrapped nicely around the other end, to provide a decent grip.

Instant knife.

She worked on the other guide and got it free, and bent it into a springy U-shape. With the carefully wrapped addition of a sports bra, she had a passable slingshot. The screws she’d loosened provided ammunition. So did pieces she managed to tease out of the bed’s frame.

The drawer went back in, filled with the clothing, and the pillow back on the bed. At first glance, everything looked perfectly normal.

Claire made a sheath for her knife out of cardboard (they’d left some with crayons, for drawing, in a drawer) and fastened it with a loop of torn elastic to the belt loop of her jeans. Then she put the sheath down the side of her leg, inside the jeans, and slid the knife in. It did show, but not as much as it would have if the jeans had been tighter. Good enough.

The ammunition for the makeshift slingshot went into her pockets. On impulse, she broke up the crayons and added those, too. And the button off her blue jeans.

She was contemplating what to do with the handcuffs when the door rattled, and after a second’s thought, she jammed the slingshot down the small of her back, and put the cuffs back around her wrists, but just barely clicked on . . . loose enough that she could get her hands free with a brisk shake.

She was standing in the middle of the room looking crestfallen when Dr. Anderson swung the door open again. “Can you please take these off now?” she asked, and tried to sound chastened. “They hurt.”

“In a while,” Anderson said, which was exactly what Claire had expected her to say. She gestured for Claire to come out, and she did. The metal slingshot jammed against her back felt raw and awkward, and she knew it would be visible from behind, poking out against her thin shirt, but Anderson didn’t go behind her; she took her elbow and walked next to her quickly down the hallway toward the end. No one passed them, and when Claire risked a look behind, she didn’t see anyone following, either.

“Not much of a staff,” she said.

“We’re just hiring,” Anderson said. “You and your friend are our very first patients. I’m sure you’re honored.”