Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(11)
One of the men in bite suits reached into the pen and grabbed Rommily’s ankle with his bare hand. Her eyelids flew open to reveal featureless white orbs—the signature trait of an oracle in the grip of a premonition.
“Crushed by the weight of your own hubris,” Rommily said, each word running into the next as they fell from her mouth. “Broken rib. Punctured lung. Massive internal bleeding.”
Startled, the guard let go of Rommily and turned to his coworkers—the first lapse of judgment I’d seen from any of them so far. “What the hell is she saying?”
“That’s how you’re going to die.” Mirela’s voice was low-pitched and eerily steady, like the undisturbed surface of a deep lake. “When is anyone’s guess.”
“Is she serious?” the handler demanded from coworkers, who had no answer for him.
“Just grab her, Bowman,” the man in tactical gear snapped.
“Bowman...” Rommily repeated, blinking shiny white eyes at him. “Grab her...”
Bowman gritted his teeth and seized the oracle’s ankle again, then hauled her roughly toward the opening of the pen. Rommily’s head smacked the floor of her cell, and I flinched as her normal irises returned. Pain had driven her out of her vision.
Lala gripped the door of her cell. “Please be careful. She’s not dangerous. She’s just confused.”
The handlers led Rommily into the building with no particular care for how roughly they handled her. Yet neither of them touched her bare flesh again.
After the oracles had gone, I was alone in our trailer, and when the handlers unlocked my metal cell, I lowered myself to the ground before they could even reach for me. I didn’t fight when they each took one of my arms, and I held my head high as they marched me into the building, then down a hallway lined with steel doors. My dignity and the clothes I wore were all I had left in the world, and if being sold to the menagerie had taught me anything, it was that those would soon be taken away too.
Bowman opened a door halfway down on the left side of the hall and shoved me into a six-by-eight-foot gray brick room with a tall, narrow window at one end. There was a rolled-up blanket on the floor, next to a stainless-steel toilet/sink combo and a single roll of thin toilet paper.
Bowman cut the plastic binding from my wrists, then closed the door at my back. A soft beep told me it had locked automatically. The door had a square Plexiglas window at eye height and a rectangular cutout at the very bottom that was just the right size for a food tray.
As soon as the men were gone, I rubbed my sore wrists, then drank several handfuls of water from the sink, but I made myself stop when my stomach began to churn. Recovery from dehydration must be slow and steady. Then I used the toilet, my attention trained on the window in my door, to make sure no one was watching.
Seated on the blanket, I listened to footsteps and the beeping of more locked doors as the rest of my friends were marched and stored. The sun sank slowly outside my window, labeling the directions for me, but ignorance of the exact time and my own location ate at my thoughts like an infection. I’d only been imprisoned in the menagerie for about a month before our coup, and since then, I’d lost focus on the reality of captivity. I remembered pain and hunger and humiliation. But I’d forgotten about ignorance and dependence, and how they preyed on the mind rather than the body.
For hours, I sat in an impenetrable concrete cell, deprived of both food and information, and with each passing second, my anger grew until it overwhelmed my fear. The Spectacle was using ignorance as a weapon, keeping us in the dark to leave us disoriented and pliable.
At some point, immeasurable hours after I’d been locked up, a folded stack of material was slid through the opening at the bottom of the door. A food tray followed the clothing, and on it was an empty paper cup lying on its side, a boiled chicken leg, a slice of white bread and half an apple.
Before I could pick up the tray, Bowman’s face appeared outside the door window. “Change clothes and slide your old ones through the slot.” He disappeared without waiting to see if his instructions would be followed.
Still dressed in my grubby Metzger’s uniform, I filled the paper cup with water and ate every bite of food on my tray. Then I changed clothes not because I’d been told to, but because my Metzger’s polo and jeans were covered in grime from a trip I couldn’t remember.
The new uniform was a set of gray scrubs, a wireless sports bra and a drab but clean pair of underwear. The message sent by the prison-like clothing came through loud and clear.
I spread my blanket out on the concrete floor and curled up with my hands beneath my head, and soon I realized that the intermittent traffic past my door was now headed in the opposite direction. My fellow captives were being removed from their cells one at a time.
None of them came back.
Despite having just awoken from sedation, I fell asleep on the floor and when I woke to the scrape of metal as my door was opened, I found a beautiful starlit night shining through the window in my cell.
I sat up to find Bowman staring down at me from the doorway. He’d changed from his puffy bite suit into tactical gear and he was holding a pair of steel handcuffs. “Orientation. Let’s go.”
Still weak from exhaustion, I stood. He spun me around by one arm and secured my wrists at my lower back, then led me into the hall, where one of his coworkers took possession of my other arm.