Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(55)
My handler’s semicordial familiarity with me. The change in my diet and living quarters. Clothes I hadn’t put on.
I felt as if I’d woken up in the middle of a day I didn’t remember starting.
With that realization, my hand flew to my face. There was no mirror in my room, and there’d been so many discrepancies in my memory that I’d completely forgotten about the bruise from Woodrow’s punch. Which had been easy, because it no longer hurt.
As we completed our third lap around the isolated, nondescript building, my fingers found my cheekbone. There was no tenderness. The scab that had formed over the nick on my throat was gone.
That wouldn’t be possible overnight without the liberal application of some sort of healing aid, like phoenix tears. But phoenix tears wouldn’t explain the discrepancies in my memory.
The conclusion was obvious, if inexplicable. I hadn’t been punched and cut the night before. I wasn’t just missing the memory of dressing and leaving Gallagher’s room last night.
I was missing several days.
*
Pagano seemed confused by my sudden silence as he walked me back to my cell, but not entirely disappointed by it. About an hour after he left—though I could never be sure of the time—he came back with my lunch tray, which held a ham sandwich with lettuce and tomato, steamed broccoli, half a peach and a school-lunch-sized carton of orange juice. I could hardly enjoy the best meal I’d eaten since Vandekamp shot me with a tranquilizer dart because of the questions swirling around in my head.
What had changed during the days I was missing? Why was I missing them at all?
Around midafternoon, Pagano came back to escort me to an engagement he seemed to think I was expecting. I wound up in the prep room with five other captives, including Zyanya. She was already paralyzed in her chair when I got there, but I saw nothing unusual in her gaze. She seemed pleased but not surprised to see me.
Nothing the makeup artists said or did gave me any clue about my missing days.
Once I was painted, dressed and rubbed with body glitter, the other captives and I were marched through the topiary and the rear iron gate toward the arena, where we were led to individual box seats. Just like the previous evening.
Which wasn’t actually the previous evening at all.
The fact that it was arena night again confirmed my suspicion that I was missing a significant amount of time. Gallagher had told me that fights were only held twice a week, to give the combatants a chance to heal and rest. That put my missing time at three or four days, at least.
My head spun with the realization. How could I have lost so much time? How could no one else know about it?
Pagano was waiting in my box—the same one I’d served Mr. Arroway in—along with Bowman, who didn’t seem surprised by my presence, or by the fact that my face had healed. Which told me that I hadn’t actually gone missing during my missing days. I just couldn’t remember them.
Half an hour before the fight was scheduled to begin, Olive Burnette escorted a party of six into my box. Four men and two women, all dressed to kill.
The larger party kept me busy serving food and refilling drinks for most of the first two matches, in which a new troll and the manticore I’d seen before successfully and gorily defended their titles.
During the break before the final fight, conversation buzzed in my box while my customers discussed the reigning champion. I listened closely, because as of the last fight I remembered, Gallagher and Eryx had both been champions. If either was no longer a reigning champion, then he was dead.
My chest tightened at the thought, and for a second I had trouble drawing a deep breath. Could Gallagher be dead?
Could my reaction to losing him be what had led to my loss of memory? Had I blocked the entire event? Or had I been so much trouble as a result that Vandekamp had me medicated? Was the memory loss an unforeseen side effect?
That could explain why no one else seemed to know about my missing time.
I shook those thoughts from my head and focused on pouring drinks and offering bite-size delicacies, because I couldn’t believe it. Gallagher couldn’t be dead.
Soon the house lights dimmed, and Vandekamp appeared alone on the sand in his spotlight. With his usual booming voice and composed showmanship, he introduced the challenger: Belua, a behemoth, which looked like a cross between a wild boar and a black rhino. The twelve-foot-long, two-ton beast pawed the ground and paced back and forth, snorting aggressively. The only thing keeping her from charging Vandekamp was the huge steel collar around her neck.
When he announced that Belua’s opponent, one of the reigning champions, was the rare and prized fear dearg, my relief was so consuming that I almost dropped a tray full of stemmed glasses of red wine.
“So what is a fear dearg anyway?” a woman on the front row asked.
“I don’t know, but he’s undefeated,” the man next to her said, and no one pointed out that winning a couple of fights—how many could there have been in a few days?—doesn’t really count as being undefeated.
I held my breath as I stared down at the sand, waiting to see Gallagher. To verify for myself that he was okay.
Lights dimmed all over the stadium, except for three spotlights in the ring. The gate at the other side of the arena slid open. And finally Gallagher stepped onto the sand, into the empty spotlight a third of the way into the oval ring. Then he turned to look up at me. As if he knew exactly where I’d be.