Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(61)
“I need to talk to Vandekamp.” I had to know how I got pregnant. I had to look into his eyes while I demanded information, so I could see the truth and hopefully rule him out as a suspect.
I needed to know why he’d locked me away from everyone else and put me on a prenatal health food diet, and what all of that meant for the fate of the baby I shouldn’t even be carrying.
I needed to shove my thumbs into his eye sockets and listen to him scream.
“That’s not a request you get to make.” Pagano pushed my breakfast into my room, then picked up the snack tray I’d slid into the hall untouched in the middle of the night. He frowned at the browning apple as he started to close the door to my cell.
“Wait. Please. Just tell him I want to talk.”
“Not gonna happen.”
“If you don’t let me talk to him, I won’t eat a bite of this.”
Pagano shrugged. “Do what you’ve got to do.” But the tight line of his jaw said something else entirely. If he’d been instructed to make sure I took my vitamin, he was probably also supposed to make sure I ate.
I picked up the tray he’d slid into my room and held it over the toilet, tilting it so that the blueberries would have tumbled from their compartment, if not for the plastic wrap. “How much trouble are you going to be in if I flush this?”
He gave me an exasperated sigh. “Yes, you’ll get me in trouble. But you’ll also lose your work privileges.”
I retracted my breakfast tray, surprised by the news. “Why didn’t I have work privileges yesterday?”
Pagano frowned. “Yesterday you had an engagement.” At the arena, of course.
“So, if I play nice, I get to work this afternoon? Outside my cell? Where I’ll see other people?”
My handler’s frown deepened. “What’s wrong with you?” His gaze narrowed on me. “Should I call the infirmary?”
“I’m fine.” I sank onto my stack of mats with my tray. “Close the door on your way out.”
He frowned at me for several more seconds, then left.
When his footsteps receded down the hall, I peeled the plastic wrap from my breakfast tray. The scents of the sausage and egg-white omelet sent me lurching for the toilet, but heaving for several minutes produced nothing more than the water I’d drunk an hour earlier.
Only the fact that I’d never been pregnant—and hadn’t known it was a possibility—could have led me to mistake morning sickness for a side effect of sedation.
When the nausea finally passed, I sat on the floor by the toilet for several more minutes, staring at my breakfast as if it had betrayed me. Then I scooped the omelet into the toilet and flushed it out of my life. I ate the fruit and the biscuit, then washed the vitamin down with my carton of milk. Then I brushed my teeth, ran my hands through my hair and sat on my stacked sleep mats and stared at the door, waiting for it to open.
With no way to measure time, I couldn’t be sure how much of it passed before Pagano finally came back, but the interval felt like eternity. I was up and ready to go before he got my door open.
Pagano walked me from my own isolated building to the dormitory kitchen, where two men in plain white aprons were cooking, while a staff of four filled trays according to the specifications listed on the charts hanging above a prep table.
Mahsa and Simra were among the women loading carts with prepared trays. They both smiled and nodded, unsurprised to see me in what was evidently our normal routine. But when I headed for the empty cart next to theirs, Pagano grabbed my arm and redirected me with a frown. He hadn’t yet figured out that I was missing memories, but he couldn’t be far off the conclusion.
To my utter shock, Mahsa and Simra each left pushing a cart full of trays unattended. I couldn’t understand that until I heard a handler warn them at the kitchen doorway that they had exactly fifteen minutes to complete their rounds and return the carts, before they would be paralyzed on the spot and collected by their handlers. That knowledge, along with the fact that their collars kept them from leaving the building or passing through any unauthorized doorway seemed to satisfy the staff that this was a perfectly safe arrangement.
Evidently the collars were equipped with locators, as I’d suspected.
The cart my handler led me to was being loaded with trays of gooey lasagna, aromatic garlic bread and a fresh spinach-and-cherry-tomato salad drizzled with balsamic vinaigrette. Unless Vandekamp was hiding another two dozen pregnant women, my best guess was that I would be delivering lunch trays to the guards, rather than to my fellow captives.
Pagano escorted me around the building, where I delivered the first few lunches to guards assigned to monitor the dormitories. They were all men. Every time I handed one of them a tray, I held my breath and looked right into his eyes, both hoping for and dreading the possibility of finding some private kind of recognition in them. Some cruel knowledge.
Would I be able to tell, if I were looking at the father of my child? Did I truly want to know, if there was nothing I could do about it?
After the dormitory, Pagano led me to the main building, where he knocked on a door labeled Security, and I gave a tray apiece to two men watching a huge bank of wall-mounted monitors. I tried not to be too obvious as I glanced at a tall shelf stacked with boxes identical to the one my collar had come in.
Were those extras, waiting to be programmed for new arrivals?