Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(74)
“I won’t tell anyone.” My voice was as soft as I could make it. “I’ll pretend I don’t remember. I swear.”
“I can’t...”
“Please. I’ll owe you. I’ll...” But I had nothing with which to pay her. The only thing I even had easy access to was... “Do you like cookies?”
Her eyes widened, and I knew I’d said the right thing. A child growing up in captivity probably saw very little luxury. “Chocolate?” Her voice bounced around my head with excitement.
“Yes. I’ll bring you a cookie next time I see you. A big chocolate one. All for you. That’ll be our secret, just like this is.”
Pagano and the female guard were still talking, just outside my field of vision, and I realized that they couldn’t hear her at all, and even if they heard me, they were paying no attention. They expected me to talk to Sandrine. That was part of the process.
“Okay. Our secret.” The child’s lips turned up in a hesitant smile, and I was heartbroken to realize she might treasure the secret as much as she would the cookie. “Close your eyes.”
Her hand slid over my forehead again, and I obeyed. “You can’t remember anything after you left your cell, until you step into your cell again. You can’t remember me being here. Touching you. You can’t remember this room.”
I panicked for a moment, until I realized she wasn’t taking my memory; she was giving me instructions on how to fake it.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
When she removed her hand from my face, I opened my eyes. She started to step away from me, signaling the end of her job. “Sandrine,” I whispered and she frowned. “I can’t remember the past two months. Did you take those memories too?”
She shook her head. “That wasn’t me,” her lips said, though I heard the words from that other, internal source.
“Are you sure? Could you have been made to forget what you did?”
That time her wide eyes hinted at deep sadness. “I can’t forget anything.”
*
The next day, I was both relieved and disappointed when Pagano came to get me for lunch duty. Relieved, because I didn’t have lunch duty on fight days, which meant that Gallagher would not be forced into the arena that night. Disappointed because that meant I wouldn’t get to see him.
In the kitchen, I chatted with Mirela as we loaded trays, and my preoccupation with the fact that she had less than two years to live if we couldn’t break out of the Spectacle almost made me miss what she was saying.
“...and Lala saw her yesterday during the dinner shift in the infirmary. She may have a limp, but she’s going to be fine.”
Genevieve. She was talking about Genni. However, news that the werewolf pup would recover was bittersweet at best, because she’d be hunted again as soon as she could run. “None of us are going to be fine, Mirela. Not if we don’t get out of here.”
“I know. We’re watching, and making lists, like you asked.”
“Like I...?”
Mirela’s hand paused as she lifted a cookie from the tray. They were freshly baked, but came from premade dough, which put them squarely in the middle of the food-quality spectrum, which stretched from the gourmet bites served at events to the tasteless but nutritionally sound fare doled out to the captives. “You asked us to watch the handlers and make mental lists of who works when, and where, remember? There are three that rotate shifts in the security room, two at a time, so that it’s never empty, even when one goes to the bathroom. But you can tell when there’s only one there, because the control room door stands open but the nearest bathroom door is closed.”
I’d asked my friends to gather intel?
“Good. That’s good work. Thanks.”
“I don’t see how it’ll help, if we can’t get through the door. And even if we could, we don’t know how to disable the system.”
The whole system? Of course. Why bother with one or two collars, when we could take them all out at once? Or at least remove their restrictions. “I’m working on that.” Though for all I knew, I’d already figured it out once.
I glanced at the chart hanging on the wall over the tray she was filling. “You’re going to the stables. Could you make sure Genni knows her father is here? That might improve her spirits as she recuperates.”
Mirela’s eyes widened. “Claudio is here? How? When?”
“Zyanya didn’t tell you?”
The oracle shook her head. “She just said Payat survived.”
Naturally her brother would have been her priority. “Claudio breached the hunting grounds and was brought in during the first round the other night. I don’t know how he figured out Genni is here, but he got himself caught to get her out. Or at least to be near her.”
“Okay. I’ll tell her.” Mirela slid her last tray onto the cart and headed for the door. While the guard on duty reminded her that she’d be shocked and paralyzed if she wasn’t back in half an hour, I slipped an extra cookie onto my own cart, beneath one of the trays.
*
The infirmary was the last building on my route, and as Pagano led me through the front door, my gaze homed in on the “unnoticeable” hallway. It was suddenly perfectly noticeable, probably because I knew what to look for, since my memory of it hadn’t been erased. But my route didn’t take me in that direction.