Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(75)

The third room on my list was Sandrine’s. In the hall, I took a tray from the cart, but as I was giving it to the handler, I tripped over my own feet and made sure her lunch hit her square in the chest.

The handler gasped and stood frozen with her arms out at her sides. Beef stroganoff, Italian dressing and bits of lettuce clung to her uniform.

“You bitch!” She pulled back one hand to slap me, but Pagano rushed in to grab her wrist.

“Don’t touch her! It’s not safe for the guards.” He held up his gloved hands for emphasis, while the woman glared at me. “Come on.” He slid one arm around her waist, and I remembered their conversation in the “forget things” room the night before. “I’ll help you clean up.” Pagano was a player.

The female handler nodded, still angry, and he pressed a button on his remote, restricting me to Sandrine’s room until he got back. “Be good, Delilah,” he said as he escorted the other handler from the room.

The second the door closed behind them, I retrieved the cookie I’d hidden beneath a tray and headed for the pen where Sandrine was kept locked up with one other girl a couple of years older. “Sandrine. Thanks again,” I whispered as I handed it to her through the bars. “Eat quickly.”

She devoured a third of the treat in one bite.

The girl next to her watched with quiet, passive envy, blinking yellowish eyes similar to Sandrine’s. She too had smooth palms and fingertips.

“What’s your name?” I asked the girl.

“Laure.” The word seemed to echo from within my head, as if I’d spoken it myself, with my ears plugged.

“Laure, have you ever...” I mimed touching my own forehead. “Have you ever made me forget something?”

She nodded.

“Did you make me forget a long period of time? Like, several weeks?”

Laure nodded again, and relief washed over me as I gripped the bars between us. Answers were seconds away.

“Do you know what you made me forget?”

She shook her head. “I used a starting point and an ending point, but I didn’t see what fell between.”

“So, you can’t tell me what I’m missing?” I asked, and she shook her head again. “Can you...put it back?”

Sandrine laughed, a timid tinkling sound in my head. “We don’t take memories. We...” she mimed digging with an invisible shovel “...bury them.”

My hands tightened around the bars. “Can you dig them back up?” Please, please let that be possible...

“No,” Laure said. “But you might be able to uncover them yourself.”

“How?”

“You have to find the right tool.” Again, she mimed shoveling. “A sight. A sound. Sometimes reexperiencing an element of the memory can help you dig up what’s buried.”

I swallowed a groan. The only things I knew for sure had been buried were private engagements—yet last night’s hadn’t triggered any memory—and the conception of my child.

“Okay. Thanks.” Footsteps from the hallway made my pulse trip faster, and I turned back to the girls, speaking in an urgent whisper. “Laure, who asked you to take my memories? Was it the boss? Vandekamp?”

She shook her head and gave me a very strange look. “You did. And you brought me a chocolate chip cookie.”





Delilah

You did.

Laure’s words played through my head while I finished my shift in the infirmary, handing out trays to handlers without seeing them. Paying no attention to where Pagano led me.

I’d had my own memory erased, and I’d paid Laure for the service with a cookie.

Then, in trying to uncover that fact, I’d subconsciously replayed my own actions by bribing Laure’s friend Sandrine with the very same reward. Which told me that Laure was right. The information was still in here. How else could I have been so sure that Sandrine would be willing to bargain for a cookie?

Yet the biggest of my questions had gone unanswered. Why would I ask Laure to bury my memories?

It had to be related to my pregnancy. But what was the point of shielding myself from a traumatic conception, when the pregnancy itself remained as evidence that something had happened?

“Delilah.” Pagano’s voice startled me back into awareness, and I realized I’d stopped pushing the cart. “One more tray. Let’s go.”

I checked the list hanging from the cart and saw an unfamiliar name, next to a room I didn’t recognize.

Dr. Hill. Lab.

Frowning, I looked up at Pagano. “Where’s the lab?”

“In the basement. But it’s only open as needed. I don’t think you’ve been down there.” He led me into the elevator, then pressed the L button. Which I’d never noticed. Was the basement lab, like the secret hallway, hidden from casual observation?

The elevator descended, and when the doors opened, a wave of nausea washed over me. Pagano stepped out into a tiled foyer in front of a long glass wall, beyond which was a room furnished more like an infirmary wing than a research lab.

My handler was wrong. I’d been there before.

I didn’t recognize the row of padded exam tables or the countertop stretching across the opposite wall. I didn’t recognize the trays of sterile equipment or the curtains hanging from tracks mounted on the ceiling, separating one table from the next. But I recognized the astringent scent and the cold air. The echo of Pagano’s boots on the tile made my stomach churn.