The Countdown (The Taking #3)(19)

Daybreak.

Somewhere, even though I couldn’t see it, even though I couldn’t see anything, the sun was rising.

Abruptly, my body curled up at the cramps that wracked me, trying to wrap around itself. But even before I’d moved an inch . . . a centimeter . . . the restraints stopped me. They were at my wrists and my ankles, even my neck and chest.

My pulse skyrocketed as a layer of cold sweat chilled my skin and the trembling set in, and somewhere inside my head the number fifteen repeated like some kind of misfire.

Fifteen, fifteen . . . fifteen . . .

I was desperate to open my eyes, but each eyelid weighed a million pounds, making the task monumental. Willing myself to focus on one thing at a time, I concentrated on my breathing, exhaling slowly, evenly, through my nose, until eventually the tremors began to subside. My thoughts were a sticky jumble. Disjointed and disconnected, clumping together and making them hard to sort.

Voices . . .

I remembered that much at least. Hearing voices somewhere . . . sometime before this. And now, here, I was sure I heard voices again.

No, wait . . . not voices. Voices and sound . . .

Familiar yet somehow not at the same time . . . like . . . what was that?

It was fuzzy and faraway.

I swallowed hard, thinking, concentrating. Concentrating.

My throat was raw, my tongue thick and dry.

The word seeped into my awareness like molasses, slow and gummy: music. The sound with the voices was music . . .

It was significant, that victory, as if I’d crossed some sort of invisible line that divided the imaginary from the real. Dreams from consciousness.

You are now entering life. Population: everyone but you.

It was like being reborn.

I focused on the music, something you’d hear in an elevator or a doctor’s office—a crooner from some bygone era. From even before my dad’s time, which was practically prehistoric.

There was a smell too. Definitely-certainly-absolutely nothing I’d ever smelled before. It went beyond musty and past decayed. I tried to put a name to it, but it wasn’t any one thing. It made me think of corroding metal and decomposing leather and rotting documents or papers all at once. Whatever it was, it was definitely old, ancient, and it singed my nose hairs all the way to my brain.

“She’s awake,” someone said. A girl.

An image flashed through my head, fleeting and incomplete, but it was her—the blonde from the diner bathroom. “Do I know you?” she’d asked. And now I wondered if she had, even though I most surely hadn’t known her.

“Watch.” The girl’s voice again, and I wondered what they were watching because I wasn’t giving them anything to look at. My eyes were sealed tight, and at this point, I was barely even breathing.

Then came a guy’s voice. “There it is! Go get Ed. Tell him the girl’s heart rate’s spiking. Ask if he wants us to shut her down again.”

Monitors. They must have me hooked up to some sort of monitors.

I wished I had control over my heart rate the way I did my breathing. Stupid heart!

Guess there was no point playing dead. Might as well get a look around.

This time when I tried to open my eyes, they felt less heavy, but still gooey, like someone had glued them shut. The effort was crazy, and it took me several tries before light clashed against my retinas, stinging them all the way to the core.

“Hey there,” the girl said, only this time I was sure she wasn’t talking to someone else.

She swam into focus and then I could see her and it was most definitely the blond girl, standing directly in front of me, her blue eyes migrating over me. “You were dead to the world for a while there. Took a helluva lot to knock you out though.”

Knock me out. I turned her words over.

My last truly conscious memory was the flash of her pale-colored hair, followed by a sharp burn in the side of my neck.

That must have been it, the burn. No wonder I’d been so hazy. She’d jabbed me with something, a needle probably—drugged me.

Right after I’d been returned my parents had taken me to the hospital. One of the lab techs had stuck a needle in my arm to draw blood and my skin had healed so rapidly the needle had gotten stuck. I wondered if that had happened this time too.

It made me wonder about the blond girl and whoever she’d been talking to, because when the lab tech had exposed himself to my blood—something the NSA called a Code Red—he’d gotten sick, the same way Tyler had. Only that guy had died.

I studied the girl. Had she been exposed too? Would she die? That’s what I’d call karma.

I tried to lift my hand, to check my neck for a needle or punctures or injuries, but it jerked to a stop. Some sort of cuff, brittle leather, kept me bound in place.

Right, the restraints.

My eyes scanned downward.

I was bound to some sort of chair. It reminded me of a dentist’s chair, except it was really, really old. I could feel the metal at my back, and not of the spotless stainless steel variety. I could only see part of it at my sides, but where I could it was like a grimy, rusted-out stretcher. Cold and unforgiving.

Above me there was an enormous box light attached to an equally rusted pole. The bulb wasn’t on, but the way the lamp was directed, aimed right at me, made it clear it had been positioned there for me.

Beyond the light and all around me—around us—were crumbling and decayed brick, and the smells suddenly made sense.