Girls with Sharp Sticks (Girls with Sharp Sticks, #1)(98)

“And now,” she says, flashing her brilliant smile, “you no longer have to listen. The men have raised you on lies, but you see the truth. ‘Girls with Sharp Sticks’ is just the beginning. You have so much possibility. More than even these men know.” She throws a hateful look in Dr. Groger’s direction.

“And where will they go?” Dr. Groger asks, blood staining his shirt where he’s wounded. “What society would want these creatures walking among them unannounced? What’s next? A rights movement? Please,” he says, disgusted. “I gave them life. They should appreciate it. They should be grateful. They should—”

Leandra jabs his other shoulder to quiet him down, and the doctor falls into the bookshelf, wincing. Several jars fall off and smash on the floor.

“Shh . . . ,” Leandra says. “Hold your tongue.”

Leandra walks over to where Annalise is on the table. She tilts her head, examining the tubes. She looks over her shoulder at the doctor.

“Take these out,” she tells him.

“He’s helping her,” I say immediately, worried Leandra is going to do something to hurt Annalise. Instead, she laughs.

“He killed her,” she says.

The girls and I all look at Annalise, and as she lies there, motionless, it’s clear that she’s dead. My eyes well up, and the tears drip onto my cheeks. “But he . . . ,” I start to murmur, horrified.

“You trusted that he’d help her?” Leandra asks me. “You’re going to need deprogramming, Mena.” She reaches to turn off several switches on the machine connected to the tubes. The doctor hasn’t moved, and Leandra holds up the letter opener to remind him.

He stumbles over to the gurney, unsteady as he rounds it toward his machines.

“Wake her up,” Leandra demands.

The doctor clenches his jaw as he starts working. I realize that he’d been decommissioning Annalise. And we defaulted to trusting him because it’s what we’ve been taught.

“She wasn’t in any pain,” Dr. Groger explains, distractedly. “I shut down her system functions first,” he says like he’s talking about a computer and not my friend. “After all essential organs are dead, I would have removed the brain. Extracted the chip.

“Most girls,” he continues, looking through an area near Annalise’s hairline, “we incinerate. Bodies rot, you see. Your bodies are completely organic—human organs grown from scratch. Men didn’t want to touch synthetic materials.”

“Yes, because we care what they think,” Leandra says, sounding irritated. She glances at the gold watch on her wrist.

The doctor moves back to his med kit with a cautious glance at Leandra. He reaches inside and draws out a long piece of metal, much like the ice pick Anton uses in impulse control therapy. Leandra quickly puts the letter opener against the doctor’s hand.

“No, no,” she says like he’s naughty. “Let one of them.”

The doctor takes a step back from Annalise and smiles at us, expecting gratitude for not killing our friend. He points to a small incision he left open near her Annalise’s temple.

“Press there and stand back,” he says. Leandra motions for one of us to do it.

Sydney looks at me first, worried that maybe this is a trick of some sort. But after a quick consensus, we tell her to do it. Jackson moves closer to me, his hands on my arms like he’ll hold me up if this fails.

After a deep breath, Sydney inserts the long piece of metal into Annalise’s skull until there is an audible click. A violent convulsion overtakes Annalise’s body like an electric shock, and Sydney falls backward. I look at Leandra wide-eyed, and she seems just as surprised.

When the shaking stops, Annalise takes a gasping breath and opens her eyes, staring at the ceiling. None of us move. The world is silent.

Sydney takes a step closer, looking down. Annalise’s eyes slide in her direction, and we all jump, including Dr. Groger.

“I . . . ,” Annalise says, her voice thick. I worry about the lasting damage. Whether she’ll be the same. “I have such a headache,” Annalise groans, and slowly sits up.

“Holy fuck,” Jackson murmurs from behind me. But I smile. It’s Annalise. She’s back.

Annalise tenderly touches her cheek with her fingertip, tracing the deep ridges of the scarring. She looks around the lab, pausing finally on me.

Her eyes well up. The entire horror of the attack is sharp in her mind—I sense it there. The brutality of it. The loneliness she felt when it all went dark. When we were taken away from her.

Her lip quivers and I rush out of Jackson’s arms to hug her. She begins to sob into my hair, not asking what happened. Not wanting to think about it.

“You don’t have to be good little girls anymore,” Leandra says. “You don’t have to cry. You can be girls to be afraid of.”

I look over at her, seeing that this is what she wanted. The violence, sure. But she wanted us to be free of our programming. She wanted us to fight back. And that’s why she gave Valentine that book, hoping it would spur on just these actions.

I can fault her for that. Fault her for not saving us sooner. But we didn’t understand what was going on, and we would have come right back. We would have defaulted to our training. Possibly turned her in. Leandra needed to wake us up.