“He’s not dead,” I bite out.
“I get it,” Tito says. “But the more guys think Kiro is dead, the more they want to go over to Lazarus. Be on the winning team. And the more powerful he gets. Perception is reality, man.”
“Fuck that,” I say. “The reality is that we just took down Bloody Lazarus’s most profitable operation and took ten of his guys off the street. The reality is that we’ll just keep hitting and hitting until Laz is ended and Kiro is back.” I turn to Viktor. “Get that C-4. I want this place rubble.”
Tito eyes me. “You sure? This warehouse is a nice fucking asset.”
“Now it’s a fucking message,” I growl.
Chapter Five
Kiro
Wait for mychance to escape. Destroy anybody who tries to stop me. A simple strategy. It was always so simple here.
Until her.
Morning. I catch her clean, spicy scent in the hall. Starting her rounds for the day. My body floods with heat.
I try to calm myself. I listen to her with Randall. She rips the Velcro. Pumps the pumps.
The cart squeaks nearer. My heart pounds. Lightness in my chest.
Her kindness is the most dangerous weapon they’ve brought out because it screws me up and makes me forget she’s one of them. Makes me forget she’s the enemy.
I recite my three conditions of escape: a clear head, bonds broken, gate guards distracted or incapacitated.
Three conditions. Ann is irrelevant. She’s just one of them. An enemy.
The cart wheels squeak, then stop. Four stops before she gets to me.
She doesn’t ever sit and talk with the other patients, but she almost always sits and talks to me these days.
I turn her words over in my mind in the hours after she leaves. I don’t know half the things she talks about. I don’t know what Freudian projection is. I don’t know whatOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nestmeans or what Kabul is.
I don’t understand her story about the kitten or the rubble. I can’t tell if it’s one story or many stories, or what any of it has to do with being a nurse.
The professor tried to stuff a lot of words and concepts into my head over the year he held me and studied me, but there’s a lot he didn’t teach me. I understand nothing about the pads and phones they all have. Always touching the glass to light it up.
The professor was studying me, but really I was studying him. Absorbing his language. Learning how to act like him so that he could forget what I was. So that he could forget I was dangerous. It worked.
I killed him.
And ended up in this place—a far worse place. Never mind; I’ll get out of this place, too.
Nurse Ann found herself holding the kitten in the middle of the street. Drawn by its cries. I understand that part.
The squeaky cart wheels. Another door. Another patient. Soon it will be me.
I love it and hate it when she talks to me.
It’s the worst when she sounds sad. I want to break my bonds and grab her, hold her, speak to her in soft tones like she does with me. It’s stupid to blow my one chance at escape just to comfort her.
She’s one of them.
Nurse Ann has already tried to hurt me—she ran to get Nurse Zara when she caught me staring at her.
If they understood my head was clear, they’d give me more drugs, and my chance to escape would be gone. Everything in me needs to be pointed at getting back home—not at Nurse Ann with her sad stories and pretty green eyes and the unbearable torment of her touch.