Page 141 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

Instead, just a blank white room with bright overhead lights buzzing ever so slightly, and the air doesn’t move.

She’s been in this before.

She spins, and her own skin doesn’t change, her own perception of pain and discomfort. The breath she pulls in doesn’t impact her lungs, her blood stilling in her body, but her mind continuing to turn over, to think, to experience, and—

Stasis cells always have one wall that’s open for observation, and so does this one.

Beyond the bright light of the cell, the world is dim, like someone forgot to turn a light on. Like a basement, the floor raw concrete and the walls untouched brick.

Panic starts to drip down her back.

“Gurlien?” she calls out, and her voice breaks, echoing around the room, deadening to anything outside. No words can reach outside, nothing.

She weaves her fingers against the leash, testing it, but there’s no sensation.

It’s the only stasis cell in the room, and she creeps closer to the open wall, to the pane of observation glass, and no other light spills out from anywhere else, even when she cranes her neck to either side.

She’s alone, she’s alone and Gurlien isn’t here and—

Her breath, the completely useless breath that does nothing to help her body, hitches.

For a brief, heartbreaking moment, she lets herself crumble. She lets the worry and the pain and the terror wash over her, lets her legs dump her so she sits on the cold tile, hugging her knees to her chest.

If he’s too far away, if she can’t reach him, then this whole thing is for nothing, then…

She squeezes her eyes shut, taking another long useless breath, before opening them up again.

If Gurlien’s too far away, then he’s somewhere alone that she can’t control, and he’ll need her help.

He’ll need her help, he’ll need her to break out of this and get to him.

Still sitting down on the tile, she tilts her head against the observation glass, casting her eyes across the room. Water drips in the corner, further solidifying the basement sensation, and a dirty table with rusty tools sits off to one side.

So obviously Boltiex. He never cared for the condition of his tools and would buy new ones when his current set inevitably broke from overuse.

It does nothing to quell her fear, so she glances to the other side. A set of stairs, leading up to somewhere unlit. A single dark screen of some electronics, set on a set of wooden boxes.

The lack of rune boxes, the lack of basic sanitation, this is an unsanctioned stasis cell, one that Boltiex would be imprisoned if it ever came out.

She’ll kill him before it does.

But it does tell her some interesting things. That he’d want to keep this quiet, keep her quiet. That he wouldn’t want witnesses.

That he wouldn’t have backup.

Careful, she presses her hand into the seam between the glass observation panel and the floor, and no air flows through. In one of the cells, the Korean one, air occasionally hissed through, and she would lay next to it just to feel some sensation.

The wound at her chest pulls, sending a pang through her awareness, but she pushes herself up to standinganyways. The glass is neutral warm against her palm, but that doesn’t surprise her.

With her breath, the still jagged edges of her wound spark up at her, teasing at a madness of obsession.

That happened whenever she went into stasis. Any wound or injury, anything causing pain, tempts the mind into circling around it, swirling until it occupies every thought.

It did, for Ambra, the first few times.

Something in the basement beyond creaks. She freezes, squinting out past the brightness of the cell, but nothing’s there.

Wait. Not nothing. Not nobody.

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