Page 77 of Irreversible

The door slams shut.

No.

I collapse backward with a wail, just as a chain drags across tile on the other side of the wall, and I curl my knees to my chest and cry.

“Everly.” His voice sounds far away, but there’s no mistaking the urgency bleeding into my name. Isaac taps the partition between us. “Bee… Hey, talk to me.”

“I…I can’t…”

“Tell me what they did to you. Where they took you.”

“I don’t know. They knocked me out…I don’t…” I squeeze my thighs together, hissing through the sting. “They took my eggs.”

Hopelessly, I sob.

My vision clouds, adding to my unraveling. My voice cracks, and my sanity splits. The drugs are still pumping through my veins, rendering me sluggish. Vulnerable. If they tried to kill me now, I’d be helpless to stop it.

I wrap my arms around my knees and weep into the starchy pillow. Isaac is right beside me. I feel him there, closer than ever. If I zoned out long enough, I could imagine his breath fanning across my face, his voice right next to my ear, vibrating through me.

How could I let this happen?

He’s a number.

A casualty.

A tragedy waiting to happen.

And somehow, I’ve come to care about his well-being just as much as my own. Twice the pain, double the loss.

“You need to keep it together. This isn’t over yet.” His tone is calm yet firm. He’s trying to reach me, but he can’t. “Listento me. We’re not done. We have a plan. The next time that brainless fuckhead brings you food, get the bracelet on him, and I’ll…”

His voice fades out.

My cries taper off, weakening to sniffles, then to nothing. I inhale a breath as my eyes shut, Isaac’s words lulling me back underwater, where sunshine kisses the surface with a golden glow. My fingers lift as bubbles churn, and I reach for the dappled light, anxious to breach it.

But it’s just another wall.

Darkness finds me the moment my eyelids peel back open.

It’s quiet. Too quiet.

My muscles ache, and I realize I fell asleep as a tangled mess of limbs. Eyes dry and burning, I blink half-a-dozen times and extract my sticky cheek from the pillowtop as my body pulses with residual pain. When I try to move, my equilibrium wobbles, and I tip off the mattress, the cold floor a shock to my skin.

Everything hurts.

Groaning, I flick my lamp on until the room is bathed in crimson lowlight, then crawl back on the cot. I pull the blanket up over me as my teeth chatter from the chill.

The silence turns eerie when I twist to face the wall.

Issac.

He was talking to me, trying to soothe my sadness before I drifted away, lost to the void.

Panic creeps inside me, and I slap a hand to the wall, eager to hear his voice again. But it hardly makes a sound, mystrength no more than a feeble breeze against a brick pillar. “Isaac?”

Nothing.

Oh, God…did they take him?

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