Page 63 of Defiant Beta

“Myroom?”

“Yes.”

I look at him.

Nothing. I get absolutely nothing. “Why?”

“Because.”

I grind my molars together, ready to snap at him until he walks into a bedroom the size of an Olympic swimming pool with a wall of glass that overlooks what looks like a rainforest. Trees as far as the eye can see. It isstunning.

He puts me down in a large white bed while I’m still distracted and glares down at me. “Chicken or vegetable.”

I blink at him.

“You need to eat something. Chicken or vegetable soup.”

“You’re making me soup.” This is weird.

I tell myself this isn’t as weird as I think it is, but it is, right?

“Or potato,” he adds. “Anything else, and it has to be from a can.”

My math professor is getting ready to make me homemade soup.

This is definitely weird.

“Chicken,” I eventually say, if only to end this unreal moment.

He spins around and stalks out of my room. “Stay there. I’ll bring up a tray.”

I take a good long look around me while processing my new reality.

I’m still absorbing my all white, pristine surroundings when something sticks in my throat, and I have a sudden and overwhelming sense that I’m going to die. Right this second, I’m going to die, and someone is going to find my body in this bed and take me to the morgue.

I startle when a door slams against the wall.

Professor Vincent walks in carrying a black tray with a large white bowl and a big glass of water on it.

That’s it? He was gone for two seconds and he’s back with homemade soup?

But if it’s been two seconds, why has the light changed? Why is it darker in my room than it was a moment before?

He pauses, eyes lingering on my face. “What is it?”

I open my mouth to tell him I’m dying. But I shake my head and look away, whispering, “Nothing.”

After a long pause, he walks over to me and places the tray in my lap. “Eat.”

I’d tell him to stop speaking to me like a chihuahua, but I need him to leave.

Two seconds stretch out for eternity, and his footsteps move away from me. The door snicks closed, and I slide the tray off my lap and onto the bed beside me. It shakes. I spill water from the glass onto the soup and my lap. The steaming soup splashes me on my thigh, but I barely feel the sting of something that looks hot enough to burn.

And I close my eyes, breathing hard, still envisioning my dead body being stretchered into an ambulance, where a guy in the morgue will cut me open to figure out what killed me.

I see it all so clearly that when I peel my eyes open and my room is pitch black, I tell myself that I’m in a coffin.

But I’m not.

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