Page 7 of Consume
I shot a quick look behind me to see if Pop was coming around from the other direction yet and then burst back into the dining room. My jaw dropped open at the scene unfolding on the Mind-I screen.
Poh was back in the hospital room, visible, her frame huge in the close-up of the camera. She was shouting obscenities at someone near the room door. But it was what was happening behind her that stalled my breaths and ripped ice-cold panic up my back.
The two men in their beds were both sitting up, their eyes still closed. Their legs snaked beneath the blankets as they slid them out. Their bare feet pressed to the ground, and they stood facing each other, their movements synchronized perfectly.
I’d seen this before on a rogue planet known as The Black—they were being controlled with Mind-Is.
“Poh!” I shouted, or I tried to anyway. It came out as a Saelis wail.
The two men’s eyes popped open, and I slapped my hand over my mouth fearing they’d heard me, fearing the Saelises had heard me, the real, alive ones who were likely pulling these men’s strings.
I couldn’t hear Crispin anymore. I had to assume he’d gone to rescue Poh and had given up on communicating with me through his microphone.
Standing between the two beds, the two men took a step toward Poh. Next to her, an empty bed on wheels rolled through the door, as well as a redheaded nurse shoving through and blocking Poh’s only exit.
Other than the eleventh-story window, that is.
Poh rammed the bed backwards into the nurse, who tripped into the closing door.
The two men’s white hospital gowns skimmed their knees as they rounded toward Poh’s back.
Whatever they wanted, it likely wasn’t to introduce themselves.
The nurse used the rolling bed to block Poh’s attempts to attack her.
To my left, outside the dining room door, quick footsteps sounded. I turned toward it and tensed, keeping my gaze locked on it for Pop.
When the door opened and his worried face appeared, I pulled him inside, then closed and locked the door behind him.
“What the hell is going on?” he demanded.
I pointed at the screen.
The two men were right at Poh’s back, close enough to whisper in her ear. They snatched her arms and yanked them behind her back. She let out a hiss and kicked and bucked, her yellow eyes narrowed and lethal, her fangs glinting in the artificial light.
The nurse rammed the side of the bed into Poh’s titanium legs with a great crash. Poh yelped and sagged in pain, the two men holding her up.
“Poh! Crispin!” Pop shouted and lunged for the receiver end of the camera on the gurney.
The nurse flashed an uncapped needle toward Poh and stabbed it into her arm. Poh immediately went limp and crashed forward onto the bed face-first. While the nurse hummed a tuneless tune, she turned Poh over and secured a leather strap across her chest.
Poh turned her head toward the camera, her sharp, panicked eyes slowly growing dazed, and her hand flopped toward me.
The screen blacked out on Poh and the guttural cry tearing from her throat.
