CHAPTER 26

Juliet Parrish opened her eyes. Panic gripped her heart as she didn't understand anything about that present moment.

She noticed she was on her back on a padded surface, and for some reason this struck her as a bit strange. It shouldn't be, she thought, since I'm just waking up. A sigh escaped her lips, and somehow doing so calmed her down. But then she had another spike of panic when she noticed something was covering the lower part of her face. At first she felt terrified about being unable to breathe with this thing encompassing her nose and mouth, but again she started to calm down when she noticed she wasn't suffocating. If anything, she found it was actually pleasant to breathe. A heavy blanket had been draped over her entire body, and she detected a strange sensation on her forearms. She felt a warmth, a sense of comfort, that surprised her, almost as if that experience was something completely alien.

She blinked and looked around, finding that she was in an unfamiliar place.

Where am I?

Again, a sense of panic spiked Julie's heart rate. She felt compelled to get up, to leave this unfamiliar place, but she felt so tired, so weak. Nevertheless, she still tried to raise herself from her reclined position.

What the –

Julie couldn't understand why her arms felt like they were pinned to her sides. She tried again, and that's when she became aware of the straps wrapped around her wrists. She tried to move her legs, and found that her ankles were likewise bound.

Why –

Her eyelids suddenly felt so heavy. Although she didn't want to – she wanted to figure out where she was, how she got there, and what was happening – she found herself surrendering to the beckoning darkness.

Julie remained on that cycle of waking up and returning to unconsciousness over the next forty two hours, a time period of which she was completely unaware. Each time she opened her eyes the first thing she felt was raw panic, similar to what one feels when waking suddenly from a nightmare. After that first uncomfortable burst of panic, she would settle down again and begin to wonder what was going on, before unconsciousness claimed her once again.

Most times, when she came to there was no one else in the room with her. Once or twice, though, she did see a couple of Visitors working with some equipment whose purpose she couldn't even begin to guess. She had no idea who they were or what they were doing to her. One time, she even saw one of them looking down on her. He said something to her, but whatever it was he was saying, she couldn't understand, and she reverted to unconsciousness almost immediately.

And while unconscious, Julie's mind always replayed her memories of her time in that strange, cold room with all the lights and walls of glass. All of her fears, even her most secret ones she had told precious few people about, and even the ones she had suppressed because they were too painful to keep, came alive inside that room, just as they do when she is asleep and dreaming. The line of separation between the here and now and the world which only existed in her mind and in her memories was blurred until it practically did not even exist.

This was Julie's life for the better part of those forty two hours.

Then, one time when she woke up, she noticed that her nose and mouth were no longer encased by the mask, and that the blanket that covered her had been removed. Her forearms itched a little, and when she looked at them she noticed tiny red spots on her skin.

I've seen something like this before.

She sat up, glad to know her limbs and arms were now completely unencumbered. That she could see and think clearly and didn't have a splitting headache totally escaped her, as did the fact that she felt well-rested. Her mind had fixed its focus on trying to figure out why those marks on her arms seemed so familiar.

She gasped as she had an epiphany.

Needle tracks.

Julie's mind flashed back to her first two years in medical school. As an intern she spent some time in a few emergency rooms, where she assisted in the care of, among other patients, drug addicts who had been brought in for accidental overdoses. Quite a few of them injected heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine, and many had pronounced scarred markings on their arms as a result.

The marks on her arms were nowhere near as bad as the ones she'd seen, but seeing them was still a huge shock.

She knew that the Visitors had been drugging her, but this was the first time she noticed evidence of it on her arms. Julie blinked, and a couple of tears dropped and landed near some of the needle marks. She didn't understand why she was crying, though.

Stop crying, you idiot.

You know they're watching you. They're always watching.

Don't let them see you like this.

Julie sniffed, wiping her cheeks and nostrils with the back of her left hand. She winced when she then felt a stinging pain on the skin. That was when she realized that her hand had bite wounds on it. That's right. I bit myself. She looked at her other hand and found that she had bitten it as well. The wounds weren't open and bleeding, but they weren't completely closed either. The salt in her tears activated the nerves in her skin and sent pain signals into her brain.

She looked up and realized, just then, that she recognized where she was.

I'm back.

Back in her cell.

Julie lay back down onto her side and tucked her legs into her torso, wrapping her arms around them. She faced the wall opposite where the door into the cell was.

I hate it here.

I want to go home.

She closed her eyes as memories started flooding back into her mind without her bidding. She remembered why she'd bitten her hands. Everything she experienced during all those hours of sheer terror inundated her awareness. All the faces, all the voices, all the pain, all the humiliation, the sense of betrayal and, worst of all, total violation… everything was coming alive for her again.

Julie stifled a painful sob that erupted in her chest. She tried to force everything filling her mind out, purging it from her awareness. But all this did was make her see her comrades – every single one – in her mind's eye.

And as she saw each face, her heart started beating faster and faster, and her fear and anger started to grow.

Why did they leave me?

She swallowed hard, thinking about this question she had asked herself, and remembered the night she, Elias, Mark, Donovan and Pascal went to Eleanor Dupres' house to make a counterfeit copy of Eleanor's special Visitor pass.

Her own words echoed in her head now: "We can't risk everything for just one person, no matter who it is."

Her cheeks were soaked now with hot tears, the irony of what she had told the others that night both haunting and taunting her.

They left me behind. That's why I'm hurting so, so much.

NO.

NO.

She pushed those thoughts out of her mind through sheer force of will. In their place came another memory.

She was driving a truck away from the loading area of the medical supply warehouse where she and her comrades stole some scientific equipment.

She saw Ben in the rear-view mirror, running away from the truck, pursued by Visitor Shock Troopers. He was drawing them away from the truck so it could escape.

She heard Brad's angry and frustrated admonitions when she stopped the truck a few blocks away, even as she jumped out and got into her Volkswagen.

She felt the utter desperation and the guilt for leaving Ben behind, and hoping that she could find him in time.

She saw Ben running down an angled ramp of a multi-story parking structure, still being pursued by Shock Troopers.

She saw him get hit by an electric blue packet of energy in the chest.

She saw him fall twenty-some feet onto the ground.

She saw him, broken and bloodied, in her car's front passenger seat.

She heard Ben's labored, hoarse attempts to breathe in those final moments, then the final gasp escape from his lips.

She watched him die.

And she thought, I left him, and he died because I did.

I left him.

He died because I did.

The memory of Ben dying, and the words that felt like an irrefutable truth that sprung forth as she lay there crying, tortured Julie until she finally fell asleep.