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Upstairs, Emily is watching this and smiling. Not much can amuse her these days, given the constant pain in her back and down her leg, but seeing that mousy little bitch frantically dry-washing her hands? That’s funny.

July 3, 2021

1

The Harrises’ latest “guest” doesn’t eat the raw liver, and she tries to ration what remains of her water, but eventually both bottles are empty. She swirls her finger around the go-cup, getting the last of the Ka’Chava, but that only makes her thirstier. She’s hungry, too.

Bonnie tries to remember what she last ate. A tuna-and-egg sandwich, wasn’t it? Bought in the Belfry and eaten outside on one of the benches. She would give anything to have that sandwich back right now, not to mention the bottle of Diet Pepsi she bought at the Jet Mart. She would chug the whole sixteen ounces. Only there is no Diet Pepsi, and no phone. Only her helmet and backpack (looking like it’s been emptied), hanging on the wall with the tools.

The raw liver starts to look good to her even after God knows how many hours at room temperature, so she hooks up the flap in the bottom of the cell and pushes it out, giving the tray a final shove with her tented fingers so it will be beyond her reach. Get thee behind me, Satan, she thinks, and swallows. She can hear the dry click in her throat and thinks that the liver must still be full of liquid. She can imagine it running down her throat, cooling it. Knowing the salt content would only add to her thirst doesn’t help much. She goes back to the futon and lies down, but she keeps looking at the dish with the liver on it. After awhile she drifts into a thin, dream-haunted doze.

Eventually Rodney Harris comes back and she wakes up. He’s wearing pajamas with firetrucks on them, plus robe and slippers, so Bonnie wrongly assumes it’s evening. She further assumes that it’s now been a day since they drugged and kidnapped her. The longest and most terrible day of her life, partly because she doesn’t know what the hell is going on but mostly because all she’s had for the last twenty-four hours are two bottles of water and a cup of Ka’Chava.

“I want some water,” she says, trying not to croak. “Please.”

He takes the broom and slides the tray back through the flap. “Eat your liver. Then you can have water.”

“It’s raw and been sitting out all day! All last night, too… I guess. Is it the third? It is, isn’t it?”

He doesn’t answer that, but from his pocket he takes a bottle of Artesia water and holds it up. Bonnie doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction of licking her lips but can’t help it. After its day at room temperature the piece of liver looks like it’s melting.

“Eat it. All of it. Then I’ll give you the water.”

Bonnie decides she was half-right. It’s not sex, but it is some kind of weird experiment. She’s heard people at the college talk about how Professor Harris is a little bit gaga on the subject of what he calls “perfect nutritional balance,” and ignored it as the usual bullshit—this professor is eccentric, that professor is obsessive-compulsive, the other prof picks his nose, there’s a video of it on TikTok, check it out, it’s hilarious. Now she wishes she’d listened. He’s not just gaga, he’s over-the-moon crazy. She thinks eating a piece of liver tartare is the least of her problems. She has to get out of here. She has to escape. And that means being smart and not giving in to panic. Her life depends on it.

This time she’s able to restrain herself from licking her lips. She goes to one knee and pushes the tray back through the slot. “Bring me a fresh piece and I’ll eat it. With water, though. To wash it down.”

He looks offended. “I assure you that liver isn’t… isn’t…” He struggles for what he wants to say, jaw moving from side to side. “Isn’t microbially damaged. In fact, like many other cuts of meat, calf’s liver is best at room temperature. Have you never heard of aged steak?”

“It’s turning gray!”

“You’re being troublesome, Ms. Dahl. And you are in no position to make deals.”

Bonnie grasps her head as if it hurts. Which it does, because of hunger and thirst. Not to mention fear. “I’m trying to meet you halfway, is all. You have some reason for what you’re doing, I guess—”

“I most certainly do!” he cries, his voice rising.

“—and I’m agreeing to do what you want, but not that piece. I won’t!”

He turns and stomps back up the stairs, pausing only once to glare at her over his shoulder.

Bonnie swallows, and listens to the dry click in her throat. I sound like a cricket, she thinks. One dying of thirst.

2

Emily is in the kitchen. Her face is drawn with pain, and she looks her age. More than her age, actually. Roddy is shocked. For it to come to this after all they’ve done to hold senescence at bay! It’s not fair that their special meals, so loaded with life-extending goodness, should wear off so quickly. It was three years between Castro and Dressler, and three years (give or take) between Dressler and the Steinman boy. Now they have Bonnie Dahl, and it’s not only been less than three years but the symptoms of old age (he thinks of them as symptoms) have been creeping up for months.

“Is she eating it?”

“No. She says she will if I give her a fresh piece. We have one, of course, after the Chaslum girl it seemed prudent to keep an extra on hand—”

“Craslow, Craslow!” Em corrects him in a nagging voice that’s utterly unlike her… at least when it’s just the two of them and she’s not in agony. “Give it to her! I can’t bear this pain!”

“Just a little longer,” he soothes. “I want her thirstier. Thirst makes livestock amenable.” He brightens. “And she may yet eat that one. She pushed it through the slot, but I noticed that this time she left it in reach.”

Emily has been standing but now she sits down with a wince and a gasp. The cords on her neck stand out. “All right. If it must be, it must be.” She hesitates. “Roddy, is this diet of ours really doing anything? It hasn’t been our imaginations all along? Some sort of psychosomatic cure that’s in our minds rather than our bodies?”

“When your migraines cease, is that psychosomatic?”