Page 29 of Defiance (The Intersolar Union #7)

I woke up with an electrical whine in my ears, the sort you hear in a quiet office or server room. Every once in a while, a cavernous thunk would permeate my consciousness. Heavy machinery or sea monsters. I wasn’t sure which, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I remembered that I wasn’t at sea, even if the air was cold enough to make my teeth chatter.

I expected to feel wretched, and I did. Gritty, painful dehydration made me feel like I was swallowing sandpaper. My head pounded more insistently than the last time, and my stomach… It roiled and I dry-heaved, leaving a string of thick drool between my mouth and the cold stones beneath my cheek. I curled in on myself, hugging my naked knees in the dark. Rocking helped to alleviate the nausea, so that’s what I did, trying to forget that time existed.

It was still better than waking up on that table.

My holotab buzzed. I pried my eyes open and tried to focus on the blue glow beneath my skin. The narrow notification bar that hovered over my thumb illuminated a new alert.

Hexane metabolized. Assuming control of internal temperature.

What I thought were bruises around my wrists began to move in the holoscreen’s glow. A swarm of tiny black particles beneath the surface of my skin, racing along the lines of my bionic scaffolding. I felt Jharim’s parumauxi like tiny bubbles popping against my nerve endings, tickling all the way up my spinal cord and into my brain.

When I thought too hard about it, I heaved again, mucous smearing the corner of my mouth.

My holotab went dark again, and I closed my eyes. Maybe I slept. I was drained, fighting just to blink or form complete thoughts. I couldn’t say the moment my stomach felt more settled, but suddenly I was alert and noticed how my hips and shoulder ached. I tried to sit up, elbows wobbling as I planted my weight on my palms.

The place I was in was still cold, but my chest was warm like I’d taken a shot of poitín. Even if I couldn’t see, I felt my breath steam in the air. The walls were as unforgiving as a bank vault and I knew without a doubt that I was underground.

I opened my holotab to use the holoscreen to see and feel back on my ass with a muffled scream. The light flailed around the tiny stone room, bouncing off of Imani’s face like a naked light bulb in a basement. She didn’t look at me, even if her eyes were open and a slow trickle of breath warmed the air from her nostrils.

It was like looking at one of those wax statues of a celebrity. A pristine replica. I reached my fingers out to get her attention, then pulled them back without touching her. What if she was warm?

What if she wasn’t?

I hugged my bare middle with a shiver, taking a closer look at her face. A fine layer of dust covered her eyeballs. Another muffled, mountainous boom rang through the walls from somewhere far above.

Two more dolls of meself were stacked on the floor. These weren’t nearly as pristine. Pink lipstick smeared one’s mouth while the other had gotten her hair chopped unevenly, as if people had been taking souvenirs. Jacks were set in the napes of their necks, and upon investigating Imani, I found that she had the same, hiding under her fuzzy black hairline.

“Feck’s sake,”

I swore, leaning back on the cold wall.

They’d expected Imani, not me. Guei had a perfect replica of her ready to go. What if she’d been late to all the festivities because she’d had to scramble to find a me doll that would pass muster?

It was the cloying scent of early decay that brought me out of a conspiratorial spiral. All three dolls wore a simple shift, but the mouths of mine were dark. I undressed one of them to steal the white gown, trying my best not to dwell on the dark purple and black blood pooling in the side of her body where she’d been laying on the floor. I tried not to think about how I’d been curled up just like that when I first woke up either.

When I was done, I turned away from their ghosts with a crawling sensation at the back of my neck that I ignored.

“They’re just mannequins,”

I mumbled to myself, searching for the seams of a door.

Not only did I find a door, but it had an emergency access panel without a lock. When I pushed it open, a stream of harsh, white light filtered in. I looked back at the dolls—the other women—and knew that Guei had stashed me with them because she thought I was dead.

“Imani?”

I murmured with a tremor.

The doll’s eyes turned to me without blinking and I just about crawled out of my own skin.

“Are you coming?”

She looked straight ahead again. I waited, heart in my throat, but she didn’t move. At least she knew where the access panel was. I stepped back from the door and it slid closed.

The subterranean passage was endless and straight with strip lights in the corners of the floor and yellow pipes and bundles of thick black cables racing along the ceiling. I chose to walk right, my knees knocking together in fear. Anyone could find me wandering around.

I just hoped the first person who did was Novak.