Page 52 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

HIM

I nstitutional life had its rhythms, ones I’d never really forgotten, ones I could have easily readjusted to under most circumstances.

Sleep, eat, work, eat, sleep. Simple. But most institutions—mines, farms, factories—also had certainty.

They owned you, and unless a miracle occurred, you weren’t getting out. You accepted that, or you died.

Here, there was no certainty. I didn’t know anything. How long I’d be in this place, why, or what had to happen for me to get the fuck out of it. And that was what was killing me.

They’d given me pain meds at the hospital the morning of my arrival, but they’d long since worn off and nobody seemed interested in giving me more.

Besides, I figured it was around eight, and I’d probably missed pill distribution—if they even had one.

At any rate, they dragged me limping into processing, where, like usual, I was stripped naked, scrubbed raw, thrown into a starched gray scrub uniform, and led to the chain-link enclosure I’d be sharing with sixty other guys, most of whom were already snoring.

I stuck out my hands lazily through a hole in the link so the handler could remove my chains, then collapsed on an empty metal bunk with a sigh, wishing I could run my hands over my scalp just to see if my hair was growing back yet, like the stupid, vain bastard I was, even in here.

But I didn’t yet have enough range of motion to put my hands behind my head, so all I could do was tuck them in close to my chest. I blinked against the lurid lighting, which dug crude patterns into my retinas.

All in all, I’d prefer the darkness of the mine.

I blinked. What a place to cry. That wasn’t happening.

Maeve had spent time in a place like this, I reminded myself. Thanks to me, she was out. And that was enough to let me sleep. A little bit.

“Hey.”

What now?

The guy next to me poked me on my bad shoulder, just as my eyelids were falling shut, causing me to jerk in pain. “You the one who blew up the mine?”

I turned toward my bunkmate, likely a farm laborer only a bit older than me, though his leathery face made him look about ten years beyond that.

“Well, I didn’t actually?—”

“My father got sent there when I was six. Never saw him again.”

“Yeah,” I said with the trace of a smile. “Yeah, I blew it up.”

The guy nodded with satisfaction and turned his face away. “Nice.”

Just wait till he found out about the chips.

I woke up from a nightmare about two hours later, gasping, coated in a sheen of sweat.

My heart pounded desperately against my ribcage as I clawed at the cold metal of my bunk and pressed my forehead to it, grounding myself with the chill.

It seemed to be more or less a variant on the same theme—a girl’s hand.

But the wrong girl’s hand. The wrong girl with wispy blond hair, blue eyes, and a hand that proceeded to put a collar on my neck and jerk me toward her so fast it stole my breath, giggling at me until I woke up.

“Bad dream?” the guy asked from the adjacent bunk, not unkindly.

“Yeah,” I admitted, massaging my shoulder weakly against the bedframe for some kind of relief from the physical pain, if not the mental kind. They were both getting worse.

“Dreams in here…” My bunkmate trailed off, running a rough hand over his even rougher face. “They grip you like reality never could.”

I wasn’t sure yet which I preferred—the dreams I knew, or the reality I didn’t. Right now, frankly, I wished I could be like Maeve and just make up my own.

The next day, I still didn’t get any pain pills.

But I did get a work assignment: the laundry room, probably because they thought it would be less taxing on my injuries, though it wasn’t.

It was like all other institutional slave labor: a cacophony of clattering machines, wet sloshing, and overseers screaming at me to work faster or else.

And as the rhythms washed away grime, they also washed away most of my thoughts.

Good thing, too, because I was sick of my thoughts.

They were all about either the past or the future—the past was tragic, and the future was just one huge, terrifying blank.

And that was when one of the more sadistic handlers approached me, toting enough chains to bind an elephant, all dangling down from his arm. “Your master’s here, slave,” he said, grinning. “Hands.”

I closed my eyes as the cold metal closed around my wrists and more chains snaked around me, almost grateful for it. At least it meant answers. Even if they weren’t the ones I wanted.

Besides, at least in the visiting room, it was the right girl.

Louisa. Alive, whole, a raindrop on scorched earth.

A long scar snaking in and out of the burn scars on her neck, her gray eyes forced to cry for me again as I kneeled in chains.

And if this was the last time she’d ever see me—which I had to consider, despite the cautious optimism I was desperately trying to kill—I should have died in the mine.

Free, or as close to it as I’d probably ever get.

And then a real blast from my past appeared.

“Good to see you too, man,” said Orbital Dynamics Marketing Manager Arlo Callwood—or whatever his name and title really was—with a small smile, crossing his arms. He shrugged off his tailored jacket, revealing the muscles underneath, though he didn’t take the proffered chair.

Instead, he looked at the handler, gesturing to my chains. “This necessary?”

“We tried,” broke in Keith, who’d seemingly undergone a brain transplant, not that I was going to question it.

“It’s protocol, sir.”

“Protocols can be flexible,” replied Arlo. “You’ll realize that when you move up the ranks.”

The handler sputtered. “But my commanding officer?—”

Enough with the arguing over this. “All things being equal, sir ,” I dared to interrupt with an exaggerated clearing of my throat, “I’d rather stay in chains if it means I can get an explanation sooner.”

“Fair enough,” said Arlo. “First off, as you probably guessed, my name isn’t really Arlo.

It’s Emmanuel. Agent Emmanuel Wheatley, of the federal white collar fraud division.

I’ve been undercover at Orbital Dynamics for the past year and a half.

Initially, at least, I was investigating reports of financial anomalies.

But I’d suspected for some time that the anomalies were more than financial. ”

“Wait.” I would have said something clever, but in this case, I was actually speechless. “Hold on. Did you know ? About me, I mean? The whole night ?”

Arlo—Emmanuel—shook his head. “Yes. And no.”

“I don’t—” I stole a glance at the dagger-glaring Tarrant, then stared at the floor again quickly. I’d have to fall into the old habits again, if it was between getting the whole story and another zap to the neck.

“It was me who first proposed the trip to Phoenix to Corey, actually,” the agent continued.

“Who’s dead, by the way. They pulled the plug.

” He coughed. Nobody blinked. “It seemed clear to me that if there was something weird going on, it wouldn’t be in San Francisco but operating much closer to Langer himself.

The trip seemed like a prime opportunity to get into Langer HQ and see things from the inside.

Corey, of course, didn’t know who I really was.

But I sure did my homework on Corey, and when I got there, I knew immediately that you weren’t him. ”

“Ah, fuck. Well, I hope you had fun watching me make an idiot out of myself. Congratulations. Sir ,” I tacked on with audible irritation.

“No, I didn’t.”

I raised my head curiously, though not without another sidelong glance at the handler.

“Because even though I knew who you weren’t , I didn’t know who you were .

It was clear to me you really did work for Langer, but other than that, you didn’t seem to exist. I went so far as to think you might be in witseg, a fugitive, a competitor’s plant, or even doing the same thing I was, as an operative for a foreign intelligence agency. The accent, you know.”

My hands clenched involuntarily in the chains. Wait, so had I fucked up, or hadn’t I?

“I didn’t want or need to blow your cover,” Wheatley went on, “so I didn’t.”

I bit my lip and looked at my hands again. “But did you?—”

“No. The answer is no. Never, not once, did it ever occur to me you might be a slave.”

Really? I let out a short laugh. “No offense, sir, but you should probably turn in your badge.”

“Damn right I should. You fucked everything up pretty much from beginning to end. Now, looking back, I feel like the idiot. Anyway, shoddy police work on my part or a good con on yours, I’m impressed.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll take it, if you insist. Just one question, though… What about Felix?”

“Felix, sadly for him, is just Felix.”

Somehow, despite everything, we both laughed.

“Even doing what I do, I’ve never seen a slave successfully try to pass for a free man—for that long, anyway. Something always gives them away.” He paused. “You know what you did is a crime in itself, right?”

I scoffed. “So what are you gonna do? Arrest me?”

“No. Punishment is for your master to decide. But in the eyes of the law, you do belong in a mine.”

“I know. But I had my reasons.” My voice was quiet. One of the reasons I’d done it sat in the chair across from me now, and I couldn’t look at her if I wanted to keep this conversation going.

“I know you did. And what you did took balls. Helping those girls?—”

“Like you care,” I grumbled. “They’re slaves.”

“They’re people.”

My head snapped up.

“Things are changing in the feds, you know. I’m one of the ones trying to change them.”

“You told me you took a university course,” Louisa broke in. She’d been listening as closely as I had, while Keith just stared at the whole thing like we were speaking in tongues.