Page 7 of Red Rooster

She leaned in and laid her hand on the girl’s forehead. Frowned.

“What?”

“She’s cold.”

“Well, yeah, she was outside in nothing but those.” He gestured toward her thin, short-sleeved scrubs.

“No, she–” Ashley started, and the rest of her sentence turned into a bitten-off curse when the girl’s eyes flipped open. No slow fluttering back to awareness; no, they snapped wide like one of those dolls you tipped back and forth.

Ashley stepped back and took a deep breath. “Okay. Um. Okay. Hi,” she said to the girl, who was currently sitting up and swinging her legs over the side of the couch, red hair falling around her face. “Can you hear me?”

The girl looked up, and Rooster watched the awareness return to her eyes, the blankness fading to confusion, to fear, to panic. Her mouth opened and she sucked in a breath through it, rattling on the exhale. A shiver stole over her, jacking her thin shoulders up around her ears.

Ashley softened. “Hey, it’s okay,” she said soothingly, sinking to her haunches in front of the couch. “You’re safe here.” She lifted both hands and then froze, palms suspended over the girl’s knees.Something happened, Rooster had said, and he saw now that Ash was afraid to touch the girl. She did, though, after a moment’s hesitation, resting her hands on the small, bony kneecaps. “My name’s Ashley.” Even softer now, the maternal voice she used with Desiree. “And that’s Rooster. Can you tell us your name?”

“I…” She breathed rapidly through her mouth, quick breaths that ruffled her hair. Like a frightened animal. “I don’t…”

“It’s okay,” Ashley said. “Take your time.”

The girl swallowed with an audible gulp. “I don’t have a name. They call me LC-5.”

Ashley sat back, brows scaling her forehead, but didn’t break contact with the girl. “Who is ‘they’?”

Something cold and ugly turned over in Rooster’s gut. He crouched down beside Ashley, and the girl glanced at him; he suppressed a sudden, protective urge to reach up and tuck her hair behind her ears. “Hey, kid. Who called you that?” He felt Ashley staring at him, but he stayed fixed on the girl, noting the way her lower lip trembled.

She said, “Doctor Talbot. And Doctor Fowler. And all the nurses. Everyone.”

He and Ashley traded a look.

“Are they doctors at the Institute?” Ashley asked, voice going careful.

The girl nodded.

Ashley said, “Honey, where are your parents?”

“I don’t know. I never met them.” She took another unsteady breath, blinking against the gathering tears in her eyes. “Please don’t make me go back.”

Ashley patted her leg. “It’s okay, sweetheart. We won’t.”

~*~

“Either this kid is yanking our chain and happens to be a really good actress,” Ashley started.

“I don’t believe that.”

“Neither do I. Which means someweird shitis going on.”

Ashley had found some clothes for the poor girl, some sweats of her own that swallowed the little redhead whole, but were warmer than the scrubs. She already wore a pair of white, soft-soled shoes without laces, the kind prisoners might wear. That was the dark conclusion Rooster was beginning to come to: she was a prisoner of some sort. Someone who, without a name or parents, had been held captive at the very place that was offering assistance to wounded vets. The idea made him sick.

They stood in the kitchen, both of them taking turns to peek into the living room where they’d set the girl up with a blanket and a mug of hot cocoa. Ashely held her phone in her hands, thumbs flying over the screen.

“Okay, here,” she said, and Rooster glanced away from the girl – she stared down into the cocoa and its bobbing raft of mini marshmallows like someone seeing the face of God – and turned back to his landlady. “I’m on the Ingraham Institute website, right? Well, once you get past all the shiny front page stuff, miracle drugs and all that, there’s a page dedicated to the weapons technology they’re developing for all the branches of the military.”

“’Cept the Corps,” he said with a snort.

She tipped her head in acknowledgement. “Y’all will get it in fifteen years, I’m sure. But listen to this. There’s a list of their projects. Project Royal. Project Kashnikov – I don’t know about you, but that sounds super Russian to me – and some others. Then, down at the bottom: The LC-W Initiative.” She looked up from her phone, face illuminated by the screen. “Didn’t she say she was called LC-5?”

He swallowed. “Yeah.”