Keep Watch

Chapter Eleven

Chloe was sitting in a little metal chair when water was splashed onto her.

There was a light in front of her, blocking out the face of the person sitting across from her. Her wrists were chained to the chair, but she couldn't move even if she'd wanted to — her spine ached and ribs burned with the pain of a million wounds dotted throughout her body.

She strained against her handcuffs to no avail. She was too weak, even, to lift her own arms.

The light was tilted more precisely into her eyes, and even when she closed them, it left a bright indent in her perception.

She felt anger bubbling up beneath her, but words refused to come to her lips. Instead, she glared with closed eyes at whoever was sitting on the other end of that table, willing all the rage she had felt those past days in the wilderness into her small stature.

"Chloe," the man said. He was the nurse from earlier; she recognized him by the voice. When she didn't say anything, he continued, "I have some more questions for you. Do you think you could answer those for me?"

He sounded kind. She doubted herself for a moment — perhaps she was chained up for good reason. Had she attacked him and forgotten about it? Or maybe this was her punishment for being complacent in blowing up the surveillance building? His voice was too empathetic for her to believe that he had locked her up like that senselessly. She must have done something wrong.

"Why am I here..?" she asked weakly.

"If you answer all of my questions to my satisfaction, then I'll answer one of yours," he replied. "Think long and hard about what you'd like that question to be."

Chloe nodded. To that, she was able to agree.

"How did you disable the chips?" he questioned. His nonchalance sounded artificial, as if he was editing himself to make her more comfortable.

Already, Chloe was regretting having agreed to this. She opened her mouth to ask him how the fuck she knew about those, but she didn't want that to be the question he answered once he was done with her — and she reminded herself that she was the one tied up, not him. He must have good reason for this.

"We drowned ourselves," she finally admitted.

She heard him scribble something into his notebook, before he shifted in his seat. "I'm going to need you to elaborate."

"We found out that they turn off when we're near water. We also found out that they turn back on when we're unconscious, because they don't know that we're in water if we don't know it ourselves. So A-" She cut herself off. Would she be selling them out if she told this man Aava's name? She decided to omit it. "So I found out that there's a killsafe if it turns back on when we're in water, and we drowned ourselves to make that happen."

"Ah," he said. "Of course." She heard him scribbling for a few moments longer, before he asked, "What was your vision in the beginning of the experi... ence?"

Chloe could have sworn he was going to say experiment. In the background of the blinding light, she could see him adjusting his glasses. He hadn't been wearing those earlier.

"I saw a bunch of plants. I think it was showing me which ones are edible. I ended up using it to forage for food later on."

He seemed satisfied with that answer. "Alright. When you were frying your chip, what did you hear?"

She wondered why he had switched back to the topic of the chips, after having moved away from it. Still, she tried to give him the best answer she could: "It just beeped at me, then buzzed out. Like a battery dying."