Unseen

Chapter 10

The chocolate chip cookies were gone. Delta-Nine-308 didn't know what to call this new kind. They were as pale as her skin that almost never saw the daylight, and they crumbled when she bit into them. Buried in the center was a gush of red sweetness. It looked like blood, and tasted like candy.

It was just jam, she knew. She'd had it on toast plenty of times back home. Not everything was new to her. Whatever Yvette thought, her life hadn't been entirely devoid of sweetness.

But hidden inside a cookie, jam no longer felt ordinary. It tasted like a secret.

It tasted like—

She stopped herself before she could think freedom. This wasn't freedom.

But whatever it was, she thought... maybe...

She thought maybe she might like it.

Not enough for it to be worth those men throwing a net over her, sticking a needle in her, and hauling her away. Not enough to be worth losing her home and her cohort and Joss and her familiar room. But...

But cookies. And TV. And a couch that wrapped itself around her body like it wanted her to stay.

And last night, she'd had a mission. She hadn't been prepared. It had been a new challenge, harder than any she had faced before. And she had succeeded anyway.

She heard the guards downstairs sometimes. Moving. Talking. A reminder that she was still a prisoner. The weight of the bracelet on her left arm was another reminder.

She needed those reminders. She looked at the bracelet as often as she could, and moved that arm so she would feel the weight dragging her wrist down. She turned off the TV sometimes just to hear the guards. Just for the reminder that she shouldn't get too comfortable.

It wasn't working.

The bracelet was new. The guards weren't. There had always been guards. If anything, the strange part was not seeing them. Back home, they were stationed at every corner. They escorted her and the rest of her cohort from room to room. They stood at the door to the bathroom, and knocked if she was in there too long.

Maybe that was why she kept turning off the TV to hear them. Not to remind herself that she shouldn't get comfortable. But because hearing the guards, knowing they were there, was comfortable.

It was being alone that made her uneasy. Sitting here on the couch without anyone ordering her up to do her daily exercises. Eating cookies she hadn't earned. Watching TV, which was a luxury so forbidden she'd never even had the chance to earn it.

Something dark and ominous looked under the surface of her thoughts, like the cartoon shark that was on the TV right now, a fin jutting up above deceptively calm waters.

Yvette said this was freedom. It was a lie.

She knew it wasn't freedom because there were guards.

There had always been guards.

Had she...

Had she always...

She turned up the volume as high as it would go. A cartoon squid's laugh echoed off the walls, making her ears ache. But the thought would not be silenced.

Have I always been a prisoner?

What she'd had back home... it hadn't been freedom, not like Yvette would think of freedom. She knew that. She wasn't stupid.

But it wasn't not-freedom, either. It was just... it was...

It was home. Why did it have to be more than that?