Extracted

Fletcher

I can't sleep. The dreams crash around forcefully of men coming to take me in the night. I sit up on a lurch, wet strands of black hair fall forward over my face.

I push them back and swing my feet to the floor.

"Where are you going?" Cecelia turns over on her side to face me.

"Bathroom."

"Nightmares?"

I must have thrashed in my sleep, maybe cried out. A little hard to restrain yourself when you're not conscious. I hope I didn't call out for Jeremy.

"Yeah, sorry." I slip out of our room before she can say anything else. Maybe without me there she can get to sleep.

After splashing water on my face and letting my shakiness subside, I leave the bathroom when someone pushes off the wall and grabs my wrist from behind. "Hey. I thought you weren't coming."

I squeak and spin, arm up to strike. "Mitchell?"

His eyes crinkle at my defensive position. "I thought you weren't coming, but then I saw on my tablet that you left your room."

I scrunch my nose in confusion.

"You don't remember?" It's dark, but I can see well enough to notice how his skin turns a sickly green. "They took your memories, didn't they? I thought in the infirmary...that you were still you."

He had come to see me. I hadn't imagined him.

"Oh, Katherine, I'm so sorry."

I shake my head. "I...no...they didn't. I'm still me."

His eyes squeeze closed briefly and he nods once...then again. His throat column bobs in a hard dry swallow. "Good. That's good."

We stare at each other for a long time, then he visibly shakes himself. "When you didn't come, I worried—"

"Didn't come?"

"In the infirmary, I asked you to meet me."

I shake my head.

He must notice my confusion and he breathes out a long breath and scrubs a hand down his face. "That part you didn't remember. I should have guessed. You were really out of it."

His hand still encircling my chafed wrist squeezes. "Katherine, what did they do to you in there?"

I startle and pull away from him, stretching our arms apart, but he doesn't let go. The burning cold flares beneath my skin, phantom pain that feels real. "I...I don't want to talk about it."

"Okay." His jaw tenses into a hard angular point. "Okay. You don't have to."

I'm grateful. My throat closes up tight and my vision wavers behind a stream of sudden tears.

I feel the rough pad of his thumb wipe the moisture away beneath my eyes. "Don't cry, Katherine. It's going to be all right. I promise. We have a plan."

"You do?" I glance up at him, although he's still blurry.

"Yeah." He smiles. "We were going over it in the big secret meeting I thought you'd forgotten. Come on." His fingers around my wrist slip down to my hand and pulls me after him. "I've disrupted the camera feeds so we're invisible to the school servers."

"You're going to need to teach me that. Apparently I have a big enough brain now to take that kind of stuff in." I go for a dry tone and wipe the back of my hand across my face to get rid of the rest of my tears.