Trapped | The Trapped Trilogy Book 1

Seventeen (Part 1)

Seventeen (Part 1)

EENIE

The sound of low beeping wakes me up.

I'm inside a hospital... I know this hospital. The round walls and the simple round rooms with a single bed in each, and the door placed at the opposite end as my head. I'm back inside the Dame's Dome.

A woman walks into the room in a Doctor uniform and smiles presently at me.

"How are you feeling?"

My head starts to throb as I sit myself up. I rub up and down on the center of my forehead with two of my fingers to relieve some of the pain bouncing around inside.

"What happened?" I groan.

"You fell off a swing and hit the ground. The impact your body took made you black out and slip into unconsciousness." She says simply, typing on her paper-thin tablet.

"I did?" I ask, eyeing her. I know she's lying. One: because those words sound rehearsed, and two: because I remember exactly what happened before I blacked out. More or less. "What made me fall off the swing? I mean, we don't do very many things that will make us fall off, and the safety belts are pretty snug on our laps. They adjust to our weight and circumference, and I should know-I've repaired a couple hundred in my day. If I didn't, I'd be a horrible Mechaneer and probably be kicked out of the Dome because of the strikes from not knowing. Not to mention the night I broke a swing and felt everything but the seatbelt break on it. So what happened, exactly?"

She looks up at me and sucks in her cheeks, thinking. She smiles at me crookedly. "You don't remember?"

I snort and shake my head, tired of playing games. But I can feel that pull at the back of my brain again, the same one that was there when Murkas was asking me what I saw on the outside of the Dome walls when the panels went clear. I should play dumb. Should.

"Maybe I do. Maybe I don't. But if I do? What will you do to me? Nothing? Tell on me to the President? Go ahead. Living outside the Dome isn't so bad, you know. It's possible. I've been doing it for how long now? Or maybe I haven't. Maybe it's all a figment of my imagination. But either of those stories will send me into a life of Doctor visits and no free will, am I right?"

She types something else in.

"Of course I am," I snap and shake my head.

I move my arms and feel things pulling at it. Needles. They're attached to a wire connecting to a bag with a clear liquid inside of it. All of the needles are poked into my left arm, while half my right hand is wrapped with gauze that spirals half way up my arm.

"Hello?" I ask, my voice flaring with attitude.

Maybe I'm not supposed to remember. Maybe that's what the liquid being slipped into my veins right now is supposed to be doing. Making me forget.

I lift up the material on my right hand and peek under it. It's still purple, and the color it's spread a bit since I last looked at it. It's starting to reach the halfway spot between my wrist and my elbow, and work itself down my knuckles.

I pick at the little needles, getting ready to pull them out.

"What are these?" I ask her.

She looks up from her tablet and down at my arm. Glancing back down, she tells me it's for my headache.

I smile and rip the first one out.

"Good news, it's gone," I lie and pull another one out.

Her face twists into horror as she sees me.