Once I was alone I bathed quickly, scrubbing off over a week’s worth of dirt, sweat and dried blood. Evidently, only parts of me had been cleaned in preparation for my surgery. I lathered soap over every inch of my body, hoping I might be able to wash away the entire ordeal. I succeeded in scrubbing off the top layer of my skin. Washing my hair, I was relieved to see it had stopped falling out, and I hadn’t lost an alarming amount while I’d been starved.

I toweled off and greedily brushed my teeth, wanting those small day-to-day luxuries I’d been denied for so long. Once I was clean I returned to the main chamber of the room and rifled through the drawers. The clothes hadn’t been selected for me personally, so there was a generic assortment of items.

I avoided the scrubs and picked some black sweatpants with a drawstring waist and an army-green T-shirt. There were no undergarments provided, so I went without, though I’d have loved a bra to combat the cold temperature in the room.

I found a pair of socks, and just having my feet bundled felt good. I didn’t want to put my boots back on until I needed to. I sat on the bed, a metal-framed twin, and looked around my new temporary home. The bed and dresser were the only furniture, and there were no mirrors in either the bedroom or the bathroom. I did another tour of the space and noticed there were no electrical sockets or phone jacks. There was no glass in the space whatsoever, and the bed was bolted to the floor. The shower curtain hung on a flimsy plastic rod, and the sink was just a basin sticking out of the wall with no exposed pipes.

They had this place locked down like a mental hospital. With the exception of the green Oral-B toothbrush, there was nothing in the room I could use as a weapon. And unless my biggest foe was tartar deposits, the toothbrush wasn’t of much use to me.

I went back to the bedroom and lay down on top of the thin blanket. Compared to my former accommodations, this might as well be the Ritz-Carlton. Even the flimsy mattress felt like memory foam compared to a concrete floor.

The full weight of my exhaustion pressed down on me, holding me into the mattress like a giant hand. I had to think about my plan, figure out what I would do the next evening after seeing Holden, but my body didn’t care. Plans weren’t going to happen tonight.

I fell asleep thinking of the last bed I’d been in and imagining Holden’s arms. I made a silent prayer I’d be in those arms again tomorrow.

An unfamiliar man was standing over me when I woke up, and my immediate reaction was to slap him.

The response was instinctive, and I was thankfully so weak it didn’t do any serious damage, but he still seemed surprised, hollering, “Ow. I thought you said this one was incapacitated.”

He rubbed his cheek and glared at someone on my opposite side.

“No, I said she wasn’t at her full strength. You’re the idiot who got in her face. You know better than to approach the subjects.”

“She was sleeping.”

“She’s part vampire, and you didn’t check the sun chart. Idiot.” The other person was a woman. The nurse who I’d slapped wasn’t Geoffrey, the man I’d threatened the day before. I wondered if he’d requested a transfer off Secret duty or if it just wasn’t his shift yet.

Both nurses stood back from me now, looking uncertain of how to deal with my potential violence.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I wasn’t sorry at all, but if they thought I was going to start attacking people, they’d move me back to my cell. “You surprised me. I’m so sorry.”

I tried to sound contrite, which wasn’t something I was naturally talented in, but it came across genuine as far as I could tell. They didn’t know me well enough to understand how rarely I was remorseful about violence.

The female nurse didn’t look too forgiving, even though I hadn’t touched her, but the male nurse said, “I shouldn’t have gotten so close.”

Was he…apologizing to me? I didn’t know what to do with that, so I just stared at him.

“The Doctor will join us shortly, but he requested we take a few notes before he arrives. Do you mind?” he asked.

Would it matter if I did?

“What kind of notes?”

“He wants to see what progress you’ve made after yesterday’s procedures.” The male nurse was holding a clipboard and pen.

I imagined stabbing him in the throat with that pen. “What are you going to do?”

“Nothing big.” He was treating me like I was a nervous patient he was trying to soothe instead of a walking, talking experiment. “Blood pressure, heart rate, and um…we need to check for scarring?” His gaze drifted to the front of my shirt.

“No scarring.” This wasn’t entirely true, but they wouldn’t see the kind of scars one would expect to find on a human.

“We need to check,” the woman said.

I stood up and pulled my shirt off, bracing my hands on my hips and glaring at her defiantly. In spite of the thin pink lines on my chest—which the female nurse was noting on her clipboard—I said, “No. Scarring.” I turned to the male nurse who was blushing furiously—I was starting to think he must be new—and asked, “Is that enough, or do you need to touch?”

“Th-that’s enough,” he stammered. “Thank you.”

I tugged the shirt back over my head and plopped onto the bed, holding my left arm out to them. “Do whatever you came to do.”

They set about checking my temperature, heart rate, blood pressure and a half dozen other bizarrely normal things, as if I were a human patient recovering from surgery in a real hospital.

“What do you get out of this?” I broke the silence when it became too much for me to just listen to them work. “What does he tell you about us that lets you justify your actions to yourselves?” I stared right at the new guy, who fumbled while writing something on his clipboard. He couldn’t look at me.

“He tells us not to listen to you for starters,” the woman informed me.

“Because he doesn’t want you to figure out we’re real. We’re people.”

“You’re not a person.” She took the blood pressure cuff off my arm and rattled off the numbers to her partner. I continued to watch him instead of her, his fingers trembling on the pen.

“He thinks I’m a person,” I observed.

“He doesn’t know any better yet. But if you talk to him like you talked to Geoff yesterday, he’d come to the conclusion pretty quickly. Why don’t you tell us about how our families are disposable?”

I shifted my attention to her, noting the way she fixated on the bridge of my nose. She’d been here a long time if she was willing to stare that close to my eyes.

“You’ll all get what’s coming to you,” I whispered. The male nurse’s pen clattered to the floor.

I could go for it. My strength was still up from the previous night’s feeding, enough I felt confident I might be able to take these two out. My gaze was transfixed on the pen, wondering how quickly I could kill them both and get through the door. How fast would security come down on me?

How long would it take before the collar blew?

The fucking collar.

I swore internally as loud as I could. Instead of going for the pen, I sat perfectly still and looked at the nurse again. “You dropped your pen.”

He scooped it up, and I asked, “How old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

Judging by the aggravated sigh the other nurse let out, I assumed they weren’t supposed to engage in personal conversations with us. That made sense, considering I couldn’t have been the first one to threaten an employee’s family.

“Me too,” I told him. “I bet this is your first real job. Good salary? Health benefits too? I’m guessing you’re thinking about how bright your future is with this real medical job on your resume.” The female nurse grabbed him by the arm and started dragging him towards the door. “But you’re not doing good work here. You think we’re the monsters? You’re the monsters.”

They left, and a moment later the door reopened. This time the familiar figure of The Doctor filled the frame. Tonight he was dressed up, wearing a nice pair of slacks and a velvet tuxedo jacket in a rich blood-red color. On another man it might have looked ridiculous, but he owned it somehow, appearing fierce and regal.

He scared the shit out of me.

Before now I’d thought the only person I could be so afraid of was Sig. But what had me afraid of Sig? The idea he had the power to kill me? He and I shared blood. He loved me in a demented way, and I’d spent such a long time being afraid of him I hadn’t really noticed.

The Doctor didn’t love me. Not unless Madame Curie loved polonium. I was a discovery to him, and the awe and adoration on his face whenever he looked at me was nothing more than a gross fascination with what my existence could mean to him.

Fortune and glory. Wasn’t that the ultimate goal?

I was his polonium. His insulin or his skeleton of the first homo sapien. The Doctor had no interest in me as Secret McQueen. He didn’t care about my history or my life. He just wanted to glean what he could.

That made him scarier than anyone I’d ever known. Because I couldn’t reason with him or barter with him. He already had what he wanted from me, and that was my body. I needed to convince him my body was more valuable alive than dead for the time being.

“Are you going to take me to Holden?” I asked.

“We made a deal, did we not? Do I strike you as a man who does not live up to his word?”

“You strike me as the man who held my…heart…” I struggled with the words, suddenly short of breath as I recalled the experience. “Someone who held my heart in his hands while I was still awake. That’s the man you strike me as.”

“And what a fine, strong heart it is.”

He was totally unmoved by my words, further convincing me words would not be the key to unlocking my prison. A damn shame, too, since one of my greatest skills was talking.