TEN

"Tantrums, you know."

 

There were four blank end pages in the last signature of The Count of Monte Cristo. Davy tore them out carefully, under the covers in the middle of the night. Initially, he hid them in his pillow case, but in the morning he slipped them, folded in tight creases, next to the roller of the toilet paper dispenser inside the cardboard tube.

He wanted a pen or a pencil, but if worse came to worst, he could improvise something using food or, he shuddered, other substances he'd been seeing too much of lately.

What he wanted, really, was to send a message to Millie.

Dearest Millie. Have been kidnapped and wired for electricity. Hope you are well. Davy.

He laughed to himself, but felt his eyes sting suddenly and took a shuddering breath. Too close?

He'd been avoiding even the thought of Millie. If he even started thinking about her, there were too many things to worry about.

Did she get out of the Aerie safely? Does she have any idea what happened in D.C. or did she just think I abandoned her after our fight? If she did find out about my kidnapping does she realize I'm alive? Is the NSA watching out for her and is that a good thing? Is she actively looking for me and, therefore, in danger of being found by these psychopaths?

And that was the biggest worry of all.

His hands hurt and he looked down, surprised. His fingernails had left a series of curved lines across the palms of his hands. He consciously relaxed his fingers, then rubbed at the marks with his thumbs. Could use some fingernail clippers.

Could use a lot of things.

He shook the chains. Freedom to leave this place. Freedom from observation. Freedom to go to Millie. He felt his hands clenching into fists again and grabbed the chains, instead. He jerked heavily on them, an up and down motion, and they cracked against the wall, chipping the paint. He took all four chains in his hand and jumped ten feet back, still facing the wall, to the extent of the chains' reach. The chains jerked rigid, but did very little to the wall. Instead, Davy was yanked forward onto his hands and knees.

Oh! He froze, staring at the floor, hammered by a sudden realization. It wasn't the grief he'd been avoiding by not thinking of Millie, of the things taken and kept away from him.

It's rage.

He jumped to the bathroom door, bracing automatically as the chains whipped around and cracked into the wall. Then to the opposite side, by the bed. Sheetrock cracked and paint chips dropped to the floor under the impact. The noise was awful.

The noise was wonderful.

He jumped again, alternating sides, accentuating the effects by timing his leaps to correspond with the sinusoidal waves running down the chains. His wrists and ankles were being wrenched painfully and he was aware of this, on some level, but on another, it didn't matter at all. Sheetrock was exploding away from the edges of the hole. Entire foot-wide sections were cracked, hanging off by the thinnest shreds of paper laminate. Sheetrock dust hung in the air, dancing eddies of particles stirred by the whipping of steel links through the air.

And then he was standing in the square, in the green box, his throat tingling from the aftermath of the warning signal.

He rocked on his feet, surprised. He hadn't been conscious of a cough. He wondered if he'd mistaken some physical reaction—the dust in the air would make anybody cough—and had jumped in response, but when he leaned over the green tape, it was there. The tingle in his throat, the incipient nausea.

He stepped back to the center of square, blinking, his nose suddenly itching from all the dust in the air. He surveyed the damage. The hole from which the chains emerged was three feet high, exposing upright two-by-four studs and a smaller hole in the Sheetrock on the other side of the studs, the wall of the adjacent room. That room was as unlit as ever, but there was enough light coming in through the newly enlarged hole that Davy had high hopes of actually seeing what lay beyond when the field was shut off again. But the wall was a real mess.

Hmmm. They're not going to like this.

They kept him "in the box" for hours. They did not bring him lunch.

His first awareness that he was no longer "in the box" was the computerized voice. "You have two minutes to use the restroom."

He didn't need telling twice. For the past hour he'd been considering peeing on the floor. When he'd finished, they reeled the chains in through the now larger hole in the wall. He crouched and looked through, keeping to the edge to allow light through.

It took him a minute for his eyes to adjust. It was a small room with a bed and dresser stacked against one wall, crowded, as if they'd been pushed out of the way to make room for the large drummed marine electric winch that had been bolted to the middle of the floor.

The door opened and Davy turned around, suddenly very nervous. Of course, if they wanted to punish me, they could've just turned off the field.

Miss Minchin led in two men, dressed like maintenance staff, though they did wear the ubiquitous paper surgical mask, as did Miss Minchin. She pointed to a spot just inside the yellow square about halfway between the green box and the bathroom door. "About here, I suppose. Make sure and straddle one of the floor thingies. The beams." In addition to the masks they were wearing rubber gloves.

"The joist," said the first man, thumping a half-inch-thick, foot-square steel plate onto the floor.

"Whatever!" Miss Minchin snapped. More calmly she said, "Keep your masks on. Believe me, you don't want to catch his disease. And keep your tools in the hall unless they're in your hand."

She walked across the floor to Davy and said quietly, for his ears alone, "I'm going to be in there—" she pointed at the mirror "—with my hand on the button. You say one word to them and you'll be puking and coughing all over the place." Then she leaned forward and added, "And I'll have to kill them." She jerked her head minutely back toward the middle of the room. "Got it?"

Davy considered head-butting her in the nose. He took a deep breath and said quietly, "Got it."

He couldn't see her lips smile but he saw it at the corners of her eyes and her cheekbones.

"That's Mama's little angel." She turned back to the men and said to the two workmen, "Quick as possible. We'll be getting you the chains in a moment."

She exited the room without looking back.

When the door had shut, the man closest to the door said, "Now thaaaat's what comes from keepen your dildo in the freeeeezah."

The other man laughed nervously. "Don't. I helped wire this room for sound."

The man grunted. "Ah." He began tapping the various spots on the floor with his hammer until it made a less hollow sound, then slid the plate to that point. "There. Take the other plate downstairs—I'll drill the holes and drop the bolts through and you can get the nuts on, eh? Then you can bring the welder when you come back." He tapped the floor. "And a fire extinguisher. Just in case."

I know that accent. It was an extreme New England accent, only different. I've been where they speak like that.

The man who stayed behind used a long-shafted half-inch drill bit to drill through the floor, using the corner holes on the plate as a guide. In less than fifteen minutes, they'd bolted the plate to the floor, presumably anchored to an identical plate in the ceiling below. The two ankle chains were cut with an abrasive wheel in the room behind him, and Miss Minchin came back into the room to pull them through. They measured the distance from the plate into the bathroom, and then trimmed the chain back.

One of them took a U-bolt out of his pocket. It had been bent so that the open end was at a right angle to the closed loop. They threaded last links of the chain onto it and began welding it to the plate.

Davy coughed. His throat tingled. He jumped, even before he thought, but slammed back against the wall, his shoulders flaring with pain. He stared wide-eyed at Miss Minchin. "Did you turn it off?"

The two workmen looked up. They hadn't seen him try to jump but they heard the sound of his back hitting the wall.

Miss Minchin frowned and looked at the mirror.

The computerized voice spoke over the speaker. "It's the arc welder. It's jamming the signal. It'll be all right if they keep their arcs under one second."

"We can do that," said the welder.

"No!" Miss Minchin said. "The conditioning will be compromised." She pulled the welding unit's plug from the wall socket. "Wait," she told the welder. "He's got an electronic prosthesis. You could kill him." She left the room at a run.

One second? Is that the new time limit between warning and full-out convulsions?

Miss Minchin came back carrying a plastic box with a short, stubby antennae. She walked right up to Davy and held it out, toward his chest. Davy started to reach for it and she slapped his hand. "Hands off, vomit-boy." She turned a dial and said to the welder. "Try it."

He tapped the electrode to the plate and there was a flash, but this time there was no tingle, no cough.

Miss Minchin held her thumb up. "Looks good."

They started to weld in earnest and the overhead fluorescent lights went off and a small emergency light, mounted in the corner, came on.

"Sonofabitch," said the welder.

His partner voice said, "It's just the breaker. I'll get it." He left, propping the door open. Distant sunlight showed dimly in the hall.

Miss Minchin backed away from Davy and looked at the mirror. "What's the status on the primary?"

There was no reply.

Hmmmm. Are they out over there, too? He stared at the box in Miss Minchin's hands. "Would I be puking if you didn't have that here?"

She looked at him, apparently thinking it over. Finally, she clicked it off. There was no tingle. "See? The primary is on a battery backup. The green square is always safe."

The lights came back on. When the workman came back, he said, "It's a thirty amp breaker, but there's a lot of other equipment on the circuit. You'll have to keep the welding current down."

"Can't they shut down the other stuff?"

"No," said Miss Minchin. She turned the box back on.

They shrugged and went back to work at the lower setting. It seemed to take forever.

Miss Minchin kept her eyes on Davy, but her hands relaxed a bit and the device tilted forward enough that Davy could see the faceplate. It was a gray plastic prototype enclosure of the sort you could buy at RadioShack. Its only features were the antennae, an LED power indicator, and a rotary switch marked OFF, 2m, 10m, 30m, 100m, and 500m in magic marker. The switch pointed to 500m.

Meters?

They kept pouring water on the plate, to keep the floor from catching on fire. Davy was sorry to see the resulting weld looked quite solid.

Miss Minchin turned off the box and put it in the hallway.

"We'll just go get the plywood now?" the workman said, half telling, half asking.

Miss Minchin nodded. Then, to Davy's surprise, as soon as they'd left she took a key from her pocket and unlocked the padlocks on his wrist restraints using the same small key.

He eyed the key thoughtfully.

She said, "Don't even think about it. You'd be in convulsions before you could get it into the first lock."

With the cuffs off, his wrists showed raw and red, almost scaly. He rubbed them carefully, resisting the urge to scratch until he bled. Miss Minchin backed away to one side, clear of the chains, and said, "In the box."

He didn't wait for the warning cough, jumping immediately. He braced, from habit, for the pull of the chains on his wrists, but they weren't there anymore and he fell over backward, his feet jerked out from under him.

Miss Minchin laughed.

Davy sat up gingerly, keeping his face impassive, but he could feel his ears heat up. He checked the border, out of curiosity. He was indeed "in the box."

Miss Minchin coiled the now unused chains and wrist restraints, and tossed them through the hole into the other room. After a moment, the workmen came back with a sheet of half-inch plywood, which they fastened to the wall over the broken Sheetrock, anchoring it to the studs with two-inch screws.

"You want us to clean up this stuff, Ma'am?" They indicated the broken Sheetrock scattered on the floor.

"No."

They nodded and left.

Miss Minchin tore the mask off her face. She turned to the mirror. "Let him out."

Davy tested the edge of the field, then stepped out. His arms felt unnaturally light without the chains. Still, the chains on his ankles pulled as heavily as ever on his legs. And on my spirit. He touched the scar on his chest. But the real chains lie here.

Miss Minchin said, "Better see if you can reach the bathroom."

He found that he could sit on the toilet if his legs were extended. He tried the shower. "I won't be able to stand in the tub." The chains were too short. They'd measured into the tub but hadn't accounted for the angle up and down over its edge.

Miss Minchin came to the door and looked. "Take baths. Let your legs hang over the edge." She went back to the door. As she went out she said, "It's your own fault. Tantrums, you know."

She hadn't said, "Clean up this mess," but that seemed the implication. On his new shortened leash, he couldn't walk up to most of the walls but he could reach them. Since they'd removed the wrist restraints, he could get down on his hands and knees and stretch out to pick up the chunks of Sheetrock.

While he was piling them together he found the screw, one of the two-inch Sheetrock screws that they'd used to fasten down the plywood. It was up against one of the pieces of Sheetrock and half-buried in Sheetrock dust.

He palmed it and continued to clean up. While the mop bucket was filling, he used the toilet, then slipped the screw into the toilet paper roll, with his scraps of paper.

Unfortunately, it looked too large to get into the key holes on the padlocks of the ankle restraints, but he would check, in the night.

 

They put him in the box ten times before supper, then several times through the night, on some random basis. He wondered how they decided. Did a computer program tell them, using some random number generator? Or was it scheduled weeks in advance? Or did they just wait until he was fully asleep, to maximize his confusion and thoroughly disrupt his rest?

He pictured them behind the mirror. Sometimes he imagined them watching intently, some savage smile lingering on their lips, laughing each time they sent him to the box, drinking his misery with eager eyes. His other image was much worse—a man not even watching, bored, reading some magazine or book, and only reaching out to poke the switch when some timer went off. Then, glancing briefly through the window to make sure he was actually in the box, before turning back to his book. Oh, yeah—and yawning.

This second image chilled him because he thought it more likely. How could someone do this to another human without mentally placing him in the category of "thing" first? Passion implied involvement. He suspected Miss Minchin of some form of involvement. But the others?

Under the covers, in the night, he tried the screw on the padlocks of the ankle restraints but his earlier suspicion was correct. It was too thick.

It was sharp, though. For one bleak moment he thought about using it to pop his jugulars, covers pulled up to his chin. They wouldn't find out until they put him in the box or noticed the blood dripping under the mattress. It wasn't a serious thought, though.

Not yet.

Of more serious consideration was a bit of surgery, on his chest or lower neck, to see if he could disable the device. With a sharp screw, no antiseptics, and no anesthetic. Sounds like fun to me!

He shoved the screw beneath his pillow and turned. A mattress coil creaked as he shifted his weight.

Hmmm. There are other things that can be torn by a sharp screw.

He didn't rip the cloth cover of the mattress. He was pretty sure what he wanted to do would take a lot longer than one night, and he would need to conceal the effort. So, his first session he settled for painstakingly opening the bottom seam of his mattress, near the corner next to the wall. Left alone, the weight of the mattress held it closed. With the fitted bottom sheet in place, it was undetectable.

Unless they look.

He left the screw tucked inside the mattress.

An hour later, after two turns in the box, he resumed his work. His goal was the wire from a coil spring—one of the interior coils to avoid a detectable sag in the edge. It took him the rest of the night to cut his way between two border coils and through the pocket of one of the interior coils. The fabric didn't rip, even when he'd started a good hole with the screw. He had to saw, roughly, with the threads, then tug, then saw some more.

Everything was one-handed, as he had to work without apparent movement, lying on his stomach, face buried in the pillow, only one arm over the edge of the bed.

Then they put him in the box and he nearly tore open his arm pulling it out between the coils as he jumped. Another time he didn't let go of the screw and nearly dropped it on the floor in the box. He sat on the floor quickly, back to the mirror, and hid it between the stainless steel band and the inner padding of his ankle restraints.

By morning, he had the coil completely exposed, but the tops and bottom of the spring were fastened to the wire frame by crimped metal clips and they eluded his initial efforts to wrench it free.

He left the screw inside the mattress and gave up for that night. This time, he was ready for sleep.

 

After breakfast, Miss Minchin entered the room. She was dragging a chain that went around the edge of the door and she carried a pair of felt slippers and a heavy bathrobe.

"In the box."

He complied immediately, from choice—not reflex. He wanted to give her an impression of cooperation for the moment.

She walked forward and stopped five feet from the edge. "Lie down—stick your feet out to me."

He did, keeping his upper chest inside the green tape. She unlocked his left ankle restraint but, instead of removing it, she switched chains, locking the padlock to the new chain that ran out the door. Then she unlocked the right ankle, but this time she completely removed the restraint, dropping it on the floor and leaving the small padlock beside it, still open.

She straightened back up and took a radio from her pocket—not the plastic box she'd had before, but a scrambled handheld transceiver. "We're ready here. You?"

"Switching on. On," said a voice from the radio.

She slid the bathrobe and the slippers across to Davy. "Come on, boy. Walkies."

He scrambled to his feet staring at her.

She walked to the door, then paused. "Well, I suppose you can stay here if you want."

He threw on the robe and tested the border. They were broadcasting a larger signal, apparently, for there was no warning tingle at the green tape or the yellow. He pushed his feet into the slightly large slippers and walked forward, coiling the chain as he went.

It felt very odd, going through the door—surprisingly difficult.

He'd been expecting some sort of institutional setting—some sort of clinic, but the hallway was clearly not that. It was manorial—old and elegant. Carved or molded accents decorated wainscoted walls. There were small dark, satin-finished side tables adorned with bowls of fresh flowers. At the far end of the hall there was an actual window, framed by heavy drapes, where bright sunlight puddled on the thick carpet and made his eyes tear.

The outside.

The chain ran the other direction, away from the window, and ended, Davy saw, just down the hall. A heavy furniture hand-truck stood there and strapped to it was an upright cylinder, one and a half feet across and two feet high. He took a step closer and saw that it was concrete cast in an iron pipe. The end of the chain was secured to a U-bolt projecting from the cement.

Miss Minchin led him toward it. "You'll need to push this along."

Davy eyed it and tried to remember how much concrete weighed per cubic foot. The pipe itself was at least a half-inch in thickness, a significant weight even without the concrete. He tried to tilt the dolly back on its wheels but didn't succeed until he'd braced one foot and leaned far back. The little plate on the back of the dolly said it was rated to 700 pounds, but the way it creaked, he strongly suspected it was overloaded. He balanced it carefully, looping the coil of chain he'd been gathering over his arm.

If I jumped, I bet it would come with me—all seven hundred pounds. He remembered moving entire loaded bookshelves—not huge ones, but weighty enough—and once a small refrigerator when he and Millie had purchased the condo in Stillwater.

And where would I be, then? Flopping on the floor and vomiting? Perhaps going into cardiac arrest? And when I try to jump back "in the box" I won't have the coordination to bring the weight with me.

He looked at Miss Minchin and raised an eyebrow.

She pointed down the hall, the direction he was facing. "There's an elevator."

They passed a door on the right and Davy made himself ignore it. The doorway was in the right place to lead to the observation room on the other side of the mirror.

The elevator was on the left, at the end of the hall, wood-paneled doors, wood-paneled interior, a cut glass insert, a small mirror. There was barely room for Miss Minchin, Davy, and the handcart. Miss Minchin took the opportunity to stand a little closer than necessary. Davy found his body reacting to her warmth and scent.

He shuddered.

Remember Cox. Remember she put a bullet in his head and she'd do the same to me if they ever decide I won't cooperate.

The elevator controls showed four levels, basement through third. They were apparently on the third floor now, for Ms. Minchin had pressed One and they'd passed another floor. They exited into another, taller hallway—grander—opening on a hotel-lobby-sized living room, a parlor, and a large, formal dining room with runway table.

Miss Minchin diverted him down a smaller hallway, to his right, and they passed a large kitchen, a laundry room with multiple washers, dryers, and a heavy duty commercial ironing station.

This is somebody's grand house—a mansion, really.

"Servants' day off?"

Miss Minchin didn't respond and he concluded that they'd cleared them out before bringing him through.

At the end of the smaller hallway there was an exterior door, white with rows and rows of four-inch beveled glass panes, and beyond that, a porch overlooking a walled expanse of brown grass bisected by a walkway that ran straight across to a cast iron gate in the far wall. An undulating border of evergreen plants ran beneath the walls and a dry stone fountain decorated the corner. The air was cold but the sun was up and the walls blocked what wind there was. Davy took a moment to tie the robe shut.

"To your right," Miss Minchin said, from behind him.

There was a wheelchair ramp, running down beside the building, then turning into a down-sloping path that curved through winter-mulched flower beds where the barest tips of early tulips or irises were poking up through the straw. The hand truck wanted to run away on the slope and it took all of Davy's concentration to keep it under control. This curving path rejoined the main walk back near the porch.

Miss Minchin led him to the center of the yard.

"There." Miss Minchin pointed. Someone had dug a hole beside the walk, roughly the size of the cylinder. She stepped up beside Davy and tilted the hand truck forward. The cylinder bounced down hard on its base, then fell forward with a thud that could be felt through the ground. She rolled the cylinder until its end was over the mouth of the hole, then pushed down with most of her weight, to tip it on into the hole.

She had to pull her foot back quickly to avoid getting it caught when the cylinder dropped, but she managed, just in time.

Too bad.

He swore at himself. I should've jumped to the Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center. If any one place could've kept him alive and figured out what was causing his convulsions, it would be them. Now, cylinder down in the hole, there'd be no moving it.

Miss Minchin wheeled the hand truck back toward the porch and dropped it on the brown grass just short of the steps.

Well, maybe I would've survived.

Davy took a deep breath and blinked. The sea? There was a whiff of salt air and the more pungent odor of low tide. As if to confirm it, he heard the cry of a single seagull, lonely and haunting solo and raucous in company. He thought back to the workman's accent. Martha's Vineyard?

Or maybe Nantucket? He'd never been on Nantucket but he'd spent several days bicycling around Martha's Vineyard once. He didn't stay there, but had jumped daily, right before Memorial Day. He'd tried it after Memorial Day, too, but it was far too crowded. The accent, once heard, was unforgettable. He'd heard that the accent on Nantucket was similar, only more so.

And there are mansions.

It would explain all the seafood.

He pushed on the top of the concrete cylinder with his toe. It didn't budge in the slightest, as if it were part of some massive rock outcropping reaching up from the bones of the earth. He was puzzled. It would take a crane to get the weight back out of that hole, but its placement looked deliberate and long-term. Are they going to leave me out here in the open to graze upon the grass?

The brick walls enclosing the three sides of the yard joined the corners of the house and were at least eight feet high. The cast iron gate at the far end had gaps between the bars, but all he could see was a distant garage door framed by leafless shrubbery at the end of a gravel path. The house, as he'd noticed in the elevator, was three stories above ground, but there were big dormer windows jutting from the roof, hinting at substantial space in the attic. The basement was clearly evident, too, both in the windows peeking above window wells and the stairs opposite the wheelchair ramp, leading down to a door under the porch.

His eyes were slowly getting used to the light, and now he lifted his eyes to the sky, bright and blue and cloud-free. He took a deep breath. There were contrails high overhead and, after a moment's searching, he spied a lower jetliner. Hmm. Bound for Logan? If so, the house was north of him, and the gateway south. This certainly matched the sun's position.

Unless I'm totally wrong about where I am.

Miss Minchin was sitting on the porch steps watching him. He decided to ignore her. The chain allowed him a forty-foot circle that kept him pretty much on the grass, five feet short of the walls' border shrubbery and twenty feet from the gate and porch.

He shivered. To warm up he walked the perimeter—counterclockwise since his left ankle was constrained by the chain. I'll wear a groove in the grass if they leave me here long enough. Like a dog on a chain. He swung his arms and scuffed his feet as much as possible in the short grass. A circle would be visible from the air, from satellite. Like a dog on a chain—and that's what they would think. He stopped scuffing.

After fifteen minutes of this, Miss Minchin talked into her radio. He heard the static and a voice in reply, but couldn't make out what was said. She stood and came up the walk, halting where the arc of his circle crossed the cement. She tossed something shiny onto the ground and, curious, he approached.

It was a key, presumably the key to the padlock. He looked at her. She was holding the radio to her mouth and watching him.

He crouched and took it, still watching her. When she didn't say anything, he moved it toward the padlock.

"Now," she said, into the radio.

He felt the tingle in his throat and coughed. The key wouldn't go in, but then he turned it one hundred and eighty degrees and it slipped in, twisted, and the lock popped open. He got it out of the hasp, pulled the restraint open, and jumped.

He was in the box, gasping.

He had tried to go to Adams Cowley. He had pictured Adams Cowley.

He'd ended up here.

The computerized voice said, "Put the manacle on."

He jumped—not to Adams Cowley, not home to the Aerie, not to the condo in Stillwater. He jumped to the hallway, right outside the observation room, and opened that door. Even as he did so, he coughed and his throat tingled, but he managed, for one instant, to look at the three men inside the room, before his body flinched back to the box.

He closed his eyes, trying to eke everything he could out of the one glimpse. He'd seen a darkened room with a counter under the tinted window, a microphone, video monitors, a video camera, and three men.

Three startled men, staring back over their shoulders at the open door, their eyes wide open with surprise. One of them was Thug Two, the red-haired, hook-nosed man, and another was Thug One, the blonde he'd thrown against the wall. The blonde was still wearing a foam cervical collar, souvenir of his last encounter with Davy. Davy hoped it had hurt when he'd been compelled to twist to face the door. He hadn't seen the third man before. He was older, with a white lab jacket, dark hair gone mostly gray, glasses, sharp long nose. One of the video monitors had shown the bathroom tub and toilet and a rim of the sink, bright and clear, even though the bathroom light was off and the door shut.

Darkness will not hide me.

The computerized voice said, "Now! No more tricks. Put the manacle on."

Davy coughed and felt the tingle in his throat.

But I'm in the box!

He considered, for the barest instant, not obeying. It would counteract some of the conditioning, if they sent him into convulsions "in the box." It would be a grave mistake, on their part.

But he couldn't make himself face that—not now.

He crouched and put the padded restraint over his ankle, threaded the padlock shackle onto the last link of the chain, and put it through the hasp on the restraint. He twisted the padlock shackle into alignment and pretended to push it shut, using the motion of his hands to rap the body of the padlock against the stainless steel of the outer cuff with a muffled click.

Weirder things had happened. They might not check.

The tingle stopped and he exhaled a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. He checked the border—he was still "in the box." So he dropped to the floor cross-legged with the unlatched padlock hidden beneath his calf.

They left him "in the box" for forty-five minutes. He imagined them talking to Miss Minchin and plotting a new punishment for him, but now that they'd removed the winch, there was nothing to pull him physically out of the box.

He imagined them doing it directly, muscle against muscle, maybe sending Thug Two in, but they probably remembered what had happened with Thug One. Davy looked over at the wall—the depression from the blonde's shoulder and hip were still visible.

Let them come. He wasn't feeling that manageable just yet.

Miss Minchin entered the room and he tensed. He could slip off the manacle and jump behind her, drop her in the pit in west Texas, and be back in the box before the full convulsions kicked in. But I'd still be in the box at the end of it.

Miss Minchin said, "Stick out your foot."

He extended the one without the manacle.

"Ha, bloody ha. The other foot." She raised her hand to the mirror, three fingers extended. She retracted one of them, waited a beat, and retracted the other.

Reluctantly, he extended his foot.

She looked at the open padlock and sighed, then looked meaningfully at the mirror. "Do I have to do everything!" She gestured at Davy. "Shut the padlock, vomit-boy."

"Shut it yourself." He pulled it from the hasp and tossed it across the room, followed by the ankle restraint. He stood up.

He didn't think he could lose this one. If they went ahead and sent him into convulsions, in the square, it would counteract the conditioning. He was visualizing the trauma center at Adams Cowley, ready to jump.

She looked down at the lock and manacle, then back up at him. "Don't mess with me, vomit-boy. You'll regret it."

He slapped her in the face, starting the swing before jumping. The impact swung her head around. She lashed out but he was already back in the box, his arm dropping to his side. The cough and tingle were momentarily there but fading already.

Miss Minchin had dropped back, eyes wide, hands raised, body flinching into some sort of martial arts stance. Davy's handprint was vivid on her cheek.

"Probably." Regret it, he meant. Davy held his breath, waiting, expecting the warning buzz. It didn't come. What's a boy got to do?

He jumped, swept her rear foot from behind and was back in the square before she hit the ground. She rolled to her feet again, her hand held palm out to the mirror, as if to say, "wait."

He slapped the top of her head, hard, from behind, and she kicked back, cobra fast, but he was back in the square and she was dancing on one foot, off balance. She turned and reached for the doorknob but he knocked her spinning away with a body slam.

She scrambled up. This time, instead of going for the door, she came at him. He walked toward her slowly, despite the cough, and, when she committed herself to a front kick, jumped behind her, reached out and grabbed her collar. Both feet went out from under her and she landed hard, on her back.

This time, back in the square, he coughed again. An odd mix of dread and relief coursed through him. He waited—he wanted to be in full convulsions when he arrived, hopefully unable to jump. If he could survive anywhere, it would be in the Trauma Center.

He... jumped.

He blinked as the lighting changed and he was on hospital tile, doubled over, vomiting, coughing, defecating. His vision was tunneling down but he saw a pair of legs in scrubs turn toward him, a voice saying, "What the—"

No!

He was back in the box, on all fours, the vomiting stopped, weak as an infant and soiled like one. He saw movement out of the corner of his eye and turned his head just as Miss Minchin kicked him in the face.