MirrorWorld

But I react quickly, or rather my body does. Acting on some kind of body memory, using techniques I have no memory of learning, I catch her wrist with my right hand, squeezing a pressure point. A painful, cold sensation is rushing up her arm. She hisses in pain and drops the Taser, but I’m not done.

With my left hand, I squeeze a second pressure point at her elbow joint. It’s like completing a circuit, doubling the pain and eliciting a shout. But her voice is cut off a moment later, when I release her wrist and give her a backhand slap behind her right ear, striking a third pressure point and once again completing the circuit, overloading her neurology. She drops into my arms, unconscious, just as the door swings open.

“What’s going—”

I lift Winters and shove her toward the security guard. He instinctively moves to catch the woman. As his arms wrap around her, I punch the defenseless man in the temple. The pair drops together, limbs tangled.

It takes three minutes to lift Winters and the guard into the bed, gag them, and shackle them with the restraints, which they’ll be able to remove once the sedatives I’ve given them wear off. I check them for cell phones but find nothing. No IDs, either. Winters has a blank, red keycard around her neck, which I transfer to mine. I take a set of car keys from her pants pocket and recover the Taser from the floor. The security guard carries a pair of plastic zip cuffs, a stun gun, and a radio. I pillage the nonlethal armaments, clip the radio to my belt (after turning it off), and pocket the cuffs.

I take one last look at the unconscious pair and slip out the door into an empty hallway. I’m at the end of a hundred-foot-long, straight-as-an-arrow corridor. The floor is checkered linoleum, a far cry from the oriental rug on the living-quarters level. The tan walls are barren save for the occasional room label and utilitarian sconce. An EXIT sign glows red from the far end of the hallway.

Stun gun in hand, I stalk down the corridor. The first three doors I try are locked. The fourth opens smoothly. I flick on the light. The room is identical to mine with two exceptions: there is a vase of roses decorating a countertop, filling the air with their scent, and a woman asleep in bed. She’s not restrained, but she’s not waking from the light, either, so she must be sedated.

I step inside and close the door behind me.

A heart monitor beeps slowly and steadily. An IV hangs by her bed, the needle strapped to her wrist. She’s thin. Gaunt. Hasn’t eaten anything substantial in a very long time. But I can see her beauty beyond the malnourishment. I lean in close to her face, inspecting the details. “Who are you?” I whisper.

A splotch of purple on her arms draws my eyes away from her face. I turn the limb over and find it pocked with deep purple bruising and long, thin scars, some of them blazing with red freshness. What the hell are they doing to this woman? A chart hanging from the end of her bed catches my attention. I read the name. “M. Shiloh.”

Muffled voices, just outside the door, spin me around. The door handle turns. I’m in motion before I can develop a course of action, but my body moves like fluid, bending around obstacles as they emerge and striking with force. The first man, dressed in a long white doctor’s coat, is on the floor by the time my consciousness catches up. Clear fluid from a burst IV bag pools around him. The second, a security guard, twitches madly as the two metal prongs buried in his chest deliver a hundred thousand volts into his nervous system. Before he falls to the ground, I drop him with a punch. It’s a low blow, hitting a guy who’s being shocked, but I need him unconscious, and the stun gun won’t do that.

His twitching body slides along the wall and collapses. Moving quickly, I drag both men inside the room and shove them in the bathroom. I don’t find any sedatives in the cupboards, so I bind and gag them with spare sheets, take the guard’s radio, and wedge a chair beneath the bathroom door’s handle.

With so many people around, it must be morning, which means my time is short. I leave the room and move quickly down the hallway. Assuming all the unlabeled doors lead to more examination rooms, I jog down the hall, reading labels as I go. None sound interesting until I get to a set of double doors labeled DOCUMENTUM.

It’s Latin.

What the hell? I know Latin?

Documentum

means “proof” or, more loosely, “evidence,” which is the same word etched on my plastic pendant; I don’t think they’re related, but it sounds like what I’m looking for.

I shove the doors and find them locked. I swipe Winters’s keycard across the panel next to the door. It turns green, and I hear the lock click back. I shove the doors open, rush into the space beyond, and stop in my tracks.

For the first time in my one-year memory, I’m shocked into silence.

10

Dead eyes stare at me. Hundreds of them.