Take Me by CD Reiss

Author:CD Reiss [Reiss, CD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781942833765
Publisher: Flip City Books

Chapter 3

The second time I wake up in the greenhouse, it’s dark. My legs are cold, and at some point in my unconscious state, I must have taken off my gloves, because my hands are free. My joints ache and my entire head hurts. I’m hours past hunger pangs. A mass of glue and sand has lodged itself in my throat.

The minutes crawl like hours while my vision gets used to the light. I spot a glove resting by my shoe, and it’s not until I reach for it that I realize my skirt’s hitched over my knees.

Did he…?

No. He didn’t.

He wasn’t interested in raping me. He was interested in watching me starve. Or maybe someone else was watching me.

Leaning forward for the glove, I check the camera. The red light glows steadily.

Darius hadn’t been speaking lightly when he threatened my survival, but it wasn’t pure sadism. He was after the Colony.

The only way to keep him from getting what he wants is to take myself out of the negotiations. Just then, my eyes adjust to the shapes on the tile. He removed my laces to keep me from killing myself, but he left the shards.

Well, that was his mistake.

Grabbing the glove, I gather my skirts, slyly picking up a triangle of pottery to tuck into the base of my palm.

To mask what I’m doing from the camera, I pretend to put the glove back on while—under the fabric—I tuck the pointy side of the shard into my wrist. Once I cut it open, all I have to do it curl up and bleed out. They won’t notice until I’m already dead. They can’t stop me, and they’ll lose. We’ll survive.

My starving brain decides it’s a good plan, until the edge of the ceramic is pressed to my skin, and all I have to do was put the glove on quickly. It’s then that I realize that the *elders could be on the video feed. They might miss it and give up everything, or they might be building a plan that included me dying at some other, more strategic, point.

I keep the shard in my glove, flat side against my skin, but I can’t use it.

Even suicide’s too risky, too self-involved, too much an individual decision.

The best way to help the colony is to be predictable.

My thoughts degrade into colors weaving together. Fear is green and yellow. Thirst is brown and burgundy. They become a whirring, spinning loom that clatters around my head.

***

Kylah’s family had come from the Good Hope Colony in Connecticut. Her father was an accountant who must have been extremely talented at weaving together our web—with its secrecy and fiscal traditions—and the Outside—with its taxes and disclosures, because relocation was rare and had to be approved by a plurality of Council members across regions.

She was fourteen—the same age as me—when she came to Preparation. I’d just gotten my blood a few months before and was still excited about the daily routines of preparing me for my sixteenth year, when I’d enter Training, and learn how to please a husband.

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