Glow by Ryan Amy Kathleen

Author:Ryan, Amy Kathleen [Ryan, Amy Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Published: 2011-09-13T05:00:00+00:00

THE BRIG

Kieran woke with the side of his face crammed against a metal floor. His head ached horribly, and his mouth tasted like the peat his mother used in her garden. He blinked his eyes open to see the underside of a metal cot, a dripping sink beyond it.

For long minutes, Kieran’s mind was absent, and he could only look at the dripping sink, the silver water falling drop by drop into the basin.

Kitchen.

The word fell like an ice chip into his mind. Sinks are in kitchens. He could be in a kitchen.

No. He was lying under a cot. No cots in kitchens.

His neck itched. He tried to scratch it and touched something hard, something that stuck out of him, pulsing back and forth with his heartbeat. A syringe.

It all rushed back. Seth had done this to him.

This wasn’t a kitchen. It was the brig.

His body felt like sludge as he struggled to roll onto his back. Whatever Seth had given him was powerful and still dragged him down. He fingered the hypodermic, trying to guess where it was poking him. Was it in his jugular? His carotid? Was it safe to pull out? He certainly couldn’t leave it in. He should go to the mirror that was hanging on the wall opposite him, but he couldn’t move.

“Here,” someone said.

Something slid across the floor and hit him in the side. He was afraid if he moved his head to look at who was with him, he might drive the needle deeper—or worse, he might knock it sideways to rip through his jugular. So he groped for whatever they’d given him and, with real effort, lifted it to look.

A mirror. A woman’s mirror.

“Thanks,” Kieran said breathlessly. The mirror, his arm, seemed impossibly heavy. “Is this needle going to kill me if I pull it out?”

“Who knows?” the voice said. It wasn’t Seth talking, but there was little concern in the words. Someone else hated Kieran as much as Seth did.

Holding the mirror in his left hand, he groped with his right, edging his fingers across his chest and up to the twitching hypo, closing around it. He took a deep breath and, a little at a time, pulled the needle out of him. It felt like removing a bone from his body the way it came unstuck from such a deep place. Once it was out, Kieran threw it away and looked in the mirror again. Blood trickled from the puncture, but not very much. Kieran dropped his left hand, suddenly too tired to hold up the mirror, and clamped his right hand over the wound to slow the bleeding.

He stayed like that for a long time, catching his breath, before he could open his eyes again. He saw someone’s shadow on the wall behind the sink. Someone was still watching him.

“Are you going to kill me?” he asked. Odd, how detached he felt from this question.

“Not me,” the voice said.

“Then can I have some water?”

“Get it yourself.”

“I can’t walk.”

A pointed sigh, and then Kieran heard something sliding across the floor until it hit him in the head.

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