“So, guys, it’s simple. I need a blood sample. Raj is right, look at her. Something’s up with her.”
Sigrid, reading the room, dropped down off Wyatt’s desk and wandered over to me, her sweater fanning out on the rug behind her.
“Nora?” Wyatt said. “Help me out?”
She turned to Raj. “Maybe it is a good idea. Poor kid. She can’t tell us how she’s feeling.”
Raj put his hands on his narrow hips and paced. “I can’t be a part of this. She won’t understand.”
Wyatt rooted around in a drawer, pulled out a box with a red cross on it. “It’ll just take a second. She may need antibiotics. Val, come on, help us out. Try to do… whatever you do. Explain it to her somehow.”
All eyes drilled into me.
My knees went wobbly as weakness flooded me; I leaned on the back of the couch. In my effort to conserve my stash, I’d gone a few days without a pill. I rued that decision as heat flashed up my neck and shoulders. It was as if I was standing at the edge of the crevasse, its blue jaws open, beckoning me down.
“Can you just give me a minute?”
“Of course,” Raj said.
“You stay with Seal Man and Nora,” I said to Sigrid. “I’ll be right back.”
I ran to the bathroom and threw up. The walls rippled and throbbed as they closed in. I just need a pill, I thought, then I’ll be able to deal with this.
I staggered down the hall toward my bedroom, craving the chemical balm on my nerves even as I chided myself for needing it.
I jerked open my sock drawer, venturing with a trembling hand beneath the bright knots of cotton and wool to the back right corner. Anticipated the comforting heft of the plastic pill bottle in my hand, the reassuring rattle of the dozen or so pills I knew were left.
Nothing.
Only socks.
Had I moved the bottle to the other side by accident? My heart did its fight-or-flight dance. I checked the left side. Just cheap old pegboard, rough with splinters.
I wrenched out the drawer and dumped the contents onto my bed. Just socks, a couple of pairs of underwear, a scarf. A safety pin.
Where the fuck are my pills?
I emptied each drawer on the bed. Nothing. Rummaged through every pocket of my pants and sweaters, all the while knowing good and goddamned well I would have never been so cavalier with them. Someone had taken them. Or am I just losing my mind? I sat on my piles of clothes on my saggy bed, quaking as I tried to keep my breathing under control. Gripping my thighs with my hands, I stared at my broken-open skin, rife with pain no creams or potions could ease.
No pills, no pills, my mind echoed endlessly.
How would I ever go out on the ice again? How would I ever get home?
Screams from the living room shocked me to my feet. I bolted down the hallway. Their faces ghostly by the TV’s shifting light, Jeanne held Sigrid down while Wyatt took vial after vial of blood from her arm. Nora and Raj stood back while Sigrid shrieked, her eyes never leaving mine.
I ran at them. “Get off of her—let her go!”
“Stand back!” Wyatt growled, intent on his task. “Or she’s going to get hurt.”
Wyatt was right, all I could do was watch as the tubes filled with her dark blood, until Jeanne finally released her and she ran caterwauling by me to her room.
fourteen
The storm ended at dawn. We all took shifts shoveling out the main door, heads down, exchanging minimal good-mornings, as if each of us—in our own way—was the guilty party. I felt sick at heart about what had happened, furious at Wyatt and Jeanne, frustrated that we—me, Raj, and Nora—seemed to constantly bend under Wyatt’s will. What was wrong with us?
Around noon, I ventured outside to relieve Raj. I found an eerie and terrifying sight. Snow flowed over the tops of the buildings, the Dome now just a blip of yellow in the alabaster bay. We’d practically been erased from the landscape.
The severity of the storm had forced Wyatt to abandon the snowcat several yards from the Cube. Now, cursing and metal-on-ice chopping sounds came from it; I wandered over to investigate. Raj was bent double inside the cabin, chipping away. The wind had been so powerful that snow and ice had tunneled through the narrowest cracks between the windows and doors, caking the interior like thick white mold.
“How’s it going?”
He gave me a look, like, Really? and kept on banging at the ice with a hammer and chisel. “It’s just swell in here,” he said, eyes on his task. “I’ve been out here three hours, and this is how far I’ve gotten.” He stopped to wipe the fog from his glasses, looking like a polar explorer in his cave of rime and blue ice.