She read between the lines . . . sprinkling just the right words in . . . like music . . . perfectly strung together.
Evan stilled, understanding dawning.
The song. He’d thought she had forgotten words and was inserting the wrong ones to make up for what she didn’t remember. But no. She’d been inserting words for him to pick out and string together. A secret way of speaking that would be just between them. Because she believed, as did he, that they were being watched and listened to. “No,” he said, meeting her eyes. “I do understand. Perfectly.”
Their gazes held, his head tilted so he could see her clearly out of his one good eye. “I’m so glad,” she said, her voice slightly choked and a tempered excitement shining in her eyes.
He searched his mind to recall the words that had stood out as wrong to him, the ones he’d chuckled at as she’d sung. He couldn’t remember them now because he really hadn’t paid much attention. Songs became such background noise. It was why he’d started singing when she’d asked him to create noise. The mind naturally drifted into its own thoughts, in essence tuning out the specific words of the music. She was fucking brilliant, and despite his aching body, he felt momentarily elated. And he suddenly remembered one word he’d picked out as she’d murmured the song he knew well. It was another one his own mother had once hummed to him as he fell into dreams. A plan. Noelle had put the word plan into the song.
She’d been telling him they needed to come up with a plan.
He had no idea what remote options they might have, but he did understand that if they were going to implement anything at all, they needed to be able to strategize discreetly.
And though he had no access to pain medication or soothing salve, for the moment at least, his discomfort faded to the background as his thoughts took flight.
CHAPTER NINE
It’d been a week since the Collector had logged on and checked on the contestants. The boy. The girl. Evan. Noelle. He’d had a work commitment that couldn’t be delayed and, because of it, had been away from the computer in his home office where he watched the game. He felt a small buzz of excitement but tamped it down. He never allowed his emotions to control him. He’d had many long years of practice, and he used it still. He’d found that, in all matters, both consequential and not, a much cooler head prevailed when one could remove their own feelings and sympathies. Not everyone could master the ability, but it came naturally to him. It always had.
He sat down, turning on the monitor and going through the many steps necessary to join them where they were, locked in a building, in some room that had been prepared just for them. From what he understood, the locations were chosen months in advance and set up not only for the purposes of the game but in such a way that if it became necessary to disassemble them, it could be done in record time. In this business, he supposed, all sorts of contingency plans were necessary. The point of the game was that anything might happen. The more unlikely, the better, as that’s where players stood to make the most money.
The Collector steepled his fingers, bringing them to his chin as the live feed spread across the screen. They lay in their cages, arms stretched toward each other, two fingers linked as they—he leaned in and turned up the volume slightly. Ah, they were singing those same children’s songs they sang to give the other privacy. Silly, stupid jingles that they half murmured sometimes. Some of them he recognized; some of them he did not. It was a comfort for them, he supposed. A coping mechanism. They’d found something else to share. Always helpful in the case of dwindling optimism. How many times had they been rented since he’d been away, he wondered. He regretted that he hadn’t been there to take note of the details.
When Noelle ceased singing, Evan picked up where she’d left off. The boy looked better. His swelling was down, and both his eyes were open, though his bruises had darkened, much of his face mottled in deep red and dark purple.
The Collector turned the volume down again, lightly tapping his fingertips together. He wondered if they realized that the stakes of the game were bound to increase. This was the first time the Collector had played, but he knew very well the gamers would become bored if the contestants were allowed to go on enduring rapes and beatings indefinitely just to save some fingers or an ear . . . an eyeball maybe.
He’d be sure to listen in on a few more chats and see if he could glean more specifics about where this might go. But he was pretty sure he already had an idea. They’d made a vow to leave here whole, and so the creators would strive to break them of that notion. Silly of them to say that out loud, really. They’d freely doled out ammunition, and they didn’t even realize it. Pity. It’d make things less interesting, and he’d had high hopes that these two would be interesting indeed.