Avenged (Altered #2)
Marnee Blake
To my mom, who is proof that the quiet ones can be feisty.
And to George… I love you more.
Chapter One
Mistake. A huge mistake. It’s not safe enough yet for this type of trial. I lost two rats only yesterday. Even a five percent mortality rate is too high, and we’re at nearly twenty percent. Fields is going to kill someone.
Mark’s thoughts tripped through Kitty Laughton’s mind as she slouched on the examination table in the sparse white exam room. With her arm outstretched, she watched as the research assistant took her blood. Again.
That she noticed him at all was a huge feat. It had been weeks since she’d paid attention to anything.
It hadn’t started that way.
At first, right after her capture, she’d listened to everything, while Dr. Fields worked through countless complications with Solvimine, the drug that made her hear thoughts. When Fields stopped coming to work on her himself, there had been three assistants before Mark and countless orderlies. Yet, she discovered nothing to help her.
After weeks of vigilance, she stopped. It was exhausting. Maddening. Disheartening.
But one benefit of being held hostage and constantly forced to stretch her mind-reading ability was she’d also learned to block everything out. What a relief.
The days stretched on. She’d expected her friends—Blue, Luke, even Jack—to come for her. They’d grown up together, in Glory, Colorado. They’d been changed together, by Fields’s drug. They’d lost their families and become orphans together.
She’d even made progress getting to know Seth, the soldier who’d been unlucky enough to have been in Glory and been changed with them. She didn’t make friends easily, yet she’d believed he’d come to like her.
But no one came to save her. Nothing changed.
After a while, she’d stopped bothering to block the world out with her power. She hadn’t needed to. She hadn’t cared enough.
Now, though, she listened.
An entire battalion of soldiers. I’m sure this isn’t what they signed up for when they took this job, to be part of this psycho’s ego trip.
Psycho’s ego trip? Definitely Fields. She’d recognize his description anywhere.
“Fields is going to give them Solvimine. Against their will.” Her voice was raspy. When had she spoken last?
Mark jerked, as if only remembering she was there. “Stay out of my head.”
“You stay out of my head,” she snapped back. He should stop thinking about it if he didn’t want her to know. Surely he realized how this worked.
She stared at him, trying hard to hear more, as he removed one vial and replaced it with another. He glared back. Stay out of my head. Stay out. Stay out.
But though he intended to stop her with the singsong words, she saw what he wanted to hide.
Fields did plan to give the drug to the soldiers.
It would be disastrous. As far as she knew, no one else had taken Solvimine. Not since Fields used it on her town and killed almost everyone.
Her heart rate beeped faster on the monitor next to her. This couldn’t happen.
As Mark finished the last vial, he stoppered it and took it across the room to the refrigerator, sitting to record something on the sheet there.
She wondered what Fields told his assistants and the orderlies about her. Even here, where the drug was best understood, she was an oddity, kept under lock and key, treated as if she was dangerous.
Her, dangerous. That was laughable. The other victims of the drug had received physical enhancements—telekinesis, amazing speed, and strength. Even Fields had taken it and become telekinetic. Yet she was kept in solitary confinement.
Kitty didn’t get it. Her power was inconvenient at best, devastating at worst. If she hadn’t relied on her “gift,” she might have been more wary of Jeremy, the man who’d betrayed her, and avoided being captured by Fields in the first place.
As far as she knew, she was the only mind reader after the change. Fields was desperate to understand how that gift worked.
Then again, maybe no one cared how she was treated. Maybe they were compensated too well to question anything. Any time anyone began to speculate why she was there, they disappeared. Ignorance seemed to pay.
She retrieved the cotton ball Mark left for her, pressed it to the inside of her elbow, and covered it with a piece of medical tape, like the pro she was.
She blinked, determined to clear the past month’s fog and piece together the facts around her.
The assistants and orderlies had visited her cell a lot in the beginning. Endless experiments, some of them causing nosebleeds and headaches, even a seizure. After that, though, they stopped testing the abilities she already had. Instead, they started in with the drugs. Drug after drug. She rejected food in cycles because they hid things in what she ate. She’d hold off for a day or so until, starving and thirsty, she couldn’t take it any longer. She’d eventually eat, always ending up sick in some way, or knocked out. She’d wake with new bruises on her arms or obvious needle holes, even stitches. She would hurt for days, rejecting offers of pain medication because she didn’t trust that what they were offering was, in fact, pain medication at all.
Eventually, she stopped her hunger strikes and accepted whatever they gave her. Yes, they would feed her what they wanted, but she needed to eat if she planned to live.