Free Monument 14: Savage Drift (Monument 14 Series) by Emmy Laybourne

didn’t want her spouting the abduction stuff in front of Captain McKinley.
    “Niko.” Astrid turned to him, begging. “Would you take me with you? Take me out of here to go get Josie? We can leave tonight! I’ll go with you!”
    Niko didn’t know what to say.
    But then Captain McKinley came around the corner of the chopper.
    “Astrid, what’s wrong?” he asked.
    “There’s a nurse who knows my name, she knows I was exposed, and she was pushing me to sign up to let the Army scientists do experiments on me and the baby—”
    “Are you sure—”
    “And NO ONE will help me! Everyone thinks I’m being paranoid.”
    Captain McKinley rubbed his hands over his face. Then he dropped them.
    “I’ll take you,” Captain McKinley said. “I’ll take you both tonight.”
    “What?!” I cried.
    “I’m supposed to fly this afternoon, but I’ll push it back a few hours,” Captain McKinley said, his voice calm, quiet, and dead serious. “Go back to Quilchena. Pack your stuff, say your good-byes.”
    “Wait a minute, wait. What?” Jake said.
    “They’ve been running women out. At night,” Captain McKinley told us. “I’ve seen them do it, a couple of times. I asked about it and they said that it was none of my business, and that the women have all consented to testing, et cetera, et cetera.”
    Astrid swayed on her feet. I reached out and held her arm.
    “But?” she asked.
    “I’ve been asking myself. If they had given consent, why were they all drugged?”
    *   *   *
    We agreed that Captain McKinley would drive past the eleventh hole, where the kids’ play fort was, around 10 p.m.
    What we couldn’t agree on was how many of us were going.

 
    CHAPTER TEN
    JOSIE
    DAY 32
    “You wanted to clean,” Venger says. “So clean.”
    Well, of course, to clean—to properly clean a urine puddle off a courtyard floor—you’d want a bucket and a mop. A sponge would do it. Hot water. Some Mr. Clean, maybe, or at least some bleach.
    Take it back even more and start by sweeping up the dirt, so it wouldn’t cake all up in the bucket.
    What did I have?
    I have a dirty towel.
    On our first day, Mario had given me a four-word mantra to get by: “Look down. Look dumb.”
    He said that would get me through life in the Virtues.
    Look down, look dumb.
    I scrub the stone pavers with the towel.
    Most of the pee had run into the cracks anyway.
    There was no way to get it out. It was just going to have to dry up. You’d never see the urine in the morning.
    But Venger wants to see me scrubbing so I scrub.
    The skin doesn’t come off my knuckles right away. It starts coming off about a half hour in.
    I have to be more careful; somehow the wiring is messed up in my brain. Things don’t hurt the way they should anymore.
    How do you know you’ve grated the skin off your finger bones? They hurt and then you look and see blood on your towel.
    I feel my knees, though. They ache. The cold from the stone is setting into my bones, that’s how it feels.
    *   *   *
    I hear our group come back from mess.
    I hear Heather cry, “She’s still there.” And hear her shushed.
    *   *   *
    Venger takes out a pack of cigarettes.
    “Hard to get cigarettes in here. Know how I got these?” He is chatting to me like I am a barkeep in his regular haunt.
    “Every week, we ship off about fifteen, twenty prisoners. All type O. All people who’ve been exposed for longer than a couple hours. Bunch of brass. They ask me for the worst of the lot.”
    He lights a smoke. I can smell it.
    My knees are numb now. They feel like they are made of cold metal. But my back is screaming.
    “They take them away. I don’t know where. And do experiments on them.”
    It is getting cool, now, but that isn’t why I feel my flesh shivering.
    “I just wanted you to know that, so the next time you think about disrespecting me, or showing off for Scietto and the snot pack, or just doing anything even the littlest bit out of line.”
    He is