Free The Brokenhearted by Amelia Kahaney Page A

circle of shock.
    I turn midair to meet the greasy gray-green of the Midland churning beneath me, its surface dotted with small chunks of ice.
    My scream is one long, shrill cry of horror.
     
    And then I’m
    falling,
    falling,
    falling
    through
    the
    empty
    moonlit
    sky.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
.....................................................................
    CHAPTER 11
    I wake with a gasp.
    My vision floods with blinding white light. A blade of pain slices through my skull, so sharp it sends my head slamming back down against hard, unyielding metal. I’m ice-cold. I move to wrap my arms around myself, but they’re tied down, my wrists and elbows secured with thick straps.
    Wincing, I squeeze my eyes shut again, longing to return to the darkness of unconsciousness—to an endless, floating dream—for just a few more minutes. In the dream, I drifted through icy green water, through murk and rot, all alone but for the occasional one-eyed fish. I was neither dead nor alive. I felt no pain.
    Being awake is agony . Every tiny movement brings a new kind of hurt, every part of me searing or frigid or sore. I concentrate on the sensation of my torso rising and falling with every breath. There’s heaviness in my chest, an itchy, tingling sensation. Something inside me seems almost to be whirring . It feels simultaneously like a spinning disk and like a hundred tiny needles pricking me from the inside. As my panic mounts, the whirring seems to get faster, louder.
    I open my eyes to slits, letting the bright light in a little at a time. Shapes begin to come into focus, textures emerge and start to make sense. I’m in a small, dank room. At eye level is a rolling metal table scattered with small scissors and gleaming scalpels. Rusty old machines, tubes sprouting from them like weeds, line the gray walls. The walls, the machines, and the floor are all speckled with something dark and dried. Blood. I quickly turn away.
    I lift my head and peek at the long expanse of my body. I’m covered in a thin paper hospital gown and strapped to a narrow metal gurney. An IV is affixed to my hand, and the pole stands next to me, a clear bag sending drips of pinkish liquid down a long tube one at a time.
    My eyes are drawn to movement in the corner of the room. A high-pitched squeak is faintly audible under the humming of the medical equipment. Four glass aquariums sit on a metal table in the corner. One contains a cluster of tiny light-brown hamsters, and in another, a swarm of black mice with pink ears scurry over one another. Nearest to me, a pair of albino lab rats with blood-red eyes run frantically on an exercise wheel in a glass cage.
    How did I get here?
    Everything comes rushing back to me—the kidnappers in their gas masks; the cold steel of Miss Roach’s gun in my chest; the anguished look on Gavin’s face before they took him away. I cringe at this last image. The bridge. The birdman’s hands around my windpipe. The bridge railing. Falling into the river. An icy sweat starts to pool under my arms. I need out of here, now . But the straps dig into my arms when I try to move again.
    I open my mouth and cry out for help. My voice is hoarse-sounding, barely louder than a whisper though I’m trying to shout. After a few minutes where nobody comes, I resort to banging my head against the metal table in the hope that someone will hear.
    A tall, slim, silver-haired woman wearing goggles and army-green scrubs races through the door, a surgical mask pushed down around her chin. She’s followed by the jogger from the bridge. He stands to one side of the gurney, and the surgeon stands on the other. I thrash on the metal table, my hospital gown billowing up around me like a sail.
    The woman places her hand on my head, gently patting my matted hair. Her eyebrows furrow with concern beneath her mass of silver curls, the color an odd contrast to her youthful, unlined face.
    “Don’t touch me,” I