Free Sing Me Your Scars (Apex Voices Book 3) by Damien Angelica Walters Page A

comes in and laughs; the scratchy sound hurts
more than Big’s screams. Big pushes him out of the room.
    Sharp metal presses against my
side, my heart beats crazy-scary-heavy, and the pinch-sting comes. I cry out.
Big smiles because I am pink and red and unbroken. He closes me back up with a
new line of stitches, black against the white of my skin.
    §
    After my skin eats the stitches away, I turn my key again. A
sound drifts into the air, a quick little chirp. I hold my breath and look
through the gloom. No one moves, no one speaks. The sound lives in my head, not
in the room. I turn the key, and a shape takes form in my thoughts, a small
shadow moving across a blue not-wall. I know this shape, I remember it. Footsteps
thump outside the door, and I close my eyes, my head heavy with chirps and
moving shapes and tucked far behind, a sound I don’t want to remember.
    §
    Little Big leaves but forgets to turn out the lights. The
collared man folds his hands together, and his tongueless mouth moves without
sound. The blue-eyed man is awake, too, with his remade arms folded across his
chest. The new pieces inside him click and spin.
    “His prayers won’t do any good. Not anymore,” he says.
    I don’t know what a prayer is.
    “They’re gone for the night,” he says. “It’s safe to talk.”
    I shake my head.
    “Can you talk?” he asks.
    I turn my face away.
    “Please,” he says. “Talk to me. Tell me your name.”
    “No,” I whisper, cringing at the sound of my own voice, all hard
at the edges and soft in the middle.
    I turn my key and think of shapes and blue not-walls and a wide
expanse of green.
    §
    Big remakes the legs of the woman in black but doesn’t smile
when he finishes. He stops in front of my box and taps on the glass until I
look up. He taps the glass again, harder, and then a third time, harder still,
and I hear a small sound, like a finger bone cracked in two. The gears on his
forehead click to a stop, tick backward, once, twice, and move forward again.
With a shake of his head, he walks away.
    Little Big breaks the collared man in two pieces and fills in the
empty spaces with metal and tangled wire.
    §
    I turn my key, and a word rushes in:
Naomi.
Is this
the dark shape? I say the word aloud, feel it slip and slide on my tongue.
    “Is that your name?” the blue-eyed man asks.
    Naomi.
    Is it?
    §
    Big doesn’t come back.
    No one will be perfect. No one will leave.
    §
    Big tapped the glass too hard, and now there is a crack, a
line with shattered edges, all the way at the top. I stay crouched down, away
from the crack, turn my key, and remember. The dark shapes were birds that
fluttered and circled and sang. A little hand tugged mine, and we ran across
the green and under the birds, under the blue not-wall. A pain tugs deep inside
where metal and flesh stick together, and I try to turn the key back, to take
it away.
    I am afraid of what I’ve forgotten.
    I try to pull out the key, but it won’t move. I try to bend it,
break it, but it is harder than bone.
    I am afraid I will never remember.
    §
    “Where were you before this place?” His blue eyes are bright
under the lights.
    “I have always been here.”
    “Even when you were a child?”
    I turn my key. Wide, dark eyes. Chubby fingers. A soft voice
whispering.
    “I had a daughter with hair the same color as yours. Her name was
Lucy. They took her away,” he says, his voice breaking in little pieces.
    They took me away and made me almost perfect. Maybe they made
Lucy perfect and let her go.
    “When did you forget?” he asks.
    The pain reaches out and my eyes burn.
    “Naomi, when did you forget you were human?”
    The pain digs in knife-sharp, and I slap the glass with my hands.
Big changed most of me, but he left my hands the same. I strike the glass
again; a small star blooms at the edge of the crack.
    I forgot everything the day I
couldn’t remember her name. The one with the little hand. I turn the key, but
it won’t give me her