Thrust: A Novel полностью

The boy stared at her. Or not at her exactly, but at her cheek. His jaw looked like it could crack a wrist. His forearms were covered with marks — not the feathery traces of a serial cutter, but the gouged valleys of someone far beyond giving a shit. The guards chain-harnessed him to his chair, locked his handcuffs to a metal ring on the table, and stepped away.

Several seconds of quiet.

Then the sound of metal screaming and he lunged at her from across the table.

She flinched but didn’t yelp, thank Christ.

He laughed, a kind of fuck-you growl.

She had the impression that they could sit like that for hours unless she did something to surprise him, catch him off his stride. She had exactly one move.

She reached into her bag, pulled out the object, and placed it on the table between them.

His laugh caved in.

The object sat between them, as silent as anything had ever been.

Lilly watched Mikael stare at the strange twist of flesh, dried into a husk, wound into a shape something between a letter S and a spiral staircase. She had expected the silence; she’d been reminded over and over again that the boy had long since stopped speaking. What she didn’t expect was that, when she drew a breath to speak, she would be interrupted.

“Where did you get that?”

She recalibrated. “It was in with the artifacts and evidence left after the fire,” she lied. “They said it was found inside—”

“A lockbox.”

“Yes.” In her head, a clicking sound. How was she sounding: Neutral? Aggressive? Benevolent? She had no idea. She looked at this boy-going-to-man in front of her, coiled in a spring of heated rage and dislocated want. Without permission, she thought: brother. How do you get a boy like that to open? How long had it been since this boy had even seen a woman? She hadn’t seen a single one since she’d arrived.

She knew she had next to no shot. All she had going for her was adulthood, and her own reckless instincts.

“I have a recurring dream about a box,” she said. She opened her shirt collar wider, exposing her neck. “A bad dream.” He didn’t move. “Really fucking bad.”

He didn’t speak. His eyes were fixed on her chin. Was there some danger in telling her secrets to this kid, about to disappear into a prison system that didn’t give a fuck who he’d been or what he might be? He had nowhere to go but down. And she lived in a liminal space where no one gets saved.

Now or never.

“Yeah. The dreams are about my father. He was… a war criminal.” Her throat was thick. She’d never said that out loud. Even in group therapy she’d lied, said her father had gone to jail for murdering someone. But her father had tortured and murdered thousands. He had turned her brother into a killing machine. Even the phrase war criminal barely covered it.

She stood up and walked over to the triple-barred security window in the cinder-block box of a room. She wondered if he was watching her ass, but when she turned around to look, he was staring at the ceiling. She could see a scar at the side of his neck. A big one. His Adam’s apple, ungainly like any boy’s, made her heart hurt.

“What’s your last name?” Mikael did not stop looking at the ceiling.

Her breath cut short against her ribs—he is speaking he is speaking don’t fuck this up. She remained near the anti-window, holding as still as a statue. “Why?”

“I can hear your accent. You think it’s gone, but it’s not.”

“Bullshit.” She palmed the scar at her own neck. Her skin felt cold, like uncooked chicken. A year of failed group therapy spent covertly cutting the thinnest line imaginable over and over and over again, just the whisper of a line, just to feel something besides nothing. She had no accent. Her mother had successfully escaped and relocated her, thanks to her American uncle at the State Department, long before her father was global news. She. Had. No. Accent. God. Damn. It.

But now he looked her dead in the eye. Could he see her scar? Was he smiling?

“Tell me your dream,” he said. In Serbo-Croatian.

Little prick, she thought. And yet she realized she had no other game but this. She wet her lips with her tongue. The air between them crackled a little. Fuck group therapy. Roll the dice. In her own half-assed Serbo-Croatian, she continued.

“In the dream, my father is inside an upright coffin in my living room. The coffin lid opens like a door and he walks out, though he’s dead. His skin is rotten, falling off — it’s gray, like ash, but all his internal organs are bright colors, red and pink and bluish. His jaw is barely hanging from his head. He’s reaching for me.” She put her hand at her own neck again. She sees the dream in present tense, like it’s in the room with them. Her father. Her throat constricts and the line of sweat between her legs goes cold, as if it were ice trickling down her inner thigh. “He’s trying to say something or do something. I want to kill him, but he’s already dead. I don’t know what… I had a brother. My brother was good. My father—”