Silver Shadows (Bloodlines #5)(33)
Author: Richelle Mead

“I had to,” I said. “I had to take a chance on something, something that I know will pay off.”

“Do you?” he asked sadly, in a voice that said he’d seen similar attempts many, many times.

“Yes,” I said fiercely. “It’ll pay off.”

He gave me an amiable smile and returned to his painting, but I could tell he believed I was lying. The awful thing was, I didn’t know if he was right.

All the while, I held out hope that I would connect to Adrian in the world of dreams. I didn’t understand why it hadn’t happened yet, but I never doubted for a moment that he was out there still loving me and looking for me. If something was truly interfering with our dreams, I was certain he’d find another way to get to me.

A week after I’d disabled the gas, the re-education status quo was shaken up when a newcomer joined us. “That’s good news for you,” Duncan told me in the hall. “The attention’ll shift to her for a while, so don’t get too friendly.”

That was hard advice to follow, especially when I saw her sitting alone at a cafeteria table for breakfast. A warning look from Duncan reluctantly sent me to my own table, where I felt foolish and cowardly for letting both the new girl and me suffer being ostracized. Her name was Renee, and she appeared to be my age, if not a year or so younger. She also seemed to be someone I could’ve bonded with pretty easily since, like me, she was sent off to purging during our first class for talking back to the teacher.

Unlike me, however, Renee returned later looking pale and ill—but not cowed. In some ways, I admired that. She was still worn from her time in solitary but carried a rebellious spark in her eyes that showed promising strength and courage. Here’s someone I can ally with, I thought. When I mentioned this to Duncan in art class, he was quick to chastise me.

“Not yet,” he murmured. “She’s too new, too conspicuous. And she’s not making things easy on herself.”

He had a point. Although she’d apparently learned enough not to blatantly talk back anymore, she made no attempt to look contrite or act as though she had any intention of buying what the Alchemists were selling. She seemed to exalt in her exclusion from the others, ignoring me when I daringly offered a friendly smile in the halls. She sat sullenly through our classes, glaring with anger and defiance at both students and instructors alike.

“I’m kind of surprised she got out of reflection time already,” Duncan added. “Somebody messed up.”

“That’s why she needs a friend more than ever,” I insisted. “She needs someone to tell her, ‘Look, it’s okay to feel this way, but you’ve got to lay low for a while.’ Otherwise, they’re going to send her back.”

He shook his head warningly. “Don’t do it. Don’t get mixed up in that, especially since her arrival means you’ll move up soon. Besides, they’re not going to send her back to her cell.”

There was an ominous note in his voice he wouldn’t explain, and against my better judgment, I kept my distance for the rest of the day. When morning came—still with no contact from Adrian—I resolved to sit with Renee and not give in to peer pressure. That plan was delayed when one of Duncan’s regular tablemates invited me to join them. I stood there uncertainly, holding my tray as I glanced between Renee and Duncan’s tables. Going to her seemed like the right thing to do, but how could I turn down the first chance at bonding with the others that I’d had in a while? Resisting my better instincts, I headed toward Duncan’s table, vowing I’d remedy things with Renee later.

Later never came.

Apparently, after a day of letting her resentment seethe within her, Renee couldn’t take it anymore and snapped during third period, going off on an even longer tirade than yesterday about our instructor’s closed-minded propaganda. Security hauled her off, and I felt a wave of sympathy that she had to endure purging two days in a row so soon out of solitary. Duncan met my eyes as she was led from the room, with an I told you so look on his face.

When lunchtime came around, I expected a last-minute change to the menu to reflect one of Renee’s favorite foods and add insult to the injury of her punishment. The posted menu showed the same thing that was listed this morning, however, and I wondered if she’d gotten off the hook or simply had the unfortunate luck to already have chicken strips as one of her favorite foods. But when Renee entered the cafeteria, long after the rest of us were seated and eating, I forgot all about the menu.

Gone was that defiant glint in her eyes. There was no sparkle to them at all as she stared around in confusion, looking as though she’d never seen this room, let alone any cafeteria, before. Her facial expression was equally bland, almost slack-jawed. She stood just inside the doorway, making no attempts to enter or get food, and no one bothered to help her.

Beside me, a detainee named Elsa caught her breath. “I thought that might happen.”

“What?” I asked, totally lost. “Was it a bad purging?”

“Worse,” said Elsa. “Re-inking.”

I thought back to my own experiences, wondering how that could be worse, since we were all re-inked at some point here. “Wasn’t she re-inked already when she got out of solitary?”

“A standard re-inking,” said another of my tablemates, a guy named Jonah. “Obviously, that wasn’t enough, so they super-sized it—maybe a little too much. It happens sometimes. It gets the message through to them, but it leaves them kind of dazed and forgetful about ordinary life for a while.”

A feeling of horror crept over me. This was what I’d feared, why I’d worked to create a magical ink that would fight the effects of the Alchemists’ compulsion. I’d seen that lifeless stare before—in Keith. When he’d been fresh out of re-education, he too had acted like a zombie, unable to do anything except parrot back the rhetoric the Alchemists had drilled into him. At least by that point, however, Keith had been able to handle the daily functions of life. Had he initially emerged that wiped? It was awful to behold. Even more awful was the fact that no one showed any sign of helping her.

I was out of my seat in a flash, ignoring the sharp intake of breath from Duncan behind me.

I hurried over to Renee and took hold of her arm, guiding her inside the room. “Come in,” I said, focusing on her so that I wouldn’t have to see I had the attention of every single person in the room. “Don’t you want to get some food?”