Silver Shadows (Bloodlines #5)(34)
Author: Richelle Mead

Renee’s gaze stared blankly ahead for several seconds and then slowly turned to me. “I don’t know. Do you think I should?”

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

A small frown appeared between her eyebrows. “Do you think I am? If you don’t think so . . .”

I steered her toward Baxter’s window. “I think you should be whatever you want to be,” I said firmly. She said nothing to the chef when we reached him, and as usual, he wasn’t forthcoming, so it was on me. “Renee needs some lunch.”

Baxter didn’t respond immediately, and I almost wondered if he might not act unless she specifically asked for food. If so, we could be standing here for a while. But after a few more moments of indecision, he turned away and began making up a tray of chicken strips. I carried it to an empty table for her and pulled out a chair, gesturing to her to sit. She seemed to respond well to a command like that, even unspoken, but made no attempts to do anything on her own once I sat down opposite her.

“You can eat if you want,” I said. When that elicited nothing, I changed my wording. “Eat your chicken, Renee.”

She obediently picked up a chicken strip and began working her way through the tray while I looked on with a growing sense of dread. Dread—and anger. Did the Alchemists really think this was a better alternative than someone questioning authority? Even if the most severe of the effects wore off over time, it was still sickening that they could do this to another human being. When I’d discovered I was protected from re-inking, I’d thought I was home free in that regard. And it was true: I was. But everyone around me, whether they were friend or foe, was at risk if the Alchemists went overboard with their re-inking. It didn’t matter if this extreme of an effect was a rarity. Even if it only happened one time, that was one time too many.

“Drink your milk,” I ordered when I realized she’d finished the chicken and was just staring at her plate again. She was halfway through the carton when the chimes rang. “Time to go, Renee. That sound means we have to go somewhere else.”

She stood as I did, and I looked up to see two of Sheridan’s henchmen approaching. “You need to come with us,” one of them told me.

I started to comply and then saw Renee’s helpless expression. Ignoring my escort’s urging, I turned to her and said, “Follow along and do what the others do. See how they’re putting their trays away now? Do that, and then go with them to the next class.” One of the guards tugged my arm to move, and I resisted until I saw Renee nod and join the others with her tray. Only then did I let the duo lead me out, and they didn’t look pleased at all by my small act of defiance.

They led me to the elevator and then down one level, to the floor where purging took place. I wondered if not finishing my own lunch would make that experience more or less unpleasant. To my surprise, though, we walked past the usual door and kept going to the end of the hall, where I’d never been. We passed closets labeled respectively as kitchen and office supplies and then continued on to doors that were ominously unmarked. It was into one of these that they took me.

This new room looked like the usual purging ones, save that the chair had strange arms on it. They were larger than the ones I was used to but still had restraints on them, which was all that mattered. Maybe this was the new upgraded model from wherever they got their torture devices from. Sheridan was waiting in the room for us, holding a small remote control. The guards strapped me into the chair and then, at a nod from her, left us alone.

“Well, hello, Sydney,” she said. “I must say, I’m disappointed to see you in trouble.”

“Are you, ma’am? I’ve been in purging a few times this week,” I replied, thinking of how the others had been incriminating me recently.

Sheridan made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “That? Come on, we both know it’s just the others playing their games. You’ve actually been doing remarkably well—until now.”

A spark of my earlier anger returned. Sheridan and the other authorities were well aware of when someone legitimately stepped out of line compared to when that person was simply being ganged up on. And she didn’t care.

I swallowed my rage and put on a polite face. “What exactly did I do, ma’am?”

“Do you understand what happened to Renee today, Sydney?”

“I heard she was re-inked,” I said carefully.

“The others told you that.”

“Yes.”

“And did they also tell you not to help her when she returned?”

I hesitated. “Not explicitly. But they made it clear in their actions they weren’t going to.”

“And don’t you think you should have followed their lead?” she pushed.

“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” I said, “but I thought my duty was to follow your instructions, not those of my fellow residents. Since neither you nor any other instructor told me not to help Renee, I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. In fact, I thought acting compassionately toward another human was something right. I apologize if I misunderstood.”

She scrutinized me for a long time, and I met her gaze unblinkingly. “You say all the right things, but I wonder if you mean them. Well, then. Let’s get started.”

With a push of the button, the screen came on, showing a typical picture of happy Moroi.

“What do you see, Sydney?”

I frowned, realizing she’d forgotten to inject me with the nausea-inducing drug. I certainly wasn’t going to call her attention to it, though. “Moroi, ma’am.”

“Wrong. You see creatures of evil.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I said nothing.

“You see creatures of evil,” she repeated.

This new turn of events left me uncertain how to proceed. “I don’t know. Maybe they are. I’d have to know more about these particular Moroi.”

“You don’t need to know anything except what I’ve told you. They are creatures of evil.”

“If you say so, ma’am,” I said cautiously.

Her face remained tranquil. “I need you to say so. Repeat after me: ‘I see creatures of evil.’”

I stared at the Moroi in the picture. It showed two girls, close to my age, who looked like they might be sisters. They were smiling and holding ice cream cones. Nothing about them looked evil at all, unless they were about to force that ice cream on some diabetic children. As I mulled this over, the armrest on my right suddenly clicked. The top of it slid back, revealing a hollowed out compartment below that was filled with some sort of clear liquid.