“Why is she helping him?” I ask. “What’s in it for her?”
“They’re getting married, I think,” she replies.
“She’s a fool, then,” I say. “He won’t let her live.”
Her head rises for the first time since we began talking. “Why do you think that?”
“He can’t let anyone who was here live, but especially a time traveler. Any one of us, including her, could go back and ruin everything he achieves. He won’t risk it.”
She looks at me, thinking something she does not say. “They’re nearly done with that hole they’re digging. I wonder what it’s for.”
I’ve wondered it too, and the conclusion I keep coming back to is one I haven’t wanted to admit to myself. Now I’m forced to. In Coron’s mind, we are all just things, and most of us are useless things at that, taking up resources. Soon he’ll decide to kill those of us who haven’t woken, so it’s not as if he needs a cellar for food storage, or extra space. There’s only one thing he needs here, now.
“The hole is for us,” I say softly, with a sick kind of certainty. “For all the women they believe haven’t woken. He will kill the rest of us at once and thinks it’s safer to bury everyone here than to risk getting caught. It’s probably the only reason he hasn’t killed us already.”
She looks at me oddly again. “Your mind works like theirs,” she says. “I don’t mean it as an insult. But you think in terms of strategy, as if people are pieces on a chess board.”
I want to argue that it doesn’t make me like them, but suddenly I’m not sure. I think of the rage I feel every time Gustave touches me, every time I watch the guards kick a corpse mercilessly, how endless and cruel and cold a piece of me is. Sometimes I feel as if I become more like them than not with each day that passes.
“They’ve been working on that hole for a while,” I tell her, “so they must be nearly done.”
“What are you saying?” she asks.
“That if we’re going to escape, we’d better do it soon.”
Katrin and I begin to plan. I’ve found two more of those pellets floating in my oatmeal and have hidden them in my mattress. We’ll use them to drug our guard once we know when we’re leaving. Katrin tries to persuade me to leave Marie behind, and I refuse.
“She’s my friend,” I tell her. “I can’t.”
Katrin looks over at Marie, frowning. “Then you’d better get her off the drugs fast. If she can’t time travel when we leave...”
She doesn’t continue the thought, but I already know what she was thinking. If Marie can’t time travel, she might wind up buried alive. And even if I can wean Marie off the drugs enough to get her to comply, there are so many ways it could fail. What if they can tell we’re not dead? What if they bag all the corpses before they take them? We might suffocate before we ever get out. What if even that small amount of the drug in our systems makes it impossible to time travel when we get outside?
The other issue is my aunt. She could, theoretically, travel back in time to stop us. I doubt Monsieur Coron would risk letting her leave the building to do it, but nothing is certain. If we had any other option, I’d be taking it right now.
The next day I don’t give Marie any of my food. She is unhappy at breakfast, and by dinner time her hands twist, her body begging for something it’s certain it needs.
I tell her not to eat. She looks at me with vacant eyes and picks up her spoon.
“I’m getting you out of here,” I whisper. “Do not eat that.” For a moment she hesitates, as if there are still gears working inside her head, listening to me. And then she dips the spoon into her bowl. I have no idea what they’ve given us, but it’s something seriously addictive. I’ve only had a fraction of the dose she’s had and it calls to me too, the oblivion of it. The way it would make me forget, stop aching for a future I no longer have.
I’m out of options. I push the stew onto her lap after the guard passes. Her mouth opens, as if to cry out, and I shove my bread in her hand. “Eat this instead. Do not say a word, understand me?”
A guard rushes at us and hits me so hard that I fly off the bench. I remain on the ground, letting him kick me, my eyes still on Marie, praying she remains silent.
Slowly, still fighting herself, she begins to eat the bread, but the victory is short-lived. That night she begins to thrash in bed as her body withdraws from the drug. “Need,” she whispers. “Please.”
“Fight it, for me,” I beg. “Just for one day. I’ll give you all my bread.”
“Need gruel,” she says, too loudly.
“Be quiet or you’ll get us both killed,” I hiss. “Listen to me. Henri is alone, Marie. Think how devastated he must be. We’ve got to get home to him. Do you understand?”
After a moment she nods. “You,” she says. “You go.”
“We both go,” I reply. “Soon. But I need you awake, okay?”
She flinches. “But tomorrow?”
She’s asking me for drugs. I’ll deal with the problem when it arises. “Yes, gruel tomorrow. Just get through the night.”
I give her my bread at both breakfast and dinner. After all these weeks I didn’t have the energy to spare, and by the time the lights go down I’m beginning to worry I might not have the strength to time travel home. God knows I won’t have the strength to help her. I pray most of it’s out of her system by the time we leave.
Katrin is ill, too ill to be of much help. But I see the look in her eyes as I struggle with Marie—the one that says she’s going to get us all killed. And as Marie becomes increasingly unmanageable, I find I’m beginning to agree.
We’re just finishing up our evening meal when my aunt walks into the cafeteria. I hear Katrin’s quiet gasp on the other side of the table, and I grab Marie’s arm, punitively hard. If she does anything right now, makes a single sound, she could ruin this.
My aunt walks over to where we sit and motions, like a queen, for Katrin to rise. “Come. Your services are needed.”
A guard yanks her from the table and pulls her away. This time, unlike the last, she doesn’t even fight.
If I could, I’d bury my head in my hands. Selfishly, it’s less about what Katrin’s going to suffer than about what it will do to our plan if she isn’t back soon. This may be our last chance, and it’s only going to work once. As soon as the guards figure out how we escaped, they’ll make sure it can’t happen again. But if Katrin hasn’t returned yet, could I really leave her behind? It was her idea in the first place, and if I’m descended from her the way she claims, leaving without her may mean I cease to exist the moment we go.
Over the next two days I continue weaning Marie off the drug, but it’s far harder for her than it was for me. She twists all night, sweats, retches whenever the guards aren’t looking. Over dinner that second night the guard stands over us both, and we’ve got no choice but to finish what we were served. It takes me a day to pull out of it. Marie starts from scratch, and by the next morning is begging me for the gruel.