She scoffed. "Sorry. I already lived through the ordeal once. I have no interest in reliving it in all its horrible detail for all of you. Thanks, but no thanks. I'd just as soon put it out of my mind completely."
"There is something you need to see, Jenna." This time, it was Brock who spoke. His voice was low, more concerned than demanding. "Please, hear us out."
She paused, uncertain, and Gideon filled the silence of her indecision.
"We've been observing you since you arrived at the compound," he told her as he walked over to a control panel mounted on the wall. He typed something on the keyboard and a flat-screen monitor dropped down from the ceiling. The video image that blinked to life on the screen was an apparent recording of her, lying asleep in this very room. Nothing earth-shattering, just her, motionless on the bed. "Things start to get interesting around the forty-three-hour mark."
He typed a command that made the clip advance to the spot he mentioned. Jenna watched herself on-screen, feeling a sense of wariness as her video self began to shift and writhe, then thrash violently on the bed. She was murmuring something in her sleep, a string of sounds--words and sentences, she felt certain, even though she had no basis to understand them.
"I don't get it. What's going on?"
"We're hoping that you can tell us," Lucan said. "Do you recognize the language you're speaking there?"
"Language? It sounds like a bunch of jibberish to me."
"You're sure about that?" He didn't seem convinced. "Gideon, play the next video."
Another clip filled the monitor, images fast-forwarding to a further episode, this one even more unnerving than the first. Jenna watched, transfixed, as her body on-screen kicked and writhed, accompanied by the surreal soundtrack of her own voice speaking something that made absolutely no sense to her.
It took a lot to scare her, but this psych ward video footage was just about the last thing she needed to see on top of everything else she was dealing with.
"Turn it off," she murmured. "Please. I don't want to see any more right now."
"We have hours of footage like this," Lucan said as Gideon powered down the video. "We've had you on twenty-four-hour observation the whole time."
"The whole time," Jenna echoed. "Just how long have I been here?"
"Five days," Gideon answered. "At first we thought it was a coma brought on by trauma, but your vitals have been normal all this time. Your blood work is normal, too. From a medical diagnostic standpoint, you've merely been ..." He seemed to search for the right word. "Asleep."
"For five days," she said, needing to be sure she understood. "Nobody just falls asleep for five days straight. There must be something else going on with me. Jesus, after all that's happened, I should see a doctor, go to a real hospital."
Lucan gave a grave shake of his head. "Gideon is more expert than anyone else you can see topside. This thing cannot be handled by your kind of doctors."
"My kind? What the hell does that mean?"
"Jenna," Alex said, taking her hand. "I know you must be confused and scared. I've been there myself very recently, although I can't imagine anyone going through what you have. But you need to be strong now. You need to trust us--trust me--that you are in the best hands possible. We're going to help you. We'll figure this out for you, I promise."
"Figure what out? Tell me. Damn it, I need to know what's really going on!"
"Let her see the X rays," Lucan murmured to Gideon, who typed a quick series of keys and brought the images up on the monitor.
"This first one was taken within minutes of your arrival at the compound," he explained, as a skull and upper spinal column lit up overhead. At the topmost point of her vertebrae, something small glowed fiercely bright, as tiny as a grain of rice.
Her voice, when she finally found it, held the barest tremor. "What is it?"
"We're not sure," Gideon replied gently. He brought up another X ray.
"This one was taken twenty-four hours later. You can just make out the threadlike tendrils that have begun to spread outward from the object."
As Jenna looked, she felt Alex's fingers tighten around her own.
Another image came up on-screen, and in this one, the tendrils extending from the brightly glowing object appeared to lace into her spinal column.
"Oh, God," she whispered, reaching up with her free hand to feel the skin at her nape. She pressed hard and almost gagged to register the faint ridge of whatever it was embedded inside her. "He did this to me?"
Life ... or death?
The choice is yours, Jenna Tucker-Darrow.