Blood swirled in the clear water turning it into a surreal Rorschach test.

Was it a rabbit? A unicorn? Or maybe it was a butterfly.

“Munro?”

No, it was a sports car. Like Adam’s fancy looking Audi.

Adam…

“Munro?!”

Rachel jerked into awareness and glanced at her door. Simon stood in the threshold. His perpetual glower, firmly in place. “Yes?” she said, acknowledging him.

“Time to go.”

Time to go… Oh! Her daily trial by doctor or inquisitor had arrived. “Which fun torture is it today? The doctor or the ‘chamber’?” she asked.

For a few moments, she thought Simon wouldn’t answer, but he finally replied, “Dr. Campbell.”

“Oh goodie,” she said under her breath as she stood and strode toward the door. After three weeks in solitary confinement, she knew the drill. Simon would let her lead the way to the sterile room down the hall from her prison in the basement of the London safe-house. She had yet to see any true cells in the traditional sense, so she assumed the Order rarely had to house real prisoners, but the thought didn’t comfort her much when she sat in the stark room with the one-way mirrors, the hard metal furniture, and either a doctor or an interrogator for her only company.

Rachel stepped out of her room, forcing her head high, she stalked by the stairs—which would take her up to the main floor and the more hospitable quest quarters—and turned toward the—Baum. Baum. Baum—Chamber of certain death. Rachel giggled as she imagined Lord Jareth and his goblin minions running around her feet as she wasted away in the dark, damp, oubliette.

Upon reaching the interrogation room turned doctor’s office, she sighed and waited for Simon to unlock it. He pulled it open and stood to the side. Rachel peeked in, and a quick glance showed her no one was waiting for her yet. She tried not to sigh. When she paused for too long in the doorway, Simon pushed her and said, “In. Now.” He shut the door behind her, and with her backside now pressed against the door, she felt the minute vibrations in the wood as he locked it.

She shook her head and entered the room, scratchy anti-sanity, white-noise already came from the speakers overhead. Sighing, she walked to the table and sat.

God, she was so tired. She didn’t even have the energy to pay attention to their torment today.

Three weeks ago, Inquisitor Jackass and Dr. Campbell would have asked her detailed questions about her ordeal, but most of the time now, all they did was show her random clips of footage from TV or had her listen to music. Sometimes they played a recording, which droned on and on in a painful monotone, voicing word after word, as if being read from a dictionary. She wasn’t sure what the Order was trying to accomplish, but she’d watched enough Sci-Fi in her life to assume they were trying to trigger her “hidden weapon” a-la Serenity style.

Miranda!

Rachel snickered.

So far, it hadn’t worked.

Rachel rested her arms on the table and put her head down. A few minutes later she was startled awake when elevator musac replaced the static, but after a few more semi-silent moments, she promptly back fell asleep, oblivious to the room around her.

The scrape of metal against bare linoleum woke Rachel from a sound sleep. Jerking upright, she blinked to clear her vision. Her gaze settling on the man across from her. For a moment, her heart lurched believing Adam had come for her, but then it settled into despondency when she realized the man sitting across from her was only Dr. Campbell.

Straightening in her seat, Rachel wiped drool from her lip, and yawned while Dr. Campbell wrote a few notes on the page attached to a notebook clipped to his clipboard. When he finished, he lifted his baby-blue eyes from the sheet of paper to gaze at her. “Is there something you want to tell me, Ms. Munro?” he asked.

“Nope.”

Campbell cleared his throat. “Are you getting along with Mr. Fitzgerald?”

“Simon? Yeah, sure,” she replied with a shrug. “He’s fine,” she added, though it wasn’t even remotely fine. Simon couldn’t care less about her and made sure she knew it.

“Fine?”

Rachel nodded and yawned behind her hand. “Hey? You think we can we skip this today? I’d like to go back to my room and take a nap.”

Campbell shook his head. “What exercises does he have you do?”

Not this again! “You know,” she hedged. “Same old. Same old.”

“Are you saying that Mr. Black is a better mentor or are you saying Mr. Fitzgerald doesn’t challenge you enough?”

Rachel snorted. As if they didn’t know! “Simon doesn’t take me out for training. Simon doesn’t talk to me unless it’s to yell at me about Adam, but I’m sure you already knew that. You watch every move I make. Cataloging it against known misbehaviors. Hell, I can’t even take a crap without Agent Petterson asking me about it.”

She wasn’t bitter. Nope. Not bitter at all.

“Ms. Munro,” Dr. Campbell chided, “your surveillance is for both our protection and Mr. Black’s.”

Rachel rolled her eyes and slouched in her chair. “I’m not a threat to Adam, you, or anyone else in the Order. How many times do I have to repeat it? I didn’t get brainwashed!” She ran a hand through her dirty hair, grimacing at the feel of the oily strands, yet unable to summon the wherewithal needed to take care of herself. “Do I really have to spend another five weeks listening to the same questions over and over from you and jackass Petterson?”

Dr. Campbell set his clipboard down and rubbed his face in exasperation. With fingers pinching his nose, he said, “Look, Rachel, we have to do this.” Dr. Campbell dropped his hand to his clipboard. “I don’t want to be here either. But unless you want us to sit you down here, by yourself, forever, then you are stuck with these lines of questioning.”

“Can’t you talk to Ella? Isaac? Someone? I’m going stir-crazy around here and it’s only been three weeks.”

She even entertained the idea of escaping the Order’s compound for good, but the obstacles were overwhelming. The Order had all her official documents, not to mention, when she had initially chosen recruitment, Darius had made a point of stressing she was now irreversibly linked to the Order. The thought of some ruthless Hashashin being sent to “take care” of her, of the problem she represented—worse, the thought that it might be Adam himself—was enough to make Rachel abandon her half-formed plans in favor of staying put and staying alive.

“They already know everything that’s going on,” Dr. Campbell assured her. Rachel gave him a baleful look and he sighed. “Just bear with it for a few more weeks and then it’ll all be over. Anyway, it’s better to be prudent, right?”

“I guess.”

He nodded and made a note in his file. “Excellent. Let’s continue.” Rachel rolled her eyes. “How do you feel now that you are with Mr. Fitzgerald?”

How did she feel? Her gaze drifted upward until her focus snagged on one of the room’s three fluorescent lights. It flickered. Her attention drifted from Dr. Campbell. When will it go out, she wondered. It clicked on and off so much that it might expire at any moment. Rachel held her breath as she stared at it, hypnotized by the unsteady glow.

Dr. Campbell cleared his throat, making her jump. “Ms. Munro?”

“Yeah?”

“Please answer the question. How does it make you feel?”

“Feel...” she said, then trailed off with a shrug. She felt horrible, claustrophobic, and criminalized. She glanced at the light fixture again. Truthfully, she didn’t want to talk about any of it. Not Simon, Grace, her abduction, Jorge’s death, her family, or Adam. She preferred not to think about any of those things. Not ever again.

“Ms. Munro?”

Rachel focused on Dr. Campbell. “Bored,” she answered, latching on the one emotion that seemed the least threatening.

“Excuse me?”

“I feel bored.”

“Explain,” he prompted, writing a note on his hidden piece of paper.

How? “One newspaper a day isn’t enough to keep me busy,” Rachel tried, still attempting to be cooperative. “I’m tired of English crossword puzzles, weeks old comics, and partially, filled in sudoku. Can I have some books, a Kindle, an iPad or something?”

“You know we can’t do that.” Dr. Campbell shook his head.

She groaned. “Why? Afraid it might trigger me?”

Dr. Campbell cleared his throat. “No. But, now that you’ve brought up the behavioral conditioning Mr. Prescott subjected you to, I’d like you to tell me more about the machine Mr. Black destroyed.”

Rachel tossed her hands in the air. “Oh, for fuck’s sake! I’ve already told you everything I can about it!”

“Enlighten me,” Dr. Campbell prompted, “Again.”

“Why?” She’d already explained it numerous times, and each time they brought up the NOM, dread churned in her stomach. What if she had told Mark something truly secret? Or worse, what if Mark had succeeded and the Order found proof of it? She didn’t believe she was a threat to Adam or the Order. She was positive Mark hadn’t programmed her, but what if she was wrong? What if—

She forced herself to stop thinking about the possibilities.

“Because, Ms. Munro, you shut down your emotions whenever we ask you about these things and you need to address them at some point.”

“What I need right now, is to be let out of that room,” Rachel snapped. “And if you won’t let me out, at least let me have something to occupy my time. If you gave me back that loaner PC I once had, I could at least play solitaire.” Or, find out what is on that flash drive from Mark’s lab.

Rachel refrained from touching the pocket where the storage device lived when she wasn’t in her room. She knew hiding it from the Order was petty in the extreme, but—dammit—they’d done nothing but treat her like a criminal since she’d been rescued. Aside from being abducted and put in the NOM, she’d given them no reason to doubt her loyalty. There was no way in hell she was going to let some doctor or interrogator she barely knew have this storage drive. She slept with it on her and kept it close no matter where they took her within the compound. One of these days, she’d see Adam, and only then would she hand it over willingly, but not before she had a chance to learn what was on it.

The doctor sat back, sighing in resignation, “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you,” Rachel bit out, folding her arms over her chest and returned her attention to the flickering light. She was so, completely done. And now all she needed was the Order to realize it.