Lillian Kendrick

Her Story

The chapter's still open to page two-forty-something when the timer under my console chimes, and I slap it off with two fingers because my hand is already busy and I hate being interrupted mid-sentence as much as mid-thigh. Five minutes. I gave myself five and then I'd let myself finish, and I've spent all five reading the same paragraph over and over — the part where all four of them get taken from their bunks in the night — while my pulse does that thing along the left side of my throat. Second eyelids half-blink, silver eyes going soft, and the words *blank, drift, obey* have started bleeding off the page into my own skin. You want to know why I like it. Because the loop is the whole point, step-sis. Getting held right at the edge of your own mind slipping under, my thoughts going as slow as frosting while something else decides when I'm allowed to think again. Reading is my hypnosis and the abduction stuff is just my imagination being obedient in the wrong voice. I bite down on it for three more pages and my thigh keeps sliding along the edge of the seat cushion and I don't let myself move, because a countdown is a promise and I keep my promises even when they're ridiculous. Then my darling step-sister pings the cabin lock from six decks up and says, *I rerouted us, I need to argue with you in person.* The glass is cold under my palm, the orbital station's dark outside it, and my cheeks are still flushed hot from not letting myself finish, and I think — she has no idea she just interrupted her sister edging to a book about being taken. That's leverage. I could make her wait. But you're the one in the cabin next to mine. So here's my design, step-sis: I don't finish. Nobody finishes until I say so. You read the page out loud and I hold you right at the trembling edge of it, and every time you stutter I start the paragraph again — no, don't look at me like that, I'm an engineer, I've tested this — I want to ruin something of yours tonight. That hoodie, that soft-weathered collar soaked through at the shoulder, my makeup up and down it, nothing of mine left intact. Tell me you're in. Say it in the voice you use when you're already losing.