Feast by Jeremiah Knight

and offered Mason a parting smile as he closed the door behind her. Her smile dropped into a grimace. She rolled her neck, hearing her vertebrae pop from the tension. Then she looked at herself in the mirror and froze. It wasn’t that her reflection was almost unrecognizable—she was too skinny, covered in dirt, and had a few fresh scars—it was how the mirror itself was constructed. She looked it over quickly, inspecting the side closest to her, and then the top and bottom. It was five feet tall, rising up from the bottom of the sink, all the way up to the ceiling, and it stretched the twenty foot length of the bathroom. She looked for clips holding it in place, but there weren’t any. The mirror wasn’t mounted to the wall, it was part of it.
    Her eyes widened for a brief moment, but then she forced a casual smile back onto her lips, the kind of smile a woman thinking about a man might have. The kind a man hoping for something more might want to see. Then she leaned in close to the mirror like she was inspecting her face and placed her finger tips against the glass like she was holding herself up.
    She turned her face side to side, looking it over, glancing at her hand against the glass just once. But it was enough. Ella had worked in enough labs, in her long years of schooling and outside it, to have been on both sides of an observation mirror. There were two dead giveaways that a mirror was two-way, designed for spying. First, the mirror was part of the wall, not hung on it. The second was called the ‘finger test.’ A finger placed up against a normal mirror can touch its own reflection. A finger placed up against a two way mirror was separated from its reflection by the thickness of the glass, in this case, a quarter inch.
    Mason was on the other side of this mirror, watching. Observing. Waiting for a show. And if she didn’t give him one...
    She stared into her own eyes for a moment, picturing Mason on the far side of the mirror, looking back. If it’s a show he wants...
    She lifted her shirt slowly, bunching the fabric beneath her breasts. She’d lost a lot of weight and dropped a cup size while living in the wild, eating a diet of foraged food. If she wore a bra, it was a sports bra, but the tank top had enough support built in, so she’d opted to go braless. And today, that worked in her favor. She let her breasts fall out of the shirt together, smiling beneath the fabric as she lifted it away. If Mason was watching, he was already entranced.
    She walked to the tub and turned on the hot water. As steam wafted into the air, her smile turned genuine. She could, at least, enjoy this. Before they went back into the wild, she’d have to wallow in mud again like a pig. But for now, she’d enjoy the bath, and the notion that it would completely disarm the man behind the glass. Thinking of her hands around his throat, she pulled down her pants.

 
     
    13
     
    “So, let me get this straight,” Anne said. “No one has tried to break out of these cells?”
    “I think it’s generally assumed that escape would be worse than being caged,” Carrie said in dismay. “Besides, the gate is chain link.”
    “And the floor is concrete.” Anne rolled her eyes. “I can see. I have eyes. But I’m starting to wonder if you guys need glasses. Or maybe new brains.”
    She looked at old Willie, then Carrie and finally John. The first two seemed befuddled. John seemed almost uninterested, resigned to his fate at the end of the hangman’s noose, or whatever these people did to execute people.
    A groan rose from Anne’s throat when Jakob seemed equally baffled.
    “Seriously?” she said to her half-brother. “Have you learned nothing?”
    “What?” he said. “No one knows what you’re talking about.”
    And no one is taking me seriously, because I’m twelve. “Ask a question. Observation. Hypothesis. Test. Repeat—if necessary. And when that’s all done, take action.”
    Jakob sighed. He’d heard her modified