scaly flicked my ankle with its tongue and proceeded to slither up my leg.
Indiana Jones and I have three things in common. Good looks? Check. Unquenchable sense of adventure? Double check.
Snakes?
Triple check. Yeah. We’re both terrified of snakes.
Giant rolling boulders, Nazis, and human-sacrificing cults I can handle. But so help me if there’s a snake in the equation. Let alone a slimy, slithering room full of them.
CHAPTER 13
My brain had no concept of time anymore. Hours? Days? It was all a horrific blur. Twice, the hallucinations had been so much that I simply blacked out. (The snakes may or may not have been one of them.) I had no idea how long my blackouts lasted, but every time I woke up, a TV dinner tray was set up in front of me with a meal—a bowl of some sort of rice and bean slop and a glass of water with a straw. The water was easy enough to sip, but I literally had to shove my face in the bowl to eat. I didn’t care that it was all over my face. Impressing Nightmare with my table manners was the least of my concerns.
It didn’t help that I couldn’t stop shaking. Every muscle ached even though I physically hadn’t done anything in who knew how long. It felt like my body was falling apart.
It was during these quiet moments, however, that I could think most clearly. The more Nightmare interrogated me, the more it seemed like he wasn’t even looking for information. Could it be that he simply wanted to torture me? Maybe this was just a test. An experiment, to see how long it would take to literally kill me using his hallucinations. Or if not kill me, turn me into a human vegetable. It would explain why Nightmare wasn’t explaining what he wanted to know.
No. I refused to accept that possibility. There had to be something he was looking for. Some detail to my meeting with Oracle that I had overlooked.
It’s amazing the details you can remember when they’re being tortured out of you.
“She was wearing a purple shawl and an ugly gray dress, and she smelled like garlic,” I said, knowing full well how unimportant this information probably was. “She had big map of Cosmo City on the walls with connecting lines and a bunch of notes written in red. It was pinpointing the crime scenes of different Supervillains with a bunch of newspaper clippings. She had a gray cat named Maximus who hated my guts. She made tea—mine was peppermint and hers was . . . uh . . . honey vanilla chamomile. And . . . she said there were only two people immune to her psychic powers: Flex and Spine.”
I made a conscious effort to omit the family connection between me and Spine. This was his fault. I was being tortured because of him.
“Your father?” said Nightmare as if to rub in the fact.
“Spine,” I repeated.
“How is your father immune to her power?”
This wasn’t the first time Nightmare had shown interest in a topic. He had done it at least seven other times, and as soon as I rattled off every useless piece of information I knew on the subject, he never brought it up again. He actually seemed bored with any such topic if I tried mentioning it again. A part of me felt like he was doing this just to give me false hope that the interrogation was actually going somewhere. I mean . . . why would he even ask me a question like this? If he was working with my father, shouldn’t he know the answer to that question?
“He’s able to change the bone matter in his skull so it deflects Oracle’s telepathy,” I said. “She can’t get inside his head when he does.”
“What sort of bone matter is it?” asked Nightmare.
Was he kidding? What sort of bone matter? Did he think I was a freaking bone doctor or something?
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think Oracle even knows.”
Nightmare pursed his lips. Somehow this made him look even more like a monkey.
“I don’t believe you,” he said.
I didn’t have the energy to protest. It was pointless. I had already rehearsed this routine so
Indiana Jones and I have three things in common. Good looks? Check. Unquenchable sense of adventure? Double check.
Snakes?
Triple check. Yeah. We’re both terrified of snakes.
Giant rolling boulders, Nazis, and human-sacrificing cults I can handle. But so help me if there’s a snake in the equation. Let alone a slimy, slithering room full of them.
CHAPTER 13
My brain had no concept of time anymore. Hours? Days? It was all a horrific blur. Twice, the hallucinations had been so much that I simply blacked out. (The snakes may or may not have been one of them.) I had no idea how long my blackouts lasted, but every time I woke up, a TV dinner tray was set up in front of me with a meal—a bowl of some sort of rice and bean slop and a glass of water with a straw. The water was easy enough to sip, but I literally had to shove my face in the bowl to eat. I didn’t care that it was all over my face. Impressing Nightmare with my table manners was the least of my concerns.
It didn’t help that I couldn’t stop shaking. Every muscle ached even though I physically hadn’t done anything in who knew how long. It felt like my body was falling apart.
It was during these quiet moments, however, that I could think most clearly. The more Nightmare interrogated me, the more it seemed like he wasn’t even looking for information. Could it be that he simply wanted to torture me? Maybe this was just a test. An experiment, to see how long it would take to literally kill me using his hallucinations. Or if not kill me, turn me into a human vegetable. It would explain why Nightmare wasn’t explaining what he wanted to know.
No. I refused to accept that possibility. There had to be something he was looking for. Some detail to my meeting with Oracle that I had overlooked.
It’s amazing the details you can remember when they’re being tortured out of you.
“She was wearing a purple shawl and an ugly gray dress, and she smelled like garlic,” I said, knowing full well how unimportant this information probably was. “She had big map of Cosmo City on the walls with connecting lines and a bunch of notes written in red. It was pinpointing the crime scenes of different Supervillains with a bunch of newspaper clippings. She had a gray cat named Maximus who hated my guts. She made tea—mine was peppermint and hers was . . . uh . . . honey vanilla chamomile. And . . . she said there were only two people immune to her psychic powers: Flex and Spine.”
I made a conscious effort to omit the family connection between me and Spine. This was his fault. I was being tortured because of him.
“Your father?” said Nightmare as if to rub in the fact.
“Spine,” I repeated.
“How is your father immune to her power?”
This wasn’t the first time Nightmare had shown interest in a topic. He had done it at least seven other times, and as soon as I rattled off every useless piece of information I knew on the subject, he never brought it up again. He actually seemed bored with any such topic if I tried mentioning it again. A part of me felt like he was doing this just to give me false hope that the interrogation was actually going somewhere. I mean . . . why would he even ask me a question like this? If he was working with my father, shouldn’t he know the answer to that question?
“He’s able to change the bone matter in his skull so it deflects Oracle’s telepathy,” I said. “She can’t get inside his head when he does.”
“What sort of bone matter is it?” asked Nightmare.
Was he kidding? What sort of bone matter? Did he think I was a freaking bone doctor or something?
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think Oracle even knows.”
Nightmare pursed his lips. Somehow this made him look even more like a monkey.
“I don’t believe you,” he said.
I didn’t have the energy to protest. It was pointless. I had already rehearsed this routine so
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