Page 54 of The Sound of Him

Nolan fills the air with dread. Carter with anger. Casey with grief. Bryce with an almost weapon-like protectiveness. And in the air, around all of them, there’s this frantic fragile hope that’s hard to look at for too long. Sometimes I can feel them trying to find the same thing in the air around me. If I could speak, I still don’t know if I’d be able to tell them that it doesn’t exist.

This is different. So different. From all of them.

Here, with Ace, there’s nothing but air. Weightless with its lack of expectations. Warm. Welcoming. Safe.

It’s such arelief.

I breathe it in greedily, almost high off it. It won’t last, I know it won’t, nothing this good ever does, but until something shatters it, I want to fill my lungs with as much of it as I can. I want to pretend, just for a little while, that I’m not suffocating.

Except, when Ace speaks, that thing in the air doesn’t shatter. It just shifts. It makes room, wrapping around his words, inviting them in. His voice is an addition, instead of an interruption. His words float toward me instead of sprinting, easy for me to catch, to listen, to truly hear. They aren’t weighted down with an expectation of being returned. They aren’t wrapped in barbs of emotion.

“This is a pretty good place to hide, as hiding places go,” he says, his voice low, soft, almost like he’s here avoiding detection too. His eyes stay focused on the computer screen. “I’ve got a little mini-fridge. Snacks. Candy. Too much candy, really, but I trust you won’t tattle on me. I even have magazines to read. Really, I’m like an elevated waiting room, except there’s no shitty doctor appointment or whatever at the end of your time here.”

The nervous rambling is familiar, his voice a steady high and low as he says whatever pops into his mind. It doesn’t matter if words slip between the cracks of my mind. Most of them aren’t valuable ones anyway. Anything he thinks is important, he’ll circle back to, the touchstones that keep the conversation grounded even as he wanders down random tracks. There’s a steadiness to his rambles, a calm in the chaos.

It’s nice - the sound of him.

Listening to it is so much easier than breathing, his voice an entirely different kind of oxygen.

“Wanna see something?” he asks, gaze still locked on the screen right in front of him. He doesn’t wait for a response. “That box there shows the hallway outside my door.”

I have to step forward to see better, my eyes focusing on the little square he’s pointing to. It's a camera feed. It shows the hallway, just like he said.

It suddenly feels like I'm sinking. Like I’m going to slip right through the floor, never to be found again.

He has cameras? In the hall?

Where else?

I quickly scan the rest of the screens, that sinking feeling only getting worse. Not every monitor shows camera feeds, but the ones that do are broken up into more of those squares. Dozens of them. Every hall. The kitchen. The dining room. The living room. The laundry room. The underground level. The gym. The pool. Areas I don't even recognize. A few outside the house, even.

“It comes off creepy, I know,” Ace admits with a self-deprecating sort of laugh. “But it's our way of making sure everyone is safe. Well, as sure as we can be. No cameras in the rooms or bathrooms, obviously. Just public spaces.”

Is that really necessary?

Is he… watching us? Like paying attention to us? Analyzing us? Telling the doctors about us?

Does he know I’m not eating?

Does he know Bryce stole that knife?

Is this really for our protection?

Protection from what? From who? Does he think those men outside will come in and hurt us? Does he think we’ll hurt each other? Or hurt ourselves?

Does… doeshewant to hurt us?

Is this whole place some sick test after all?

My tongue feels heavy in my mouth. Foreign. A dead weight keeping me from the world.

Or…protectingme from it?

Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

“Anyway, Jake's room is right there. We can see the light under the crack of his door, see?” He points to a spot on the screen where the night vision is a lot brighter. “When he turns it off but doesn’t come back out, he's likely going to sleep. Then you're safe to leave.”

I frown.