Page 346 of Immune

A tray beside me.

Needles.

Scissors.

A scanner.

Metal picks.

My knife is gone.

My boot knife too.

My pistol.

My hat.

My chest clenches so sharply I almost give myself away, my heart stilling so violently that I almost choke on it. My lungs seize and the blood in my veins stops moving while everything around me warbles and tilts sideways.

Maine’s hat.

No.

No, no, no.

I force my breathing slow before the panic dials my scent up to a frequency that will scream through the drugs.

I mean, it’s just a hat.

That’s a filthy, stinking lie.

It’s not just a hat.

I will kill everyone in this room if they lost it. Fuck it, even if they haven’t, I’ll slaughter them all for even removing it from my goddamn head.

“Pupil response,” the woman says.

A hand grips my chin and my skin tries to crawl away from the touch. I let my eyes flutter open halfway, unfocused and heavy.

“There she is,” the woman murmurs. “Can you hear me, sweetheart?”

I stare through her. Not at her but through. Like she’s just a smudged pane of glass standing in front of me. It’s actually harder than it sounds, mostly because my vision keeps trying to split her into two terrible women and I just don’t have the patience for duplicates right now. Not when they’re wearing a lab coat and a face I want to carve with a knife.

“She’s still under,” the man at my side says.

The woman leans closer. “Dakota O’Reilly.”

My name in her mouth makes something old and vicious rear up inside me but I stay completely limp. Even when the woman says, “You were a very expensive inconvenience, you know.”

That almost makes me smile. Almost.

“You understand me?” she tries again, trying to lure a response out of me. I’m an expensive inconvenience, though, so I do nothing.

The man beside me laughs. “Look at her. She doesn’t understand anything.”

My right hand closes around nothing.

Not useful.