He simply pulls a gun from his waist and points it at me.

Then he looks at his watch.

I look at mine.

3:49.

Eleven minutes and then he can do whatever he wants with me.

::::

I wake up.

I am strapped to a table.

I’m in the White Room.

I scream.

The door opens.

I crane my head upward.

“Good morning,” Ewen says.

“Fuck you.”

“Somebody is cranky. Didn’t get enough sleep, did you?”

“What did you do to me last night?”

Ewen smiles, then leaves as quickly as he came.

I take three deep breaths. Luckily, last night he hadn’t administered Compound-23, and I didn’t have another nightmare, a fate I’m certain won’t last another night.

I glance at the wall to my left, a wall I know is actually a long mirror.

I yell at the wall, “You fucking cowardly piece of shit! Get in here!”

I lay my head down.

I wrangle my hands against the velcro restraints.

There is little give.

I half expect my mother to come through the door with a mallet. To smash my hands to smithereens like in my nightmare. To ask me where the flash drive is.

I would be able to answer this time. I would be able to tell her that her mentor, lover, the biological father of her only child, had it. How I watched it. That I knew what she’d done. How she killed Jennifer Nubers. But I wouldn’t tell her where it was. No matter how many knuckles she broke, no matter how many nightmares she gave me, I would tell her to go to hell.

The door opens and Ewen returns. He is holding an iPad.

He approaches, sits on the table near my ribs and says, “I must say, your brain is remarkable.”

He turns the iPad toward me.

“Your brain has nearly twelve percent more synapses firing each millisecond than average. Do you know how many that is? Billions more synapses firing than perhaps even me.”

He pats my leg. “Haven’t you ever wondered why? Why you are so smart? How when you’ve only been awake, alive really, one-fifteenth that of an average person your age, how you could be more intelligent than most of these people?”

Actually, I had wondered this. Exactly this. Wondered why I wasn’t intellectually a four-year-old.

“Fascinating,” I say, then spit on the computer screen.

He wipes the screen clean, then says, “Well, the real fun will begin tonight. When we see how your brain responds to Compound-23.”

The thought of another twenty-three day nightmare claws at my stomach.

I find myself begging, pleading. “Please . . . please . . . no . . .”

He smiles and pats my leg. “Don’t worry, son. It will be okay.”

He walks out, leaving me with my own thoughts for the next ten minutes.