Fingers, much the same, but I couldn’t really bend them to test their mobility, with the swelling being what it was.

Fingernails… five fingernails attached, two tender to the touch, feeling that same kind of wobbly as a child’s tooth might be, when it started to show signs the kid might lose it.

I’d lost two fingernails when attacked in the prison plaza. When I’d picked up the skin, only one fingernail had still been attached.

The sweet and good hearted people of Shin had found a stray fingernail and brought it in for reattachment?

Not likely.

Had it fallen on me, landing on my clothes without my notice?

No—the wire had raked along my hand and toward the woman, away from me. The nail would have been flung toward her, not toward me or onto my clothing.

Had I somehow missed that another fingernail had been attached to the loose patch of skin I’d picked up off the ground? Had they found it and attached it as normal.

I wasn’t sure. Possible. Maybe it was the most likely possibility.

Or the final possibility. That Amy had lied to me, more than once, in the course of our conversation. It would be cause for simultaneous gut-wrenching horror and relief; it would suggest she’d used her power on me and hadn’t told me the full truth, but it would also gave some reason to doubt her interpretation of what was coming.

In that, at least, I really wanted her to be lying to my face.

Breaking 14.10

I jumped as the door opened. I hated myself for doing it.

“You don’t need to flinch just from seeing me,” Amy’s voice was loud in ways that had nothing to do with volume, filling the otherwise silent room.

“I thought you said you read my feelings and you understood.”

My own voice sounded so loud, to the point where I wasn’t sure if I sounded angry, argumentative.

She didn’t respond, her eyes moving this way, that, before settling on her chair, which she dragged a noisy foot and turned a bit before seating herself. Fixating on the chair seemed to let her not fixate on my statement.

My heartbeat was even louder than the chair, than her voice, mine—or it felt that way. Every sound was a vibration in the air, and my heartbeat was a vibration in me. By the metrics of what constituted loud, the thuds were loud enough to make thinking hard, to make breathing difficult.

There were no sounds in the hallway, no voices elsewhere, no hum of ventilation or creak of architecture. Just stone walls.