My reflection was fractured, too. A maniacal jigsaw of jagged features. I looked in my many eyes, the pain receding. They had pushed me too far. I grabbed the chair and used it to widen the hole, rounding off the sharp edges. Then I pulled it out and threw it behind me, staring into the dark hole I had made, waiting for a face to emerge. Or the barrel of a gun.

The room was about the same size as this one. A terminal of video monitors rose from a desk against the far wall. Otherwise the room appeared empty. Unless there was someone hunched under the mirror, something I wouldn’t know without peering inside. Exposing my head, which had been severed on wallpaper and mounted on a wall. Jesus, maybe this was part of the script. My act of rebellion anticipated and accounted for.

The lights went out, and a door slammed closed behind me. Malia had fled the room. Off to warn the others, I assumed. Which meant I had to hurry.

I poked my head through the hole before paralysis rooted me in place. Looked down and saw an angry face peering up at me from the floor. I screamed and so did he, rising up toward me as I retracted my head. My neck caught on the underside of the window, slicing the skin, and trapping my head in place. I screamed in panic and pain, and so did my attacker, mirroring my expression. It took another second to realize I was looking at my own reflection, captured on a pane of glass that had landed on the floor. Here I’d almost decapitated myself from self-inflicted fear. So much for rewriting the script.

There was no time to sigh with relief. An empty chair was still swiveling from whoever had just been sitting in it. And was now off to gather weapons or reinforcements, or both. I quickly removed more of the broken glass until I had a hole large enough to step through, then I climbed inside.

The room was a surveillance station featuring a desk with a control panel and about twenty monitors stacked four rows high. In one, I saw the operating room where I had awakened. A light-skinned man with dark hair was spraying cleaning solution on the operating table and wiping it down with a rag. To the right of this monitor was one showing the empty hallway I had just walked through. Next, the trophy room, which was now being dismantled. Several men, all similar if not identical-looking, were busy removing the animal busts from the walls, wiping off the dark spots where fluid had seeped from the deer’s decomposing necks. My eyes flashed across the monitor screens, stopping when I recognized a face.