Page 118 of Death is Familiar

“We have the same birthday and everything. You’re older by two full hours!”

No way did I share a womb with this woman. “We’re… twins?”

Three laughed. “We’re sisters, but we have different parents, silly!”

Because that made so much more sense.

But it was information on offer, and I’d take it. Hoping that if I got enough of the pieces together something, anything, would start to make sense. Even if I was trapped, in a cell, a shock collar around my neck, without blankets, next to a woman I was starting to suspect had never seen the light of day.

†

The woman who was precisely my age sang:

Three, Three, wonderful, Three.

You’re everything we ever expected you to be.

Three is devout and caring and smart.

She’ll fill the role, with kindness, with heart.

As close to a sure thing as there can be,

Three is the choice for you and for me!

†

Sometime later, Warden White returned with the grilled cheese he’d promised, and I practically inhaled it. For a man I wanted to kick between the legs, he was a decent cook.

I shoved the blunt-edged plastic food tray through the bars of my cell. “So, about that blanket?”

“I’m afraid not,” was all he said before collecting the platter, lowering the lights, and exiting the room.

Being told I couldn’t have something as simple as a blanket just made me want it more. Three had an ample supply, surely, she’d let me have one.

“Three?” I hugged my sides.

“I can’t do that.” Her eyes flickered over her shoulder. There was a camera in the corner of the room. Next to the incessant buzzing and flickering light.

I see…

†

For the next week, I tried to get a sense of the routine and failed. Even when I counted the seconds between meal times there was significant inconsistency, and no specificity to which meal we ate or when. For three meals in a row, they served breakfast. The next four meals were all dinner.

Solomon’s Seal was smart, but they were using a tactic I’d seen before. They didn’t want Three and me to have any idea how much time had passed. They made it so our entire world revolved around them, which meant we were entirely at their mercy.

But not having much else to do, beyond reflecting on the songs, attempting to gather more information from my co-inmate, and avoiding spiraling at all costs, I timed Three’s cartoons.

They each ran approximately twenty-two minutes.

It didn’t take much to convince her to watch sixty-five episodes in a row, which if they ran back-to-back would take nearly twenty-four hours. Yes, I checked my math. Thrice.

The whole point of this scheme was to get some sense of how long each day felt underground, so I could keep better track of how much time passed… in theory.

Twenty episodes into our binge-watching, I saw the error of my ways—the day moved painstaking slow, the cartoons too repetitive and brash— but I was already committed. By episode fifty-four, both of us were sleep deprived and irritable.

Despite the irritability, the cartoon-induced sleep deprivation proved useful.