So, that's what happened yesterday. Even though it was barely afternoon, everyone was in such a state of either pain or shock that Zoe declared that there wouldn't be any more training till the next morning. She told our silent assembly an extremely long anecdote about the dangers of being exhausted whilst training that I think involved a spork and an amputation, but as interesting as that sounds, I tuned her out almost immediately, still too furious to want to engage with any of them.

Rao was quiet, as always, but his face was tight and strained, and his eyes kept flickering to the corners of the corridor, as though he could see something invisible to everyone else.

Jake was limping slightly, his mouth a tight line of pain. Rust-coloured blood stained the back of his t-shirt from the wound on his head. I averted my eyes and told myself I didn't care. But I did wonder why they hadn't used a medstick on him. Did they just save them for emergencies?

As we progressed along the corridor, people peeled off – Mila disappearing into a room with a red cross on the door (like a plague marker, I thought uncharitably), and Rao waving off Zoe and slowly making his way up a narrow staircase.

"So then I had to perform a make-shift burny-thing, you know – when you burn the wound and it seals... cauterizing, that's it! – It didn't fucking work – Oh!" Zoe interrupted herself. "Teakettle!" she appeared to be addressing me. "This is your room."

She heaved open a metal sliding door. It was painted pale blue. It slid across on rollers and I looked into the room gingerly. Nothing inside but a large, bare mattress on the floor. A grey blanket was heaped carelessly at the end. At the other end of the cavernous space was a door.

"Where does that go?" I asked.

"Narnia," said Zoe. I frowned at her. She rolled her eyes. "It's your walk-in-wardrobe, sauna, ensuite – whatever. It's empty. I think maybe they kept chemical waste in there."

"What?"

"Oh, God," she said, grinning widely. "I'm so fucking hilarious. Sometimes I can't stand myself."

 I don't know how her own mother stands her. I stepped into the room and Paige followed me like a shadow.

"Anna," said Jake.

I turned cold eyes on him. "I'm going to sleep," I said, gripping hold of the heavy sliding door.

"Ah, wait – Eyeball," said Zoe, lunging in and grabbing Paige's arm. "Your room's up this way. Master-fucking-suite..." she dragged a reluctant Paige away. Jake stayed behind.

The silence between us felt as thick as tar. I studied his face, even as he studied mine. As always, his expression was nearly impossible to read. That should have warned me long ago that I couldn't trust him.

"I – " began Jake.

"You knew that if I failed the test they would murder me," I said simply. "And you brought me here anyway." Something burned in my eyes, but I blinked it back. "You knew they'd put me in that box – and you knew that they'd hurt me in it. And you brought me here anyway."

My grip on the door was white-knuckled.

"Maybe you even knew that I'd never forget what you just allowed to happen," I said. "But you brought me here anyway."

I slid the door shut on his stricken face, and I locked it. Then I walked over to the mattress and collapsed onto it, facedown. If I cried a little, I'm the only one that will ever know. The massive room swallowed up all sounds.

Then I fell asleep.

As you know, Zoe woke me up with her typical charm and a bucket of water the next morning, and here I am. It helps to write everything down and read it over. It separates what happened from me – as though it happened to someone else.

I'd just finished writing up the day before's occurrences when I heard a noise coming from the other end of my room.

Every neve in my body came screamingly alive. I'd been too upset and exhausted to check behind the mysterious door last night, and now here I was – probably about to be eaten alive by a sludge monster made of chemical... sludge. I gripped my shard in my hand and crept up to it, listening.

I heard muffled movements behind the door, and dug my fingernails into my palm. Calm, I had to be calm.

I reached up to the handle, and swung it open, crouching next to the wall. "Who's there?!" I snapped.

Silence.

I peered through the doorway, then yelped and fell backwards. There was someone in my cupboard. There was a terrifying, skinny humanoid figure in my cupboard. And it moved. There was actually a monster in my cupboard – my cupboard – a monster – my brain resorted to gibberish and I landed on my backside.

"Shit! Fuck!" I said, pressing my hand to my heart in an attempt to keep it inside my ribcage. It took my panicked brain and eyes several seconds to register that the thin, still figure in my cupboard was not Gollum.

It was Paige.

"Paige!" I gasped, "Holy... shi- shivers. Fuc – fudge! You scared me... F-fudge!"

She glared at me, like squatting in someone's cupboard was a perfectly normal occurrence, and I was disrupting her morning in an extremely unreasonable way.

"Paige!" I said again, trying to calm myself. "Ugh, Paige..."

"Fuck off," she said. "I was trying to sleep!"

"Language," I said, weakly, still trying to catch my breath. "Why... are you here?"

"I like small spaces to sleep, ok?" she growled. "It's nothing to do with you. I just like your cupboard. It's a good size."

I stared at her, my mouth open.

"What?" she snapped. "I was having a good dream until you fucking interrupted it."

"I locked my door," I said.

"Good thing too, " approved Paige. "You can't trust any of those dipshits. They might kill you in your sleep. That's another reason I'm here. We can escape together if shit starts to get fucked up."

"Now that's... let's try to have less than two obscenities in a sentence, ok? That's goal number one," I said.

"You're so fucking weird," said Paige fondly. "I broke your lock."

I looked at my door. It did appear to be sitting oddly. I sighed and struggled to my feet, crossing my arms accusingly. My cardigan was still damp.

"Well, thanks a lot for deflecting the cold water assault from Zoe, Paige."

"What?"

I glared at her, disbelieving. "You slept through that? How are you going to stop any assassination attempts?"

Paige stood up too, kicking at the nest of blankets and cushions she'd apparently dragged into the cupboard last night. I didn't know how I'd slept though that, either.

A glimpse of a pair of beady eyes beneath a blanket made me freeze and open my mouth – either to scream, or perform an exorcism, I'm not sure. Then I recognised Lily's cat slippers. Paige had tucked them under the blanket like a pair of grumpy teddy-bears. She plucked them out and shoved her feet into them, then stepped out of the cupboard and shut the door firmly behind her. "Stay out of my room," she told me sternly.

I ignored her rude invasion of my bedroom and instead stared worriedly at the cupboard door. "I don't know if it's appropriately ventilated. What if you suffocate?"

Paige decided to ignore my concern, and instead walked over to my bed, where my journal was lying abandoned. I made a running leap, and recovered it before she could touch it. Then I shoved it into the bottom of my bag and hid it behind me.

"I can't read," said Paige. "So you don't have to freak out."

I stopped fussing with the bag and looked at her. "Do you want to learn how to read?"

"No," said Paige immediately.

"Are you sure?" I asked wheedlingly.

Paige was saved from replying by a scratch at the door. I turned on it. "What now?"

There was no one there. Then Paige made an alarming cooing noise, and a cat slinked into the room like it owned the place.

"Urgh," I said involuntarily.

The cat glared at me, and its eyes reflected the light in an even more demonic way than usual.

"Is that..." I began.

"Yes," said Paige, scooping the cat up. Its long dust-coloured tail flicked in irritation and I kept my distance.

"A robot cat," I said. "I thought that was a joke! Is that a robot cat?" Somehow, Mila had combined two of the creatures I disliked most into one unholy combination. Of course she had, I reflected. That is exactly the type of thing that Mila would do.

"He's not a normal cat," said Paige. "He hasn't got a high enough body temperature to be alive."

"How can you –?"

"My mod, duh," said Paige. "I can see temperature and heart rate. That's how the slavers used me. To spot runaways, or raids by other groups."

The cat hissed, and I realised the Paige must have squeezed it too tight. She put it down on the ground, and it slinked towards me, its ears down and its tail twitching in a predatory manner.

I backed away.

"Aw, look, Anna," said Paige delightedly. "I think he's stalking you!"

"That's not a good thing!" I babbled. "Intercept! Intercept the cat!" Paige didn't intercept the cat, and it coiled around my ankles in the creepiest way possible, making a weird noise in the back of its throat. I stood as still as possible, and hoped that it would go away.

"He's very light," said Paige. "And his claws and teeth are made of some kind of metal." 

I froze into an even greater state of abject horror.

"What should we call him?" said Paige, who hadn't seemed to have noticed my extreme feelings of repulsion for all felines.

"Beelzebub," I suggested. "Satan, Pustule, Devil, Evil, Stalker, Murder, Misery, Death!!"

She scooped him up again. "I like Satan."

I gasped in relief at my sudden freedom. "Doesn't Mila have names for them already?"

"I don't care," said Paige flatly. "I don't like her."

I rifled through my backpack in an attempt to find some dry clothes. "You should try to get on with her, Paige. It'll make it easier to live here."

"Don't care," said Paige. "She's a bitch."

"Now," I said. "Let's try to avoid gendered insults. 'Bitch' is mildly misogynistic, in my opinion."

"What?" said Paige.

"Don't say 'bitch', I said. "Call her... I don't know..."

"Evil," supplied Paige.

"Difficult," I suggested, trying to quell my extreme and possibly rabid dislike for the other woman. I could hold a vendetta for years, but Paige shouldn't carry it with me. I needed her to be safe here. And something told me 'safe' meant getting on with Mila.

"Maybe her cats will eat her when she's dead," said Paige hopefully. "I hear cats do that, sometimes." Satan glared at me over her arms, his yellow eyes glittering strangely.

I shuddered, then tried to change the subject. "Do you know what we're doing today?"

"I think you're training with Jake. That's what Zoe said," said Paige. "Rao's still all woozy from whatever you did to him. The asshole."

There was a small rip as I tore something in my bag at the sound of Jake's name.

Paige eyed me. "You're mad at Jake."

I cleared my throat and tried to be mature. "Jake and I are having a disagreement, but it doesn't have anything to do with you. You don't need to and shouldn't take sides. It shouldn't affect you in any way, and it isn't your fau..." I trailed off and flushed red as I realised that I sounded like a manual for parents explaining divorce to their children. I bit my lip and kept busily digging in my bag, though I'd forgotten what I was looking for.

Paige squinted at me. "When you were in the coffin," she said slowly, "he didn't come though."

"No, he didn't," I agreed.

"When Zoe pulled me back through, his heart rate was really high. I think he was scared."

"He was scared!" I exclaimed, "I was being impaled!"

"I know, he's complete and utter dick blister," said Paige, "I kicked him in the balls, remember?"

"That– " I tried to convince myself that I should tell her not to kick people. "Thank you," I said instead.

Paige sniffed. "Anyway," she continued. "When you started doing whatever it was that was hurting Rao – hijacking his immersion, or whatever the fuck it was – Mila started screaming about getting you out of the coffin. Then Jake tried to stop them getting you out. He said it might hurt you, or kill you, or drive you mad – to pull you out of the immersion so fast." She scowled. "I tried to stop them, and then Mila grabbed me." She looked up me defensively. "She's stronger than she looks, besides – I was keeping an eye on Zoe, she's the solider. I thought Mila was just a scientist. She got me by surprise. It won't happen again." Her eye glowed cold blue.

"You don't have to –" I objected, but Paige talked over me.

"So then Jake and Zoe square off – and he's blocking the way to the coffin, and she's got her gun, but looks like she really doesn't want to shoot him – and Mila's still got a hold of me... and then Rao yells out, 'NO!' and Jake uses his shard to knock Zoe's gun out of her hands – but then she moves, fast, and grabs one of Mila's computer things of the desk – and hits Jake in the head with it. Then he was down, and Mila locked me out."

I looked at my hands. So Jake had been hurt trying to help me. It didn't change the fact that he'd brought me here knowing that they could kill me; knowing that they'd torture me. But it changed something.

There was a sound at the door, and Zoe poked her head in. She didn't look at all surprised to see Paige with me. "Good morning, cat ladies," she declared. "Breakfast is served. Jake is making coffee with the machine – which he only does when it's someone's birthday, so I think I may have hit him on the head harder than I meant to yesterday, so I'm mildly guilty, but that boy makes fucking brilliant coffee, so nobody tell him it isn't anyone's birthday!"

I blinked at her. "You have a coffee machine?"

"Jake brought it from virtual," Zoe said mistily. "He dropped it on his toe, and it possibly broke. That was a funny day – we didn't have any medsticks, so he was hopping around like a little stork, or flamingo, or whatever the fuck it is that uses one leg – and looking all sad. And he tripped on a cat..."

"You can bring things from virtual?" I interrupted.

"Yup," said Zoe, "but electronic shit doesn't work – different frequencies or some shit, I don't know. So the coffee machine only works for Wakers. You little renewable energy sources, you."

I frowned.

"Don't touch the machine," said Zoe. "Jake is protective of it. Maybe because of the broken toe incident, I don't fucking know..."

I shooed everyone out of the room and rapidly changed clothes, thanking God that I'd brought a spare set. Then Zoe led us to the main room. A familiar whistling and bubbling sound made me experience a strange wave of disorientation – it sounded like the coffee shop back home.

Sure enough, tucked behind one of the pillars towards the back of the room was what could only be called a kitchenette. A battered toaster and something that looked like a microwave sat on a counter.

Jake stood behind a large, industrial-size coffee machine. The smell of coffee drifted through the air – replacing the cold, metallic scent of the bunker.

Rao was slumped over a laminated dining table nearby. I couldn't tell if his motionlessness was due to some deep psychological scarring I'd inflicted on him by hijacking his immersion, or if he just wasn't a morning person.

Mila stalked into the room. "It isn't anyone's birthday," she informed Jake.

"NO!" yelped Zoe. "Fuck YOU, Mila!"

I walked over to Jake, and met his eyes. Was this guilt coffee?

He looked at me warily, then pointed to a cup on the counter. It was filled with what I could already tell was – my supernatural coffee senses were tingling – an expertly crafted, large skim flat white.

Jake had made my usual.

I walked over to it and hesitantly picked it up. He was looking at me as though he was worried I was going to throw it in his face. I'd never have thought I'd see such a kicked-puppy expression in his eyes.

I nodded at him, then took a sip.

^^^

Author's Note

Hi everyone, thank you so much for all your comments on last week's chapter – I was so thrilled to get them, and I can't wait to reply! (I will be, soon!) I love that you loved it so much. A more badass Anna finally emerged! She's slipped back to her normal politically correct and mildly hopeless self a little this week – but I think something's changed.

Do you feel differently about Jake now? Has she forgiven him? 

Let me know with a vote or comment! Remember, the Wattys close soon!!