The Jacksons (completed): Book 2 - Percy Jackson Fanfiction

~ Chapter Twenty: ESME

~ Chapter Twenty:

ESME

I could have just been confused, but nobody came to collect me for the 'experimentation' for over two nights. Nobody came to get the missing notes, which was strange as Dr Chadwick must've realised they'd be stolen and who more likely than I?

I'd almost escaped yesterday morning. Breakfast had been brought to me the usual way - a bowl of sloppy lumpy grey porridge and un-buttered stale bread and a glass of frothy orange juice, on a hard but smooth plastic tray with a blunt plastic spoon and a simple butter knife.

A butter knife. A butter knife.

I had looked at that butter knife and wanted to cry. Then I gazed at the woman who'd brought this excuse of a meal in. It was the same young woman who cut my beautiful hair into horrible shoulder-length strands and washed it with dirty water mixed with hand sanitiser.

Yeah, I know, right?

Anyways, I had to bide my time, I knew that much. I'd heard her vulgar words to my other captors - or maybe they were other prisoners. Who knew if she had some ruthless athletic prowess? I didn't want to find out.

"What's your name?" I asked politely, as if making conversation.

"You were told not to ask questions little girl." She had a Russian accent, quite old, but fading with the English. She'd been in America for a few good years, then. "We talk only to you, not the other way."

The woman was folding up my clothes onto my bed; the same grey t-shirt, jogging pants and that striking blood-red hoodie. They got taken every two nights and washed and handed back at dawn before I woke up.

But yesterday I was awake, though. Yesterday I had a plan. Which screwed up. And left me needing a sling.

All because I lost my bloody temper.

The woman nodded at my tray. "Eat up."

I pushed it away, taking the knife and carefully concealing it in my left sleeve. "This is sick," I'd said honestly.

The woman just shrugged. "Your problem, kid. It's not us who will starve."

"But you'll lose your experiment."

"We have one," she chuckled. "And another is in the process of being... delivered."

I thought back to the notes.

TARGETED:

Esme Jackson

Adam Grimshaw

"Do you mean Adam?" I said. She didn't answer. "Do. You. Mean. Adam?"

"I'll see you later, kid," the woman said, getting up to exit with a smile.

"Do you mean Adam? DO YOU?

"Answer the goddamned question!"

I pulled the knife and shoved the woman against the wall. I know, I know, okay? Looking back, obviously, it was stupid. But I was angry. She was useless.

She laughed and spat in my face, and before I knew it, I was pushed against the wall myself. The woman had her own blade in her hand, much longer and sharper than my own.

I'd winced pathetically.

"Don't mess with me," she'd hissed. She then danced the blade along my exposed shoulder, tracing an 8 on my skin. Suddenly she dug the knife in, and the sound of metal grinding on bone made vomit rise in my throat.