Instinct by Jason Hough (best memoirs of all time TXT) 📕

horse stalls. I wasn't going to let her hurt me. She stopped about halfway.

“You think you told her something about me that she didn't already know?” Gia began.

“She made me. She put me in the Ice Room and you know what she can do to you. You were the one who said you're not in the Ice Room. The Ice Room is in you. Now I know what you meant. That helmet thing . . . there were rats all over me and she knew how much I hated them.”

“She didn't have to do that to you to get information. She just wanted to break you, Phoebe. She already had Mindy tell her everything I said about Posy. Mindy denies it, but I know she did. She pretends to believe me, but she doesn't. Dr. Foreman has her thinking otherwise.”

“Is it true, Gia? Are you making up Posy?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you are,” I said, my eyes on the hand that held that spade like a switchblade.

She smiled coldly, her small mouth stretching and curling in the corners with disgust. “You're going to be a Foreman girl then, are you? You're going to stay here or come back here and become a buddy someday so you can torment and torture someone like you?”

“No.”

She crossed over to a bale of hay and sat, digging her spade into it.

“She told me what Mindy did with her baby,” I said.

“Did she?” Gia smiled and shook her head. “Dr. Foreman used the same technique on me, telling me what Posy had done. This was afterward, of course.”

“After what?”

“After the imaginary Posy disappeared, but that's what imaginary people do, don't they? They disappear.”

“What did she tell you Posy had done?” I asked.

“Why do you want to know if you don't believe there ever was a Posy?”

I didn't say anything and she looked at the horse behind her. “Posy liked the horses, too. She would have slept with them if they had let her. I told you Natani took a liking to her just as he has taken to you. He taught her many things, but the most valuable was how to escape.”

“Are you saying she escaped? I thought you believed she was put into the basement and might even still be there.”

“From time to time, Posy escaped, and maybe in the end, forever.”

“I don't understand, Gia.”

“Do you know anything about meditation?”

“No. I mean, it's a religion or something, isn't it?”

“It's not a religion, but it's part of some religions. It's part of what Natani believes.”

“What does that have to do with Posy?”

“He taught her how to meditate, to leave this world and enter some spiritual place, and when she was there, no one could touch her, hurt her. It got so she would rather be there than here all the time, and it wasn't long after that when she disappeared.” Gia looked like she was crying now. I thought I saw a tear glistening on her cheek.

I stepped closer to her. “It doesn't make any sense to me. I don't know what any of that means.”

“Maybe you can get Natani to show you.”

“I want to believe you, Gia. I really do, and I don't want to hurt you. I'm sorry I betrayed you in there.”

“You didn't betray me in there, but you are betraying me out here,” she said, standing. She took her spade out of the hay.

“What does that mean?”

“You don't believe me. That's more important to me.”

“I said I want to believe you.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, we'll see. I'll give you the chance to prove that.” She started out.

“When?” I called after her.

She turned back. “Maybe tonight.”

“How?”

“We'll get into the basement.”

“I thought you said the door had a lock on it. How can we get in?”

“Leave it to me. We'll get in and then we'll see if Posy is there or if she was,” she said, and walked out of the horse barn.

Wind Song reached over the stall door and poked me in the back of my head.

I looked at him.

Was that meant to be a warning? Did he see something in Gia's actions?

Was 1 as crazy as Gia? Now I believed what Natani had told me... horses and people could talk to each other.

Meditation? Escape? What was she talking about? How was I supposed to understand any of this? More important, how had I fallen into this whirlpool of pain and confusion?

Every time Gia saw me the remainder of the day, she looked at me weirdly. She said nothing else to me about the basement and Posy, so I thought it was just something that had flown in and out of her mind as quickly as a hummingbird. However, just before we started to the house for dinner, she stepped up beside me and whispered, “Don't tell the others anything about this. It will just be you and me, understand?”

I nodded, but it all made me nervous. The one thing I didn't want to do was get into any more trouble here, but I didn't want to anger Gia any more than I already had either. I was so anxious about it all that I didn't eat well, and sure enough, before the dinner ended, Dr. Foreman came into the dining room.

“How are my girls doing tonight?” she asked, her eyes fixed mainly on me.

We all muttered all right and thank you.

“You should make sure you eat well, Phoebe. You have to keep up your strength for the challenges that lie ahead, and believe me,” she said, looking at everyone now, “there are challenges. I would like to speak with you before you return to the barracks to do your homework, Phoebe. Come to the office when you're finished with your kitchen duties.”

I nodded and returned to eating, but the other girls, especially Gia, looked at me and then each other.

“What's that about, I wonder?” Mindy asked.

“I don't know,” I said.

“What I don't know is why she is so worried about you eating and you getting stronger,” Teal said. “She didn't watch over