Ex-Isle by Peter Clines (electronic reader TXT) 📕

word vertebrae floated up from the random stew of memory fragments at the bottom of her consciousness.

Okay. Her neck was broken. That was new. She hadn’t broken a bone since coming back from the dead. Not that she could remember, anyway.

But her body always repaired itself. Cuts, burns, even her hair grew back. The main doctor at the Mount, Connolly, said it wasn’t “healing,” but she never wanted to explain the difference. Madelyn wondered if the woman had explained it a dozen times and just gotten frustrated.

If her body was repairing itself now, it would probably go faster with all the parts in the right place.

It took her a few minutes to get her hands in position. One on her jaw, one on the back of her head. She decided to count to five. Then she changed her mind and decided to count to three. And then, before she could lose her nerve, she just twisted her skull hard to the right.

There were two loud pops and a sharp pain—sharper than she’d felt in ages. Her spine thumped together, and her head slipped down an inch or so. Enough to make her vision shift. Another random memory. Someone lifting a stack of red poker chips an inch or so off the table and dropping them one after another. Click-click-click-click. Her head and neck did that.

Madelyn flexed her head left and right. No soreness. No stiffness. She could still move her fingers and arms. Couldn’t feel her toes, though.

The click-click-click of poker chips was still echoing in her mind. And just as she realized it wasn’t in her mind, she registered the sounds that had let her judge the size of the room. She mentally kicked herself over the rookie mistake. What kind of superhero woke up surrounded by exes—even in a dark room—and didn’t notice?

She tried to sit up again and flopped back down. Her core muscles were weak. Probably why she was having trouble getting air in her lungs, too. She wiggled her elbows around and levered herself up onto her arms.

Her eyes strained against the blackness, but there was nothing. Not even hints of movement. Just the echoing sound of teeth on teeth. There had to be at least a hundred of them, maybe more, but none were close enough to stand out from the echoes.

She reached down and felt something rubbery brush her fingertips. She traced the edge of it back and forth. Her wet suit had been ripped almost clean in half. The frayed edge had curled up and was showing off her abs to…well, anyone who could see in the dark. She shifted her weight onto one arm, then reached out to push the flap of wet suit down flat.

It didn’t hit her stomach. The flap went down lower and lower. It hit the lumpy surface she was laying on.

She felt around the ragged edge of rubbery material. Her fingers touched one of her floating ribs, then felt the loose flesh a few inches lower down. She curled her hand around under the arc of skin and found…nothing. Something dripped on the inside of her knuckle, and she realized her hand was inside her own rib cage. And there was nothing in there with it.

She wheezed out a silent cry. No wonder she was having trouble breathing.

“Okay,” she mouthed after she calmed down, “this is different.”

She racked her brain and tried to remember what had happened to her.

Back when she’d died, when the exes had killed her and her mom, they’d torn her apart. John—Captain Freedom—he’d tried to skirt around it, but one of the other Unbreakables had told her the whole story. She’d been in a dozen pieces, at least, and after the exes were done all those pieces hadn’t added up to one teenaged girl.

But she’d healed from it. Whatever treatment or chemical or miracle cure her dad had given her, it had been enough to put her back together. To let all those pieces grow back together.

All she needed to do was find the other pieces.

She swallowed and reached as far past her ribs as she could. There was no sign of her…of the rest of her. She stretched her fingertips and found scraps that were too dry or too soft, but nothing that was her. And she felt confident she’d know her own legs if she felt them.

Her head wobbled. She had a quick mental image of her spine coming apart and her head falling off, then recognized it as the usual twinge of dizziness before she fell asleep. Not surprising. She hadn’t had much food, and being torn in half probably burned up a lot of calo—

“Dammit!” she mouthed. She didn’t have her journals. She didn’t have anything to write with, or any time to write even if she did. She was going to have to go through all this again when she—

Madelyn woke up screaming. Or she would’ve if there’d been any air in her lungs. She wasn’t sure why she was screaming. She didn’t remember having a bad dream. It had been years since she’d had any dreams.

She blinked twice, an old habit from being alive, and looked around.

The only lights were high above. It looked like sunlight seeping in through cracks. More than enough for her to see by.

There were a lot of exes. At least fifty she could see from her low angle, but probably more. Most of them were just swaying back and forth—that weird lack of activity they fell into when they hadn’t seen anything move in a while. Maybe a third of them were staggering around. The chamber was big enough that the closest ones were a couple of yards away. The sound of teeth echoed off the metal walls.

Solid metal walls. Big sheets of metal. Definitely a chamber of some kind, not a room. She couldn’t remember seeing anything like that anywhere in the Mount.

Where the hell was she?

How had she ended up here? She’d woken up in her room