White Space Season 2

her memory, but her frayed band would only stretch so far. Sarah had no idea where she was, or how long she’d been there.
    She thought she was in space, but couldn’t be certain. There were people up here, if it was indeed “up” wherever she was, and those people wanted to keep her confused. It seemed as if half her time was spent in a numbed and narcotic state. The other half she spent bewildered.
    Sarah could be dead, but she had no way of knowing.
    In the time she had been held in wherever, Sarah had vacillated between several certainties, from dreaming she was in space, to seeing Blake Conway, to the assault from an endless battery of tests. It was difficult — if not impossible — for Sarah to sift fact from fiction.
    She dropped the steak into her mouth and chewed. It was delicious, like all the meat she’d had in her room. If Sarah was in space, the station had access to premium beef. They fed her well, but only with meat and vegetables. Both were the best she had ever had, by far.
    Sarah remembered the doctors — if that’s what they were — coming into her room and questioning her diet. They explained some stuff she knew, and a bit she didn’t; how proteins, carbohydrates, and fats were life’s building blocks, and more specifically, how blood type dictated a person’s ideal diet. They asked her if she knew what dry aging was and she said, no, not really. They told her about flesh and enzymes — both human and cow — and explained that molecules in food behave like molecular cooks. And they said that back home, Sarah had spent a lifetime poisoning herself.
    Most modern meat, they explained, was prepared for mass consumption on an assembly line, which wasn’t how humans were supposed to eat. Animals were slaughtered, separated, package, and distributed. Dry aging, on the other hand — like every bite of mouth-watering meat she had tasted since first arriving wherever she was — meant the carcass was set in carefully controlled conditions (cool temperatures, with relatively high humidity) for anywhere from weeks to months, allowing sufficient time for the enzymes to work.
    They said that sort of aging was best for her body, though something told Sarah they were doing something sort of the same with her mind.
    That was one of the reasons they were always watching.
    Sarah felt as if she was being observed, every second. And she always felt extra eyes while taking the tests, both when they showed her images on cards, and in real life when they filled it with things she didn’t understand.
    Sarah was certain they were wiping memories from her mind every time they handed her one of those stupid cups filled with pills. But as much as she hated each swallow, the pills helped her feel like there were fewer eyes on her, crawling across her skin like an army of insects.
    She spun toward the door, for some reason expecting the door to suddenly fly open and the tall lean doctor with the white coat to come running inside. Sarah didn’t know his name, even after sifting through memory, but she could clearly see his face behind her closed eyes.
    The door didn’t open. Instead, Sarah’s head exploded: a violent eruption of needles stabbing her brain and sending flashes of bright white lightning before her eyes.
    She lost her balance and fell to the floor.
    When Sarah looked up, she was no longer in her room, or her mind. Her world was swimming, bleeding, like sudden color swirled in creamy soup. She was so dizzy she couldn’t stand, and it took her a moment to realize the world was now being seen through someone else’s eyes.
    She blinked, wondering who she was, and what sort of madness the doctors were broadcasting into her mind. After a half minute spent with a racing heart and pounding head, Sarah blinked again, now realizing with a deep certainty she couldn’t explain, that this was real — not from the doctors — and that she was looking through Cassidy’s eyes.
    Sarah was Cassidy, standing in a room with Jon.
    They were in a small room, with four metal drawers in the left side wall — a morgue. The Hamilton Island Chief of Police Kevin Brady stood beside them. Brady looked at Jon, then at Sarah — or more accurately, at Cassidy — as he pulled a drawer from the wall — a lump draped under a gray blanket.
    Jon nodded, and Brady tore the sheet from the lump, revealing her daughter, naked and staring straight up at the ceiling. No, not staring — dead.
    “Oh, God!” Sarah screamed from