The Dollhouse Asylum Read Online Free PDF

but he stops it from moving by placing a gentle hand on my trembling face.
    I draw in a breath. Teo’s reassuring touch is the only thing I need. The warmth of his palms, his slender fingertips. If I close my eyes and freeze time, then we can kiss again, and everything Teo’s hinting at might go away. But he reaches into his suit coat pocket and pulls out a single vial with a clear liquid inside—and I’m so not ready to accept the fact that I need a vaccine.
    My illogical impulse is to grab the flask and fling it on the ceramic tile, because in my mind not seeing a vial lets me keep lying to myself. It means the Living Rot hasn’t come back.
    “It has happened before,” Teo whispers, stroking the hair above my ear, “and it was only a matter of time before it happened again.” My nerves crackle, but not just because we’re skin to skin. It can’t be a repeat of Beijing. The Living Rot is in the past.
    I watch our reflection: his black suit against my white dress, unable to believe our time together is because of this. This cannot be what has happened. They told us it was over. They told us we were safe, that the cause of the Living Rot was buried as deeply as the core of the earth. They said life would resume as normal. Teo can’t be right.

3
    Steering me from the bathroom and down the scorching street, Teo murmurs velvet-tinged words, but they bounce off my ears, my cheeks. I’m not really sure why, but I feel like I’m holding up a shield, blocking out anything that needs a vaccine. A sickness that causes people to eat other people? They promised it would be scoured from the earth. They said everything regarding the sickness was burned. Of course, it is possible for new viruses to be created or found, but our planet has already learned the horrific outcome of the disease.
    “I am sorry to tell you like this,” Teo says as he steers me past the third or fourth house, “but I need to bring you up to speed. The other couples know. It’s the first thing I showed them when they arrived.”
    Vaccine. Couples. Rot. I can only think in one-word sentences, walking down the length of Elysian Fields as the sun over the horizon winks. Evening. Night. Lies.
    Teo turns at the fifth or sixth mailbox. “Cleo has the footage,” Teo is saying. “You know how I avoid watching TV.” It’s true. The only one at his house was in Marcus’s room because, according to Teo, Marcus had a death-grip on his shows.
    Somehow, Teo manages to pull me through Cleo’s house, which I suppose is Egyptian-themed. Gold-painted baseboards, peach-painted walls, floor to ceiling statues of some Egyptian god—my stomach lurches. Whatever happened to beige? Even her couches are over-the-top with tassels and leopard prints.
    Part of me acknowledges Teo pushing me up another curved, wrought iron staircase, and the other part of me trembles at the thought of everyone I know becoming sick. My mom. Mayor Tydal. Serenity and Josie, the other kids at school. Instead of peach walls everything would be broken, and the world would be colored in the stench of so much red.
    Upstairs, Teo sits me down gently on a hieroglyphic-patterned bed, the foreign sprawl of symbols looking much like what’s going on in my head—chaos and an inability to accept. The Living Rot, returned? But God would never again sour the earth.
    Plucking up a remote, Teo clicks on the TV, and I don’t want to look. Because real footage would show me the Living Rot must be accepted as the truth.
    I train my eyes on the gold fabric of the bed, grit my teeth because I can’t bear to see. But Teo’s hand gently cups my chin and, with only a bit of resistance, I allow him to move my face up. Because maybe, just maybe, I can accept whatever it is with Teo holding me.
    A cameraman we can’t see is fleeing. The screen is bouncing and not quite up and down. The subject of the screen is a person, but gray, decaying, and diseased. It’s a little girl. An orange dress hangs on her