plays dead

Losing myself . . . losing me. They would be upset if they lost me. Because I wouldn’t be around to jump through their hoops. But since I couldn’t physically move, getting lost seemed pretty unworkable.
Except.
There was another way for them to lose me: if I died.
Which would sort of defeat my own purpose, as well as theirs. But—could I just make them think I was dead?
I bet there were monitors of some sort in here. When you put a rat in a maze, you hung around to observe the results. They’d probably been recording my crazed ranting and sobbing all along.
Now. How to be dead?
I lay back in the buoyant liquid. It supported me totally—I didn’t have to try to keep my head up or anything. My breathing slowed, in and out, one, two, three, four. I relaxed every single muscle. Then I just . . . went inside myself. It was like I was a machine and I was slowly flicking switches off. I just willed all my systems to slow down more and more.
In the yawning silence, my heart beat slower, then slower. My eyes closed. Everything was still and silent. Maybe I would lie in this watery tomb forever.
There was no time, no thought, no motion.
I hoped I wasn’t actually dead.
That would make finding our parents and saving the world really hard.

School’s Out — Forever Chapter 128


 I, Maximum Ride, was dead, and nobody seemed to have noticed.
Maybe I really was dead. I was starting to not really care one way or another.
Finally, finally my captors figured out that instead of an interesting, captive lab rat, they now had a much less interactive dead body on their hands.
Deep in my trance, I had only a split second to brace myself as they ripped open the top of the tank, letting in retina-searing, blinding light. Staying limp was the hardest thing I had ever done.
Voices said, “What happened? Who was monitoring her? They’re gonna have our butts!”
Once again hands grabbed me and hauled me out of there. Once again it was the most horrible, painful thing I could imagine. But this time I forced my eyes open, put my feet down, and roared.

School’s Out — Forever Chapter 130