Lee was having a rough day start to finish. They slept in too late, woke up groggy and grumpy, and were cut in line at Starbucks. They got to the shop to find some jackass kids had tagged their front window. The only people who came in were a couple of looky-loos who bought nothing and touched everything, and the Sentinels.
That last one was the problem. They burst in through the back door, heavily armed, pointing guns at them and Kevin. Lee shoved him through the door first and yanked off the handle, destroying the transportation spell attached to it. They ran for the front door and were cut off; there was a struggle, but no shots fired. Their hands were cuffed behind their back and the whole time they were hollering that they wanted a lawyer, damn it.
Next thing they knew they were shoved into the back of a dark van and held down while a needle punctured their inner arm. If this hadn’t been illegal before then it was definitely illegal now, and the paranoid part of them thought, oh god, this is it, I’m going to die. But if they’d just wanted to kill them, surely they would have just shot them. That was their last lucid thought before their pupils dilated and everything went hazy and vague.
With no idea how much time had passed, knowing only that they felt terrible, they lay on the floor of what they thought was some kind of featureless detention cell God knew where; they hadn’t been able to pay attention on the way over. They’d vomited in one corner. They could smell it sometimes, wafting over. Their hand kept stroking the ground apparently of its own volition and they were grinding their teeth so hard their jaw ached. Their stomach ached too. Probably that was where the vomit came from.
They look up at a stirring of dust in the room, confused by what they’re seeing. They’ve been hallucinating all afternoon, the voices in their head trickling from a whisper to a roar of noise, but that one looks an awful lot like Michael. “Mum,” they mumble in Hebrew. “I have to go home. My tummy hurts.”