Valerie

Chapter Sixteen

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In which a mad-woman replaces her. 

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I don't remember what happened after I began to cry, though I don't think I slept. Some hours later, a door swung open to bring in a tray. I ate it; I vomited in the toilet soon after.

For the next meal, they served me one of those smoothies; the creaminess settled in my stomach like a brick. As soon as I finished, two men entered and grabbed me around the underarms. The coordinator, a bright, clean-looking woman in a knee-length dress walked beside us.

"It's time for the facility." She reached forward and dragged a thumb down my cheek. She scrubbed away the salt between her forefinger and her thumb. "None of that. Shouldn't you be happy to be a better woman?"

My throat was too dry to speak.

When I arrived in the procedure lab, Dr. Breeves greeted me with, "Luna." I sniffed in response. "Sleep well."

"I'd have killed myself in a few more minutes."

"Don't be like that." He filled a needle. "The country needs you very much."

"The country will destroy me if you don't first."

"All the humans that come here are hysterical at first." He flicked the contents of the needle until it mixed into a translucent green. "This might help. I'm going to give you lupinus glands to produce pheromones and new hormones. Then we'll backtrack to fur, and back to fangs. Just alterations." Bile crept up her throat and Dr. Breeves paused before injecting her. "It'll be a long day. You have to shift, Luna."

"Not everybody does," I whispered. I knew how stupid I was to say it. Both the doctor and I knew why it was demanded of me. Maybe the doctor feared for his life too; he might be killed for failing to produce results. I wish he would be killed.

I wiped the wetness from my eyes. I was going to stop being so afraid, from then on. I couldn't be a young girl anymore. I couldn't be scared. I had to be stronger.

(And I was still scared.)

"Well. Do you have to," I said.

He stuck the needle in my neck and my thoughts slowed. My mouth filled with bitterness as I slumped into the sheets below me. If I could've, I would've killed the doctor myself. Yeah, that was what I was going to do when I got power, the first thing I was going to do.

My dreams were not as clean as they were before. In fact, there was no division between the educator center and the procedure room. At one second I listened to verses from the moon's myths while crying, and in the next second, I screamed as a team or nurses broke my leg so it could harden with my next procedure. The other dreams were a bloodbath. My anger would rise and swell until I attacked my old orphanage workers, the Were Madame, and Yona. Then, the voices in the education center would warp and flutter, until they sounded like monsters with stretched-out voices. They'd sing their praises as I wiped the blood from my hands on my skirt and my shirt and sometimes Aeneas would be there, asking me to swear to him, asking me to kneel.

And sometimes, I'd be looking at myself in a mirror, angry and bloodied and bewildered. I was going crazy. I was already crazy.

Then, I'd go back to sleep and be filled with other dreams. The education center voices would return to normal, and remind me of the kind of woman that they wanted me to be.