The Seraphim Project

Chapter Ten

A/N: I'm starting to run out of steam. O.o I'm still not even halfway to the 50,000 word goal of NaNoWriMo, and I'm running out of plot. So a lot of this is going to be crap that I'm making up as I go and it will probably not be very good. Just a warning. Long dialogue scenes with a lot repeated have already made an appearance. If this wasn't NaNoWriMo, I would just stop writing now and figure out what to do, but I have a week left and close to 28,000 words left to write. Sorry. :P

Hawk could hear them in the isle in front of him, talking. He suppressed a groan; his back flared with agony, and he just wished he could fade back into unconsciousness, where everything was blissfully silent and painless.

The back of his hand itched. When he finally gathered the energy to touch it, he found a tube poking into the vein there and leading off into the isle. An IV? How long had he been out?

The voices moved closer, and he focused on the words. It was the same two scientists as before, but the children were not with them. “He had an unbelievable tolerance, sir. He’s still alive, after all seventy lashings.”

The other scientist, the one in charge, snorted in disgust. “He’s still useless. Generation Two! What a failure.”

“But sir, he still has something that we can’t seem to recreate: human will. I think that’s why he’s still alive; he wants to be. The newer Generations, they don’t care about their lives as much. We’ve been getting better, but it’s still not like this. He has a reason to live, something to hold on to. I think we should try it.”

“With a flawed angel? No way. He could never be what we need.”

“But what if we fixed him? Surely we could transplant new eyes…”

“Idiot! You think that would help? His eyes are just fine. It’s his brain that’s the problem. It’s not advanced enough to handle his heightened senses, so it shut down his sight. We can’t fix his brain! We’d probably just end up destroying the very thing that could make him useful to us.”

“What could it hurt to try? We have no use for him, so why should we care if we break him trying to fix him? We don’t need him for any other purpose.”

Hawk trembled. He wasn’t sure what they were talking about, but he knew it concerned him. It sounded like they wanted to try to fix his eyesight, which was good, he supposed, but they also didn’t know how to do it. He didn’t want to die, or become some broken shell that was barely even human. He just wanted to go home.

“I think you’re right. Tomorrow. We’ll do some research and do the procedure tomorrow. You hear that, boy? We’re going to fix you tomorrow. Or break you. Something to look forward to, I suppose.” The head scientist rattled the bars on his crate, and he shrunk away from them, hissing as several of the cuts on his back opened from the movement.

The scientists laughed and headed away. They stopped at several other cages and spoke of other, trivial things before they left. He heard them put down the keys just outside of the containment room and then, they were gone. He sighed in relief.

But then his thoughts turned to this new development. They were going to try to fix him tomorrow. He had one more day, and then everything would change. He might get the sight that he had longed for for most of his life, or he might lose himself or his life. Was it worth the risk?

No, he decided, it wasn’t. He got along just fine blind. He didn’t need his sight, he knew it. But he couldn’t stop them, couldn’t get away, couldn’t escape. Not by himself.

But Kite…

No, he told himself. Don’t think about her. She’s not coming. Don’t get your hopes up now. All he could hope for was that he would survive the next day, that he would gain his sight and not lose anything in return.

Not that he didn’t think she was looking. He was sure she was, or at least had been. But he shouldn’t have ever considered that she would actually find this place in time. It was impossible. It only hurt more now that he’d considered it, that he’d thought it really was a possibility. No, if he got out, it would be by his own means.

Now all he needed was a plan. But what could he do? He would need the key to get out of the crate, plus, he didn’t know where he was in the building or how to get out.

“Hey. Generation Two, right?” He nearly hit his head on the top of his crate when a voice spoke from the one below his.

Hesitantly, he said, “Yeah. You?”

“Generation Thirteen.”

Hawk shook his head. The voice he’d heard must have been almost his age. “No way. You’d have to be, what, five?”

“They figured out how to speed up our aging. I age at about three times the speed of normal people.”

“That must’ve been nice, to not take so long growing up and maturing and all that.”

The boy shook his head. Hawk could tell because he had long hair, and he could hear it hitting the sides of his head. “Not really. Not when you’re life span is also a third of other people’s. They don’t think we’ll slow down, which they fixed in Generation Fourteen. By the time I’m thirty, I’ll probably be dead, or at least really close to it.”

“Sorry, I guess.”

The boy sighed. “Yeah, well. At least I’m not blind, right?”

Hawk’s fists clenched, and he gritted his teeth. He couldn’t keep the venom out of his voice when he spoke again. “Yeah. At least your not blind.”

“Woah. Sorry dude. Didn’t mean to hurt your feelings or whatever. Just making a joke.”

“Not a good one.”

“I was just trying to be nice, seeing as you probably won’t be around tomorrow.”

“Yeah. ‘Cause that’s so nice, remind me that they’re going to kill me tomorrow.”

“I try. Hey, do you smell something?”

Hawk sniffed. Yes, he did smell something. It smelled like the first time Kite had tried to use the stove, and had caught a dish towel on fire. So that meant…

“Fire. There’s a fire somewhere in the building, probably somewhere close,” he told the boy, shivering and pushing himself into the back of his crate, as if that would save him from the flames. Logically, he knew that, as he was on the top row, he would probably die of smoke inhalation before the fire even reached him.

That didn’t make him any less terrified.

The scientists would save him. He was nothing to them. He couldn’t save himself. That left only one hope. A useless hope, one that he knew he shouldn’t even consider. But he couldn’t help it. He sent a thought out, as if it would bring her to him.

Please, Kite. Please find me.