All We Know of Heaven

[ 008 ] dog days

FOUR YEARS AGO

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FORTUNE CITY

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WHEN THE WORLD ENDED WITH A BANG—

Metal groaning, a hiss of sparks. The ground beneath their feet rumbled, sending fissures spreading through the concrete, raining debris and dust down on their heads. Blinding rage tore through her body with the vehemence of a nuclear explosion funnelled through the vents of her veins. Sloane, with her feet planted in the ground, her hands outstretched, the metal around her warping, needles flying off trays, gurneys torn from the ground, pipes wrenching off the ceiling, steel beams warping.

There was a hole ripped in her heart and only destruction could fill it. It took only four simple words.

Hold still, or this might kill you, said one of the doctors, snapping surgical gloves over his hands, the syringe on the tray already filled with a strange liquid. After months of cutting her open, extracting tissue from her organs and drilling for bone marrow, something had snapped inside Sloane, the rug ripped from under her feet, the shackles around her formerly submissive limbs no longer restraints but weapons. Girls like Sloane didn't have much else except the anger. And anger, Sloane was good at. While they'd carved her into a weapon, they'd forgotten to keep her happy. Girls like Sloane were never unhappy alone. Hold still, or this might kill you. And while she was unconscious, what would they do to her? And if she died, would they simply replace her with another one? The words kept replaying in her head until the anger sliced through her body like a knife, and she'd ripped the remote control right out of the doctor's hands and torn the shock collar off her neck without a second thought. Her neck burned from the initial shock, but Sloane fought through it. What more would they take from her now? All she'd wanted to do was rip and rend the world to pieces, make everything on the outside look like the hurt on the inside. Maul the world like the carnival bears set free.

—she was the last one standing in the whimpering aftermath.

In a blink, it was over.

Around her, the smoking remains of Velocity Labs was nothing but a desecrated wasteland of her pain. What was once a proud, state-of-the-art facility for cutting-edge science was now reduced to nothing but broken cement and shredded metal. Fragments of bodies stuck out from the debris. An estranged ringing in her ears drilled through her skull as Sloane took the first step forward, the air around her strange and thick with death. Ruin and rubble crunched beneath the soles of her combat boots. A crack of bones beneath her feet halted her in her step. When she looked down, she saw a charred, bloody hand sticking out, the rest of its owner trapped under the rubble. One look gleaned that she was the only one who'd survived the explosions once the ceiling cracked open like an egg, caving under her powerful command, the metal within the infrastructure roaring with her rage as it came crashing down on everyone else inside, burying them alive. There was no way that any of them could've walked away unscathed. Let alone alive.

Dirt streaked her red jumpsuit, coating her hair and her face, marring her features unrecognisable—she would be, anyway, to the world who'd never seen her face. Shutting her eyes, Sloane tipped her head back and breathed in the smell of the smoke, the little flames licking at the debris, hungry for survivors, even though there were none. When she opened her eyes, Sloane saw the sky from the ground for the first time, standing on her own in the open space, the world unobscured by walls and technicolour TV screens. Around her, the world was sprawled wide open—hers to take, hers to cross, hers to explore. No more mothers and canes, no more scientists and experiments. Fortune City had only ever been known in snatches of periphery. In the plastic bags her mother brought home when she went grocery shopping, the sounds of mild traffic from her bedroom, the overcast sky when she snuck out of her bedroom window to sit on the rooftop of the apartment building. Other than that, Sloane saw nothing else. Above her, the stars glimmered, their cold gaze falling over her through the tangle of smoke and the settling dust. Sloane took one last glance at her work. In her rage, she'd completely destroyed every piece of the world she used to know. The only world she had known. And now...