Final Truth

Chapter 9: Mind Surgery

"What's today's test?" I ask annoyingly as a nurse comes to inject me with a serum. Oddly enough, Peter also gets an injection.

"Well, this test will be a bit different: for today, I will be testing your power of healing. However, instead of going into the simulation alone, I'm sending both of you in," Henley says, pushing Peter in the glass case with me and locking the door.

"What?" Peter asks confusingly as he rattles the doorknob.

"You'll see," Henley says cruelly, walking over to the panel of buttons that stand waiting to be pushed to begin our torture.

She slams her hand down on one of the buttons, and a familiar explosion of pain begins where I was injected. Peter starts to writhe in pain.

I attempt to take his hand to comfort him, but he immediately pulls away from me.

My heart drops as I watch him panic, our surroundings beginning to contort to whatever the simulation is meant to induce.

Henley and the nurses all disappear, but other than that, we are still in the lab.

Puzzled, I get up and turn the doorknob, and to my surprise, it opens.

"Come on," I say to Peter, and he grudgingly follows me out of the glass case.

All the syringes are gone as well, the room left completely bare except for a single chair standing in the middle of the floor.

"What am I supposed to do?" I wonder aloud.

Your job is to heal the boy. If you can undo what I have done to Peter, as in make him remember himself, you will pass the test. If you don't, you fail. Happy testing, Henley says from outside the simulation.

Slowly, I turn and look at Peter as he eyes me with suspicion. I gesture to the chair, but he shakes his head in refusal.

"I can't pass or fail this test if you don't do what I say," I try, and to my surprise, he actually obeys me and sits in the chair.

"Alright, now we're getting somewhere," I say to myself.

I walk over to him, looking him up and down as I try to judge how to do this. If I can heal his mind, maybe I'll actually be able to get him back.

But at the same time, I'm not so great a healer. I'm not Cassia; if she were in this simulation instead of me, she would've already passed with flying colors.

Think like Cassia.

I slowly lower my hands and hold his face, rubbing circles on the spots by his eyes with the my thumbs.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath, immediately focusing on his brain and the damage that has been done to it.

"Don't hurt me," Peter whispers, letting his guard down for a split second to express a fear I didn't know he felt.

"I'm gonna help you," I promise him.

I focus on his brain waves as they travel through the neurons and receptors in his head and locate his medial temporal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for memory processing.