Red Lighter ✧ John Murphy

XLVIII - Forgotten

August 27th, 2016

Bruh this chapter hurts my heart

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Chapter Fourty-Eight

They brought Kane out, him yelling to Abby and trying to convince her to stop them. They took the other man who had been on it off, even though he had yet to take the key. Not that it really mattered... He looked dead anyway. At the very least, he was close to it.

Kane kept saying that this was madness. Perhaps it was. We were just too blinded by ALIE's power to understand that. Our minds had been so corrupted that we didn't understand the difference between right and wrong. We could not tell the difference between ALIE's orders and our own. It was as if we were drones that had forgotten all that mattered to us. We had forgotten the pain, the misery, the angst. Anything that made us human was taken away from us. We were ghosts lingering in the shadows, watching the living with wide eyes filled with curiosity. But at the same time, we could not act on this curiosity because ALIE would not allow us to do.

I certainly was a ghost of my former self. Which is why I was the one to do it, as I had many times during my stay with ALIE, Jaha, and Ontari.

They put Kane down on the giant X that ALIE called "the cross" and chained his limbs down.

"Abby! This is madness!" he kept screaming.

"This is unity," Abby said, smiling down at him. There was a darkness in the grin she had on her face. A darkness that would have frightened me, if I had not taken the key and rid myself of all fear.

"Abby, please..." he begged, his voice breathy and cracking. He was terrified, and he had a right to be.

"Take the key!" Jaha shouted to him from beside me.

"Abby please, wake up!" Kane screamed.

"Just tell us where Clarke and the others are hiding," Abby said, giving him a choice. Of course, he made the wrong one. He would do anything to protect those kids, and that would be the thing to ruin him.

No matter. We would break him one way or another.

"I can't do that," he whispered, shaking his head wildly. "I can't."

With that, I went over to Kane, taking the hammer in my closed right hand. When Jaha nodded to me, I took a large nail from one of the other guards, and placed it at Kane's right wrist. With one strike, I had driven the nail deep into his wrist. His screams pierced the air. He was louder than any other I had helped to torture. It took two more hits for the nail to finally come out from the back of the cross, pinning his wrist down completely. Then, I went to the other hand. The sounds died down a little, his throat likely beginning to burn with how loud and how much he had been screaming. But that screaming soon returned when two grounders came forwards and pulled the chains, making the X go up into the air to stand vertically. ALIE and Jaha watched him emotionlessly, while I began to feel confused.

Something was inside my head. Every time I had driven the spikes further into Kane's arms, I felt something screaming in the back of my mind. I didn't know what it was, but I knew that it wasn't supposed to be happening. What was it? I felt like I should ask ALIE, but decided against it. She probably already knew. She would fix it. After all, she fixed everything. She's the one that makes the world a better place.

"Venus," Jaha said from beside me. I turned to look at him, waiting for him to give me my orders. "Why don't you go to the prisoners, and see if any of them have decided to take our offer?"

I nodded in reply, turning back and walking towards the dungeons.

"Oh, and afterwards, you are to take watch over Kane," he called to me.

Once again, I nodded in reply.

The prisoners were in a dungeon-like area, a room of carved from stone with spikes driven into the floors and walls to hold the captive people in place and away from each other. I wondered why they were putting themselves in so much torture and solitude, without food or water. But for them, it was either become one of us, or stay our enemy and stay here for the rest of their short lives.

Unlike them, we would live on in the City of Light with ALIE. I would thank her for that, but she already knew just how grateful I was. I was happy that I would forever be immortal. I would never die within our City of Light. I would live on.

I saw many different prisoners look up when I entered, but one that really caught my eye was a man chained to some of the bars on one of the walls. And he had more than a few bleeding cuts on him. I decided to ignore it, though. Even if these people did manage to get out of their binds and happened to decide to torture each other, they couldn't escape. It didn't matter what they did as long as it wasn't outside of their cell.

"Well? Will anyone else take the key?" I asked.

One head suddenly whipped towards me, and I was met with a pair of wide blue eyes. The boy suddenly darted forwards, the chain yanking at his ankle. "Ven!" he shouted, only to fall down on to his hands and knees when the chain kept his leg in place.

I raised a brow at the boy, then cocked my head to the side.

ALIE had gotten rid of all of the pain, and the hatred, and the sadness. But she had also gotten rid of the happiness, and the love. This was why the boy at my feet looked so surprised when I said those next few words.

"Do I know you?"