**CURRENTLY A FEATURED STORY**
highest ranking: #11 in Science fiction
❝true happiness is only achieved without freedom.
There is a girl who wakes to a world that she was supposed to protect. Instead, she fights it.
There is a man who is cursed wit...
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evanna
"NO, NO, NO!" JULIAN throws their arms up in frustration. "No, what the hell! You don't want to go for my carotid artery. That's too much blood. Too messy. You don't want to make a mark." I lower my hand as Julian's fingers cinch around my wrist, my grip on the knife loosening. "Our aim is not to leave as many bodies as possible in our wake."
I move my hand as I listen, brows furrowing, tapping the knife lightly against my upper thigh. The training room is empty, and Julian stands before me in a tank top, their bangs falling over their slightly damp forehead. "But they deserve to die."
"Think," they snap. "Just because they deserve to die doesn't mean we need to kill them. Whilst you're here, you'll stick with Bernard's rules, okay? Okay?"
Julian's right, of course. Of course. Although I've escaped from prison, I'm still underneath the all-powerful influence of Tetrahmon's founders. Whatever it was we brought back from the lab has turned Bernard cautious and reserved. If anything, Julian and Francis are the only ones who don't see me as an important threat. Not that I care for them, of course. That would be stupid.
"Okay."
It's not my fault, I want to answer, but I know Julian knows and they won't take any complaints anyways. It's not my fault I was programmed to kill that which I saw as hostile, that I find it difficult to distinguish amical friend from hostile foe. I have found my purpose, and my obsession, both of which I must try to contain. My purpose: to protect the city I stand underneath, in this cavernous, primitive holding. My obsession: to kill, to seek blood, to be ruthless and unforgiving. But nobody can blame my actions on what I am programmed to do: at least, not entirely.
"Good. Alright, I think that's enough for now." Julian plucks the knife from my hand with a grin at the glower I send them, and slings a small towel over one shoulder. Thirty minutes later finds me seated uncomfortably between Julian and Francis in Bernard's dining room, the contents of what lay earlier in plastic examination bags scattered across the metal table amidst heels of bread and bowls of soup. I recognise the sample vial I took from the laboratory what feels like so long ago.
"I assume you've figured it out? What Phase 2 is?" Phase 2. Malcolm had been talking about Phase 3-- we're behind. We're lagging.
"We're calling it nano-blood. It's microscopic technology that now lives on the walls of the blood vessels of a person, so it's not possible to undo its effects or influence on the person without killing them," Bernard explains.
Nano-blood, as I come to know, is the implantation of infinitesimal, robotic-like material that uses a minute fraction of the ATP produced by cells lining the blood vessels to function. Each particle is programmed and fitted with the same technology. Around the size of a virus, each parasitic robot, comprising of a gold-titanium shell, along with other components, slips between cell membranes to gain the energy to function before slipping back out and circulating around the patient again through the bloodstream.
