It’s them. I know that it’s them. Now that I’m back in their grasp, I wonder why in the world I denied my true identity when that could have been my ticket out of this place.
I’m an idiot.
I’ve been making too many idiotic choices because I haven’t been around long enough to make real choices that are good for me. I don’t even know what I’m doing half the time.
“Oh!” she says. “They’re here!” Her face lights up and she looks so happy even though I definitely do not feel the same way about these people now. She heads over to the door and opens it. Of course, they’re all standing there, looking weary and a little tired. I feel a tinge of satisfaction, knowing that I’m the reason for this fatigue. But when it comes, it disperses. I can’t feel happy about someone’s fatigue. It’s not right.
“Hi,” Tabitha greets the woman, and the woman greets her back with more vigour. My eyes go towards her hands. She is holding something sleek and black.
“Hello Tabitha!” she says happily. “Welcome in! Here’s, ah, Seven Young.”
Tabitha’s dark eyes flicker towards me before it goes back to the woman. “Thank you,” Tabitha tells her. “Thank you for helping us.”
“But of course!” she says. “You are right about things in Seraphin. They’re not like they used to be. I used to think Fiametta was crazy until Eagan decided to join her cause. She opened my eyes.”
Gordon brings a finger to his lips, and the woman nods. “Oh yes, of course. Her name is to be spoken. My blunder,” she admits quickly. “And no, this place isn’t bugged. They don’t find it worthy enough to bug. They don’t think we have a shred of intelligence, and we’re still keeping a low profile.”
“Good,” Gordon says, looking relieved. Thorpe, who is at the back, peers from behind Gordon around the house.
“Where’s Jakob?” he asks quietly.
“He’s at school,” the woman tells him. “Now would you three like to come inside?”
Tabitha hesitates and then looking at her two companions, she complies. “All right,” she finally says due to the look that Thorpe gives her. When she says so, he smiles brightly and rushes past us and up the stairs before we can even move.
Tabitha sighs and shakes her head but a hint of a smile is playing on her lips while she watches her brother disappear up the stairs. “That boy…”
“Would you like something to eat?” the woman asks them kindly.
“We’ve already eaten, thanks for the suggestion Necha,” Gordon says, grinning again. “Actually, we’d like to have a private word with Seven.”
My head jerks up at the mention of my name, and all eyes are on me like they’ve suddenly remembered that I exist too. I don’t know what to say so I don’t say anything at all.
“You can have the whitewashed room in the back,” Necha says. “Do you want me to blindfold her so she doesn’t know the way out?”
It’s a little silly to do that, but I don’t say it. The house isn’t large and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out where the exit is. I’ve already escaped once. But I don’t say these points, and I stand there quietly, wondering what Gordon and Tabitha want to say to me. It can’t be something good seeing the sudden storminess in Tabitha’s eyes.
“No, that won’t be necessary,” Gordon says casually. “She’s not going to escape. We’ll keep an eye on her at all times. In fact,” Gordon adds cheerfully, “you’ll have two pair of eyes watching her. That’s four eyes in total.”
Necha smiles and shakes her head. “You’re just like usual,” she says wistfully.
Gordon does a mock bow. “Good to know that,” he says, a smile making his lips curl upwards.
Tabitha turns her attention to me. “Seven,” she says, her lips pressing into a thin smile. “It’s nice to see you again.” She knows I ran away from them on purpose. She was just lucky that I happened to run into Mallory and then lied to the guards when I was presented another chance at escape.
I nod at her, keeping my eyes away from hers. She might be angry at me. I’m sure she is for what I’ve done. Or she must be angry at Kasie for letting me loose so easily.
Necha goes upstairs to watch over Thorpe while Gordon and Tabitha lead me to a white room where I was interrogated earlier on. The chair still stands in the middle of the room, but I don’t head over to sit on it. Instead, I go to the other side of the room and press my back against the cold wall, facing Tabitha and Gordon. They close the door and both stare at me. There’s silence between us.
Gordon brandishes the knife of words with quick mastery and then slices it through the silence easily, cutting through the bread of silence.
“Tabitha might have already mentioned this to you,” Gordon tells me in that casual way of his. He glances at me and grins brightly. “It’s something about your family that you might have wanted to know.”
My heartbeat races, pounding against my chest, knowing the information being told will change me somehow. Like my footsteps along the ground when I ran away, the beats are relentless, strong, and faster than usual. “I don’t have a family,” I say almost dully.
“Everyone does,” Tabitha insists. “They’re always there for you. They’re the people who shape whom you are. They’re the people who stand up for you in the darkest of times. Your family. And you’re saying you don’t have one.”
“But I don’t,” I counter, my own voice sounding hollow and like it can blow away with a small gust of wind. I close my eyes and then open them again. “I don’t,” I say more forcefully.
Tabitha walks towards me, and I stare at her with wide eyes. What is she going to do? Strangle me? But that’s not the case because she places the sleek black thing she was holding flat on the chair and bends over it, opening it from the middle. The way it slices easily through the air almost makes me gasp out loud. From far away, it looks like just one rectangular shape. The fact that she can split it evenly so easily interests me. I step closer to her, examining the black rectangle with interest. “What’s that?” I ask her, unable to keep the curiosity from my voice. I think I’ve seen something like that before. Tabitha smiles at me and motions me over. I don’t even think about any bad intentions before I go to her side. My curiosity overrides all paranoia.
There’s a screen at the vertical side and a very small arrow corresponding to the movements she makes on a small silver pad on the horizontal side of the rectangular item. There are black square blocks with numbers, letters, and other odd symbols that decorate the horizontal plane. Tabitha’s fingers move expertly on the blocks, and I find that they are pushed down easily with just a little pressure.
“Oh,” I say, because I recognize this thing. It’s a machine. Dr. Salazar used them to file in his reports. The Teachers sometimes used them for filing our academic achievements. We’ve never been allowed to examine them closely. The most I’ve gotten was a far glance at the screen. Most of the time, I’ve seen Dr. Salazar with a silver machine, and he asks me questions about my condition. I answer them honestly, and he presses the blocks when I answer them.
I don’t know exactly how the screen works, but I see some kind of file pop up and there are coherent words that scroll past the screen. Seeing them brings relief to me. It’s something that I can understand.
Gordon peers over her shoulder, and I wonder how I missed noticing that he walked over here. But that’s trivial because Tabitha looks entirely devoted the words on the screen right now. She scrolls down quickly with a flick of her fingers, and the screen lands on a coloured photo. She turns and gives me a pointed look, not saying anything.
I stare at the photo wondering what is so important about it. From here, it looks like a bedraggled looking man in dark clothes with dark bags under his eyes. He holds up a white board that says a bunch of numbers that escape my mind after I read them.
“Yes?” I ask Tabitha, wondering what she is trying to make me see. “It’s a man.”
Tabitha looks perplexed at my expression and then scrolls down the screen some more. “Here,” she says, stopping at a full-coloured photograph. It is of a smiling little girl in a wheat field. Her hair is brown, but it looks golden in the streaming sunlight. She has a wide smile and is holding a drooping daisy in her hand. She wears white clothing that is slightly muddy, but she doesn’t seem to care at all for the dirtiness.
This scene feels familiar. Goosebumps prickle my skin when I stare at the picture with the girl in the dying sunlight. I know her. I’ve seen her before.
In fact, I’ve seen her every time I looked in the mirror, albeit she was older.
The girl in the photograph is me.
I suck in a deep breath and then exhale slowly, my heart pounding so hard that I’m afraid it will burst from my chest. I know this girl. It’s me. It’s me. It’s me.
She’s wearing white, but it’s not the same clothes the ones the hospital would give. It’s caked with dirt so I highly doubt that it’s from the hospital otherwise I would have gotten a punishment I’d never forget. The girl looks much younger than I ever remember being. Her smile is far too wide, and I know I’ve never worn something like that upon my face before. Never.
“You know who this is?” Tabitha asks me, her voice very soft and almost regretful. “Do you?”
I don’t reply because I’m too busy taking in the image of her. It can’t be me. It can’t be.
But then I remember the Memory Pills and their work upon my mind.
“It’s me,” I manage, my voice sounding very normal and not like I’m surprised at all. “The girl in the photograph is me.”
But I don’t remember it. I don’t remember. My teeth grind together, and I place the palms of my hands on my temple. I don’t remember. I can’t remember. The memory taunts me, zipping out of reach before I can fully grasp it. It laughs and jeers at me, getting further and further away until the memory itself is only an echo of laughter dancing away in the wind.
Slowly lowering my hands from my head, I sink down to the floor, curling up with my knees to my face and my arms around them like a line of a protective shell that used to exist a long time ago but doesn’t anymore. The lack of memories claw their way up to my head, telling me that I was nothing. I am nothing. I am nothing but a patient in the hospital.
I wish that I’d gone back when I had a chance. Then Tabitha and Gordon and whoever else is with them will be reprimanded and castigated for their crimes of intruding into private property, murdering an innocent woman, and whatever else they’ve done.
“Yes,” Tabitha tells me calmly. “The girl is you.”
It feels all too much and there’s a tightening feeling in my chest while I stare at the photo. “What are you trying to tell me?” I finally ask, my own voice sounding breathless and weak.
Tabitha scrolls down some more and clicks on other files. Meanwhile, Gordon does the explaining.
“Remember how we just found out that there was a twenty-second sector?” he asks, looking at my expression for any change. I nod, remembering this conversation.
“Well,” Gordon says, a casual grin upon his face, “it wasn’t the only sector hidden by officials.”
“Who are the officials?” I ask him, not understanding what he means by that. Are the guards that were marching outside the ‘officials’? And what do they do other than allowing people permission to leave sectors?
“Kind of like the people in your hospital. The doctors, teachers, and nurses are the officials there. We have a government who runs Seraphin and less powerful people running each sector and even less powerful people running each city within the sector. Then there are the guards.” Gordon winces at this. “I can’t remember the real name. I haven’t been in the sectors often but the majority of them are children.”
“Oh,” I say, still feeling slightly confused but wanting him to continue. “So there’s another sector?”
“According to the files we took from the hospital, yes,” Tabitha says, motioning to the computer. There are a plethora of tiny black letters on a white background that begin to hurt my eyes the longer I stare at them until I have to look away. “He’s keeping so many things from us,” she mutters, contempt in her voice. “And everyone thinks that Seraphin lives on perfect harmony.” She shakes her head. “Please.”
There’s that word again. “Harmony,” I whisper, my voice barely audible. The sound of it is lovely, so chimerical and clear that I say it again. “Harmony.”
“At least we know,” Gordon encourages, but I can see that Tabitha is too distressed over this thought to even care. “We’ll stop him.”
Tabitha has forgotten that I’m in this room, and her face turns red when she spins around to face Gordon. This is not the first time she’s lost control of her emotions. I know that every time it happens in the hospital, we are given more pills. I hated that so I learned to hold all my emotions behind a wall of steel.
My walls will never break. Apparently, Tabitha must hold her emotions behind a wall of water because it always comes rushing through with no pause or hesitation.
“How?” Tabitha asks, her voice trembling. She’s going to cry. “How can we stop him when every single person out of our cause can’t even see through the lies? He’s got them all in their own fairytale of peace, and they’re never letting that go. You hear me? Never!”
She brushes away stray tears with the back of her hand. “Never,” she repeats, her tone more resigned now.
“Hey, don’t cry,” Gordon tells her, patting her back while I watch the both of them and wonder what I should say or do. “We can see through it. We can show them.”
“They don’t want to see it,” Tabitha says, her voice shaky and her hands trembling when she wipes away more tears that replace the others. “They don’t believe me. They don’t believe anything other than their world is a paradise that does not need to be fixed. They don’t know what goes on!” Her emotions are acting up again. She then turns to me and points a finger at me. “She’s living proof of that! She thinks we’re horrible people and wants to go back to that horrible place where they treat people like nothing. That’s exactly what they think like!”
Tabitha looks on the verge of another breakdown, and I keep silent. It’s not very hard, assuming that I am silent most of the time. I stare at the screen and wonder what is so aggravating about it to Tabitha. It’s not her picture. It’s not a snapshot of a life she can’t remember. If anyone should be aggravated and screaming, it should be me. Yet I am standing here, staring at the screen and wondering how the picture was taken.
I must have asked it out loud, but I don’t remember asking it. Gordon looks at me and his mouth opens and closes again. Then he looks at Tabitha, asking for her permission to answer me. Tabitha isn’t looking at him, and she fixes her eyes on me. The edges of the whites are slightly red, but she looks more determined than anything. “Your family took this picture,” she says, emphasizing every word. She’s using it like a weapon. “And that picture is of you for certain. It wasn’t altered. That’s not another little girl who looks like you. It really is you. Namely, the first recorded photograph that they could find of you. Believe it or not, this is you before the hospital.”
Again, the words ‘before the hospital’ resonates in my head, bouncing against the walls of my mind until I can’t take it anymore, and it disappears, sucked into me to stay forever. The thought of that horrifies me, and I bring a hand to my hand and hit my temple with my palm hard.
Gordon and Tabitha stare at me.
I lower my hand and look at the ground, realizing how silly I must have looked. I want to say sorry but what for? I’m not doing anything wrong. I never do anything wrong, ever.
Or at least that’s what I believe. “What?” I ask when they continue staring at me. Tabitha is the first to look away and a grin breaks across Gordon’s face.
“They really did mess with your head. I don’t blame you for it,” he says.
The question escapes my mouth quicker than I can stop it. “Who’s ‘they’?” That’s all Tabitha and Gordon have been speaking about for the last few minutes. ‘They’. Who are ‘they’?
“Your friends,” Tabitha says, and I can hear the hint of a sneer in her voice. “The doctors, the nurses, the officials, the governor are them.”
“Oh,” is all that comes out of my lips, and I curse myself for coming up with such an idiotic response. Then I try to steer the conversation back where it was. “I never lived outside the hospital.” Even in my own voice, I can hear the doubt so strongly that it is like it’s reverberating from my bones. “I’ve always lived in the hospital,” I say. They are different words, but they repeat the same meaning. I’ve never been outside the hospital until now. Until Tabitha, Bryler, Thorpe, and Gordon stole me from there and murdered an innocent nurse on the way out.
If I close my eyes and think hard enough, I can see the slumped, dead body of the nurse with a circular bloody wound smoking from her forehead. My stomach squeezes with nausea at the image, and I shove it right out of my head. I don’t want to see images like this. I don’t.
“No,” Tabitha tells me firmly. “You have lived outside. You’ve just forgotten everything. You were born outside the hospital. The fact is, ironically, everyone who lives in that hospital was born outside of it. You didn’t live in the twenty-second sector all your life.”
“I have.” My voice sounds so weak like it can be bended to someone’s will easily. Why do I sound like that? I wish I didn’t.
“No.” Tabitha shakes her head, looking at me with a pitiful expression. “They’ve lied to you.” Her voice rises. “Face it.”
“Tabitha,” Gordon begins gently, holding his arm with his hand, but she jerks out of his grasp. His voice goes softer and lower, but I can still hear it. “She’s not going to believe you. You know that none of them do. Ever.”
“I don’t care!” Tabitha hisses back, stomping her foot on the ground like she’s throwing a tantrum. “I’ve had enough of this! She’s going to believe it whether she wants to or not!”
Gordon’s voice is soft but firm. “No, Tabitha,” he says. “You can’t make her. It’s her own choice.”
Tabitha snaps, and she wretches her hand away from him. “I have the evidence,” she says, her chin lifted high. “I will prove it to her that I’m right.” Then she bends over the machine again and starts pressing her fingers against the square blocks with masterful skill that must have taken hours of practice if not more.
“I think that’s enough,” Gordon says firmly, reaching out for her again, but Tabitha glares at him, daring him to come closer. He hesitates and then moves away from Tabitha, knowing that he should let her go on about her work.
“The microchip we took contains backup information about every patient in the hospital. Of course, it’s backup, and it hasn’t been updated since a while so some of the newer information is secluded. But,” Tabitha says, holding up a finger and still looking at the screen, “it still contains useful information and should not be overlooked.”
“Tabitha,” Gordon says again, and she shoots him another glare, but he doesn’t back down. “It’s enough. We can’t give her false hope like that.”
“Isn’t that what Wynfor said?” Tabitha asks nonchalantly, but Gordon’s face turns red with embarrassment or anger, I don’t know which. “So are you walking down his path now?”
“Don’t compare us,” Gordon says, his voice sounding angry and cold. I stare at him, not remembering any other time I’ve seen his eyes narrowing and darkening. “We’re nothing alike. Nothing.”
Tabitha wants to push him to the breaking point, but she doesn’t. Instead, her mouth closes, and she gives him a defiant look before looking back at the screen. “It contains details about the families of the patients and where they are if they are still alive. Surprisingly, most of the patients are volunteered by their families or themselves.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask her, feeling more confused by the moment. The confusion doesn’t block out the growing feel of fear and worry though. I don’t know where they come from, but I feel like I’m being crushed in from all sides and I just want out of it.
“Patients,” Tabitha says, and I nod. I know what patients are.
“They’re not there because they have some problem.” I only thought it was that case for me. I never needed the pills. They were the ones that were causing the hallucinations in the first place. I just never thought that it was the same case for the others. “They’re there because they volunteered themselves for the cause.”
“What cause?” I have never heard of any cause at the hospital. We were all there because we had problems we needed to fix before we were to rejoin Society. I don’t know if I can trust the words that come from Tabitha’s lips, but there’s a part of me that does believe her. I already found this out before she even told me.
Tabitha’s mouth clamps shut, and it presses into a thin smile. The smiles do not reach those dark eyes. “I can’t tell you that yet. The thing is that we tracked down your family because we needed to know more about you and the reason you were in it.”