Noise crashed around me, and my eyes fluttered open, snapped open wide in shock. The light hit me, brilliant and glaring, blinding me so that I shut my eyes right away. My head hurt. It was throbbing so hard I felt sick to my stomach. The crashing noise stopped, and someone spoke, the noise too garbled to make out the words. A crack and pop followed this sound, and then scratchy sounding classic music filled my ears.
I tried to open my eyes again, more slowly this time. The room swam around me, and I squinted against the light, struggling to sit up. Something pulled tight against my arms, holding me where I was. After a few seconds of panic my vision cleared.
The room was white, blazing white. Sterile looking. There were cupboards along one wall, glossy metal cabinets above a wide green counter. Test tubes and glass vials decorated the countertop. Panic spiked in my chest, and my pulse picked up even more as I blinked, then shifted my gaze down to my torso. Why can’t I move?
There were thick leather straps across my chest, metal buckles glimmering under the florescent lights. I tilted my head forward, chest tight, and saw an identical set of straps over my knees and ankles. I was in restraints, tied to a metal trolley like I was a mental patient at a hospital.
But the room wasn’t a hospital, it was far worse.
Opposite the table I was lying on was a second table, but this one was empty. The buckles were open, and the straps hung down, but I could see a pool of dried liquid on the trolley, the burnt crimson colour of dried blood.
Something was squeezing my heart in my chest, sending it up into my throat. I felt like I was choking on my own panic. Beside me, something began beeping at a steadily increasing rate, and when I jerked my head the other way I could see I’d been hooked up to some kind of machine. They were monitoring me. There were tubes taped to my skin at both wrists, which meant there were needles sticking into my skin. A rush of nausea made me feel lightheaded.
“Ms. Worth, please sedate the subject, I don’t want her heart rate rising above one hundred, if we can help it.” The man that spoken had his back turned to me, he was at the far end of the room, beyond the other table. He was tall, with frizzy black hair, and he wore a white lab coat that hung off his scarecrow frame. When he moved, the sound of glass vials clinking reached me. What was he doing?
Movement attracted my attention to the other side of my table. A young woman, her dark hair pulled up in a careful knot at the back of her head, approached me. She reached into the pocket of her lab coat and drew something out. The lights overhead made the needle in her hand glitter.
“No!” my voice was hoarse, gravely and barely audible. “No, stop. You can’t—”
She didn’t even look at me. The needle felt like a beesting going in, a sliver of pain that ran up my arm. The woman stepped back and picked up a fist-sized black box from the countertop. She hit one of the buttons on the side and spoke into it. “Subject 23 has been sedated. We will begin by testing formula twelve point five.” The tape recorder clicked off and she set it down.
“You can’t…you can’t do this…” It felt like my lips were numb, like I had to force the words out. It was the same feeling I’d had when the gas had begun hissing into my plastic prison, and I knew I only had a few minutes of consciousness left. I had to figure out what this place was, where I was being kept, what they were doing. Frantically I tried to look around, taking in the room as completely as I could. The vials were filled with different colours of liquid, some were boiling above tiny yellow flames. There were computers lining one wall, and flickering lights on the monitors. In one corner, looking out of place among the burnished steel surfaces was an old brass gramophone. It was the source of the crackling sounding classical music. Somehow the music made everything worse.
Above me, a flower-shaped white lamp spouted from the ceiling, and the woman reached up and flicked it on, pulling it down so it was a few feet above me. I blinked and tried to turn my head from the light, but it felt like I was moving against a current, battling my way up stream, each thought and movement was slow and painful.
“No not that one,” someone said, but the voice was so low it sounded like it was coming from far away. Everything was blurry again, slowly fading away.
“Formula twelve should make her more susceptible.”
All I had time to think was, susceptible to what? and then I was drifting away into the darkness.
Waking up the second time was different. There was no steady beeping sound in my ear, and the lights were dimmer this time. My eyes flicked open and shut and few times before I could make out my surroundings. I was still strapped to the same bed in the same room, but it was empty now. The headache was there though, pulsing steadily at the back of my skull, and now my skin felt hot and cold, like I had a full blown fever. My arms were shaking, I realized, but I couldn’t move because of the straps holding me in place.
Where had the doctors gone? I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or not. They weren’t sticking needles into my anymore, but now I was alone in the middle of this terrifying room, still strapped to the bed. My head felt foggy, but I tried to lift it up anyways, trying to see down the length of my body. What had they done to me? I felt different. The headache was more intense, and the fog in my brain made my thoughts slow and heavy. They’d injected me with something, would this be permanent? There was a faint stirring of panic at the back of my mind, but it was hard to think straight.
Shuffling noises made me blink furiously, struggling to raise my head off the table. I opened my mouth to ask who was there, but only a faint rasp came out. I’d lost my voice.
“Wakey wakey, twenty-three. Time to go back to your cell.”
I recognized the voice that came from the doorway, dark and slightly mocking. It was Cain, the boy I’d talked to through the plastic wall. I tried to lift my head up, since I couldn’t help my curiosity. I wanted to match a face to that voice. I wanted to know what my tormentor looked like.
Footsteps echoed in the silence, and then a face swam into view above me. Cain hadn’t lied about being dark and handsome. He had serious brown eyes and thick black brows. His hair was short, and it stuck up at the front a little bit, like he hadn’t bothered to smooth his cowlick back. He wasn’t dressed in the white lab coat that the doctor and his assistant had worn. Instead he had on a black shirt and pants and leather gloves. The gloves gave me pause, and he must have saw my eyes flick down to his hands, because he smiled at me, revealing straight white teeth.
“I wear these all the time, just in case you Jotun decide you want to take a bite out of me. Same way you handle any wild animal.”
I blinked, then tried to force my voice to sound normal. “Why do you hate us so much?” It still came out in a rasp, but he seemed to understand the question. His smile flattened, and he regarded me with dark eyes for a few seconds before responding.
“No offence, twenty-three. I don’t hate you personally. I don’t hate any of you. I just serve the cause, and your people serve the cause, just in a different way.”
“And what’s the cause?”
“Wouldn’t you like that?” His grin was back, wide and white and slightly cruel. “Do you think the scientists tell the lab rats what they’re planning on doing with the research?”
I tried to ignore the fact that he’d called me a lab rat, tried to push down my anger. He’d said he didn’t hate me, but you could have fooled me. “And what are you?’ I rasped, narrowing my eyes at him, wishing my head would stop swimming. “You’re the janitor? You clean up the messes?”
“No, not the janitor.” Cain leaned over me and I tensed, but he was only reaching for the buckle on my arm. He began to undo the straps. “I’m your handler. I make sure you’re fed and watered and I escort you back to your cell each time the researchers are finished.”
I tried to keep calm, to keep my face emotionless, but excitement was fluttering in my chest as I watched him undo the strap across my thighs, then move down to the one at my ankles. As soon as he released me I was going to leap off the table and make a break for it. Maybe I would even freeze him to the spot before I took off. He deserved it.
“I know what you’re thinking.” Cain tugged the last strap free, releasing me. “Feel free to—”
I didn’t let him finish, bolting upright and flinging my arm out. My fist hit him in the side of the head and he staggered backwards with a sharp cry. Pain lanced up my arm, but I ignored it, swinging my legs around, throwing myself off the table, eyes fixed on the door.
An instant later the ground came up to meet me, and the impact knocked the wind out of my lungs, leaving me gasping. My face was pressed against the cool tiles of the floor and my head was throbbing, my vision blurring in and out. It felt like I’d been hit by a bus.
“If you had let me finish I could have saved both of us the trouble.” Above me, Cain’s voice sounded annoyed.
I felt him hook his arms around my waist, and then I was hauled roughly off the ground. My knees tried to give out again, my legs were so rubbery I couldn’t stand. I gasped, trying to control the panic, trying to breathe properly. In and out. Deep breaths. “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I stand?”
Cain looped one arm around my waist, propping me up against his side. “It’s common after the tests they run. It will wear off. I was going to warn you.” He grimaced sideways at me. “Congratulations, you’re the first one that’s actually managed to haul off and punch me before you collapsed. Your right hook is pretty good.”
I didn’t reply, it was becoming evident that the rest of my body wasn’t working properly either, I couldn’t seem to keep my head up, and my arms felt numb. It felt like I was still drugged, though my mind was working perfectly fine. And I could still speak. “What is this? What did they do to me?”
Cain sighed. “Will you try not to work yourself up so much? They’ll get mad at me if they think I’ve stressed you more than you already are.”
“Just tell me what they did to me. What did they inject me with?”
“God, you’re persistent.”
I tried to shove Cain away as he grabbed me by the waist, but my efforts were pathetic. He picked me up and slung me over one shoulder, which made me wheeze in indignation. He was moving now, starting for the door, and for a few seconds I tried to muster up the strength to slam my fists into his back. But my entire body felt sluggish, and being upside-down wasn’t helping the dizziness, so finally I just shut my eyes and let my arms dangle down, letting my body go limp.
“Very good, Twenty-three,” Cain said, and his voice was a low rumble of amusement. “You have to learn to relax.”
My eyes were shut and I was already drifting, so I let the comment slide, but I resolved to myself in that instant, between fuzzy, confused thoughts of escape, that if I ever got free I would find a way to make him pay. I would break a promise I’d made to myself a long time ago and use my power on a human. Cain was going to die.