I don't know what happened. Bagels and coffee, then cuts and blood. What used to be thin white sheets were soaking and heavy. They didn't look white anymore. Dipped and coated in blood.
I shouldn't have remembered. I was sure of that. Why did I suddenly remember all those memories they took away from me? They probably never wanted me to, so why?
Why, why, why?
I thought of all these things as the red-haired nurse carried me into a different room. A storage room with bottles and syringes and tubes and needles. Things I had seen way too much in these past days. The woman kept telling me not to make a sound as she de-activated the alarm system.
I didn't say a thing.
She lay me down on a metal table, removing the big cardboard boxes and placing them next to the thick metal door. They looked heavy from the way the red-haired nurse's biceps flexed as she moved them. My limp body met the cold surface of the table, sending shivers down my spine that I tried my best to ignore. Along with my dizzying vision and cramming headache. I took a glance at the mirrors covering the walls of the room, so many mirrors multiplied my reflection, that I was surrounded by myself and my blood. Everywhere.
There were cuts all over my collarbone. But the skin faced outwards.
They had been made from the inside.
I pulled my gaze away to meet the nurse's and tried shake off how I felt like throwing up after all that blood. All my blood, everywhere. All my memories, shattering me, drying me out until there is nothing left but another body. Meaningless, forgotten.
"Your body is fighting your memories. Anything you are now remembering from your childhood before your tagging includes emotion" The nurse spoke quickly as she grabbed a syringe and stabbed it in my thigh. I flinched at the contact "Any bit of emotion you remember will scar you." Great, I thought to myself. Just what I needed.
"I didn't expect this to happen so quickly... I didn't expect all the tests to be made on you. I didn't think it would get to this" She stopped fiddling with the bandages for a moment and stared deep into my eyes, as if she could see through me, all the way into my soul. If I even had a soul. "You have to understand, I'm truly sorry" Then she moved on to placing a powder on top of my cuts, which effectively stoped all the bleeding, leaving me in shock. Not because of the powder.
How could she be sorry? She can't feel anything... So, how is she sorry? It's impossible. It's... human.
"How-" I mumbled the beginning of my long thread of thoughts.
"I want you to get better, trust me" She took out some bandages from the cupboard and spared a single glance at me along with a reassuring smile "But right now, I need to stop you from bleeding to death. And I also" She started cleaning the cuts with a wet cloth "need you to promise me to not say a thing about what just happened to Andrew"
I took a moment to process what she was saying, my eyes darting away from hers. She was asking me to lie to government official. Break the rules. Which I was okay with, not much of a life I would be missing out on if I got killed.
This is no life
Shaking a melody that hung uncomfortably in the back of my head I brought my thoughts back to the nurse. She would get killed if they found out she was breaking the rules. Because me not telling Andrew meant she couldn't either.
"You mean not tell him about me bleeding or remembering?"
"Exactly. If he finds out you have been remembering, it means the formula of the 'operation' isn't working. It means that you are remembering what you were supposed to forget after each session. The 'operation'..." she seemed to struggle finding the words to explain what she was thinking, frantically moving her arms around the air "-It's carefully manufactured so that after he doses you with something to resurface your memories and studied your body's reaction was to it, hence the bleeding, you would then be dosed with yet another medicine, that would make you forget everything you had just remembered. It's all to find a way to point you out. Signal out and kill people that haven't been tagged so they can't hide." She carefully stuck skin-coloured plasters onto each of my cuts "The problem that we are now faced with is that that medicine is not working"
I gulped. Why did I feel guilty about something that only bothered them? It might have been the way the nurse looked at me. Why would the way she looked at me make me feel guilty? Could someone without emotion have that power over someone else?
No.
Why is she looking at me like that?
Why,why,why.
I managed to sit upright, looking around me, watching the nurse I suddenly recognized. I had thought she seemed familiar all this time but now... now I could tell where I had seen her.
"You are her" She gave me a confused look "You are the nurse I saw on my first appointment, when they told me I had been accepted at MBA, you were the nurse that was outside talking to Sarah" I paused for a moment "Weren't you?"
"How are things there?" I kept telling myself to relax but was failing miserably at pretending to be this human robot. Honestly that's kind of how I felt. But I had been a human robot before the disease flooded into my veins.
"Great, everything is perfect" While he wrote in his notepad I took a moment to look back though the small window in the door. A red-haired nurse was talking to Sarah, how odd.
"Miss?" I quickly snapped out of my bubble of thought and came back to reality.
"What were you telling her that day?"
The young woman sighed and looked away. Her thoughts seemed troubled, heavy as she tried to decide between speaking or not saying a thing. Doing what was right to them or what was right to you. Eventually, it seemed like she sent it all to hell. Fuck it, Her face said. "I had been informed that you had an incident. A small moment of frustration after you broke up with your old boyfriend, Paul. It was something small and could have easily happened to someone tagged but since you weren't and you were so precious to the CG, we had to keep an extra eye on you. So we decided the best thing to do would be to have you enrolled in MBA, where you would be surrounded by government officials and finally be given the eye of the public we wanted from you"
"What do you mean, the eye of the public?"
"You were always very well behaved, very mature for your age, very captivating and... enchanting" she smiled "Everyone around you was struck by your presence because of how real and honest you were but also because part of you felt. Part of you had that humanity from your childhood with your parents and it was so subtle, people didn't notice it as what they considered 'bad'. But everyone was drawn to you. Because, as human beings, we are drawn to what's different and what we don't have. Even Government Officials, that are experts in telling if someone is diseased, were mesmerised by you. The wanted more people like you. So since you were 5 or 6, you had your whole future planned out to be a model in all the major fashion magazines, to do millions of interviews so people knew who to look up to. Who they should be like. The beautiful, smart, talented, captivating Katherine Snow"
I took in a sharp breath that made me feel extremely exposed and cold. My whole life had been planned out... Sarah and Andrea, they-
"You were made to be the definition of perfection and you were... until you started feeling a little too much" She moved her long red curls out of her face, taking a deep breath.
"That was when we decided to take you in to MBA, the sooner the better, right? And we sent Jack to check up on you before you were sent here. And then disaster struck when he said you had not been tagged. He said he didn't know how, you would't tell him. But that you weren't tagged. And when we talked to the doctors, they swore to have followed the procedure. So we were intrigued and worried at the thought that the 'marvelous tagging' we had created didn't work on you." I pretended not to notice the mocking in her voice when she said marvelous. As if it was sarcastic. As if it was fake and made-up. As if she didn't like the CG very much at all.
I was happy I hadn't told Jack now. I was happy Ryan had made me promise not to say a word to anyone. I was happy about something at least. Looking for the small ray of light that made me see outlines of the silhouettes of my past.
"We tried again. Without your knowledge. Jack sedated you and we repeated the process, step by step, that same day. Carefully, making sure nothing could go wrong. But your body rejected the chemicals like poison. You almost died to get it all out of your system and you would have died if I hadn't intervened and told Andrew that you could still be the perfect citizen. That we would find another way to make you perfect. But it wasn't good enough for him, he wanted to be the creator or the fixer of something. He wanted to be great. So I gave him the idea of using you to create a safety net, something for those who, like you, rejected the tagging and I gave him the science behind it so he would let me save you"
She looked at me with a guilty expression "Keep going" I said sternly, my jaw locked, ignoring the pity flooding her facial features. She didn't know that I would have died because tagging don't work if you're over 16. I had always been a year older.
"I didn't manage to save you how I would have hoped." She sighed "A coma. That was as much as I got. And you didn't wake up for an entire year, all of which Andrew and the rest of the Government Officials discussed the idea of you being lab rat used for experiments and a role model at the same time. I was just focused on waking you up. And one day I did" Her eyes lighted up, as if reliving a beautiful, magic memory that made her day so much better. But then her expression clouded over and she covered her face in her hands "But Andrew locked you up in that dark cell for another 6 months. Doing tests on you, slowly torturing you, driving you mad." I tried my best not to think or relive any of the memories that I was slowly getting back. The darkness. The screams. The cold walls. The tests and the bright lights and the blood on my wrists from the restraints I was fighting. Don't remember. I don't want to remember. I now know why I fought those memories so hard. I kept feeling my mind telling me, we can't cope with this. You don't want to see this.
"I don't know how you stayed sane. And I was right there" she shook her head, as if trying to rid herself of the feeling those four words gave her "I was there, watching, handing him the syringes, handing him the scalpel, telling him how to do what he wanted. Cut you open, sew you back together like a little rag doll that was once a beautiful, delicate, porcelain princess." A silent tear fell down her face that froze me in shock "And I'm so sorry" She looked just as broken as me as she stared into my eyes "I'm so sorry I didn't keep the promise I made to your mother. I'm so sorry I couldn't save you. I wish I could have done better by you" Her gaze never left mine " I wish none of this happened, I'm so sorry" She then wrapped her arms around me and sobbed into my neck. "I'm so, so sorry" And with that I embraced her with my own warmth, knowing, she was just like me.
*Hey! I wanted to say another thank you to those who are reading, I'm glad we're finally getting some solutions to all our questions. If you vote or comment, you truly make my day so please do if you can :)
IMPORTANT: You might be seeing how I'm editing other chapters. I wanted to mention it is nothing that will change the storyline, I'm only working on improving my writing expressions so future readers enjoy the novel more. Obviously, when I publish new chapters I will have already edited them to what I consider their best. Thank you :)
See you in the next update!*