Had it moved? Had the flame just flickered?
“Did you see that?” she called out to the unseen listeners. “Please tell me you saw that?”
The voice didn’t answer but she was already looking back at the flame. Could she do it again? It had been an odd, reaching, sensation. There had been heat there but no pain. She stared at the candle again, reaching, straining. The flame burned in silence, ignoring her.
She tried until her head began to hurt again and she wondered if it had ever moved at all. The door hissed open as she was beginning to drift again and Janan burst into the room with a grin that struggled to fit on his face. He rushed to her, consumed with an excitement that seemed larger than himself.
“I came as soon as I heard!” He said, his words fighting past the grin. “I knew you would do it. I knew it!”
He reached to embrace her, oblivious, as always to her nakedness. He tried to worm his arms under her back but the frame defeated him and he muttered in frustration.
“Wait here,” he told her, as if she had any other option. “I’ll be back.”
He was back in minutes, pushing a wheelchair through the doorway and accompanied by two men in black uniforms.
“You’ve done it, Mackenzie,” Janan told her. “You touched your power, without drugs, without stimulation! This first stage was always going to be the hardest part. It’s impossible for some, and they find themselves broken instead, but you’ve pushed through. We can move you on from here now.”
She nodded but bit down on the inside of her cheek as the fear rose. The prospect didn’t excite her. Instead, the idea of leaving the room, even leaving her frame, filled her with dread, like a phobia.
She’d always had a fear of heights. As a child her family had gone on a trip to Kosciuszko National Park where her parents had dragged her onto a ski-lift that took passengers up the mountainside. It was like being strapped to a park bench, swinging in the wind, with her legs hanging free in the air beneath her. The journey had been the most terrifying thing she’d ever experienced. It was probably completely safe, but the lift and the journey filled her with unreasoning panic. Her mother had to stop her from lifting the safety bar as she’d fought and screamed out that she needed to get off. The reality of the fifty metre drop below her couldn’t make it through the terror that had blinded her. All she knew was she needed to be away from there.
The very same fear struck her as the men undid her restraints, every bit as powerful and mindless as it had been on the Kosciuszko chair-lift. She sank down as soon as the cuffs were free, clasping her hands around her knees as she curled into a foetal position.
It wasn’t until the first tear hit her knee that she realised she was crying.
They had broken her. The shards of herself lay shattered against the base of her prison. The sobs tore from her, ripping free of her body until she was a trembling mess.
Janan waved the guards off and knelt down in front of her, working the ankle cuffs free. He caught her as she fell from the frame, taking her into his arms and making gentle shushing noises as he stroked her hair.
This was the man responsible for her abduction, and all of the torment she had experienced since. She ought to be ripping his throat out with her bare teeth, but instead all she wanted was for him to hold her and not let go.
In time, they managed to wrap her up in a thick robe and ease her into the wheelchair. She clung to the armrests, fingers clenched, clawing into the padded plastic as Janan wheeled her towards the door.
She glanced back at the wooden frame she’d been chained to. She’d spent so many hours straining against those cuffs, and yet now she was scared to leave. The realisation wasn’t a pleasant one.
Janan squeezed her shoulder through the thick bathrobe and she reached for his hand, taking strength from it. Her feelings were a tangled mess. She ought to hate this man. He was the architect of her misery, the cause of her ruin.
The truth lurked at the centre of the fear and self-loathing that filled her; he had brought her within a hair’s-breadth of truly touching this power, this thing that she’d spent every moment since childhood convincing herself wasn’t real. As much as she despised everything about him for the things he’d done to her, he was a figure of wonder. He was a man from a faerie tale, handing her magic, and how could she truly hate someone like that? How could anyone?
The door led out through a small observation room and then on to a nondescript hallway. Plain white walls and florescent lights set in panels in the ceiling gave the place a sterile quality. It reminded her of the hospitals she’d worked in back in Australia. The clinics in Kabul and Helmand Province had been nothing like this. Corridors were a luxury that went along with dedicated rooms. Too often the Red Cross clinics in Afghanistan were in temporary shelters, or warehouse-like structures.
She looked at the other doorways as they passed. Armond had been in one of those rooms. Were there more people like her? From what Armond had said, it sounded like there were, or had been. The hallway ended at a lift and Janan touched a key-card to the sensor before backing her in carefully and selecting a floor.
Her preconceptions had been shattered. Within the confines of her room she’d known nothing of the rest of this complex, or even that there was a complex. Bound to the frame, she could have just as easily been chained up in a cellar somewhere. This was nothing that she might have imagined.
“A lift?” she managed, glancing around at Janan.
His smile was like a child on Christmas morning, barely able to contain the excitement.
“I’ll take you the long way around and show you something of what we’ve done here. We began building almost ten years ago now,” he told her as the lift continued to rise. “Most of the complex has to be underground. Satellites are irritating things at times, and we didn’t want to attract unwanted attention.”
“We?” She murmured.
“We,” Janan nodded. “The others working in what we’ve come to call the Prometheus Project.”
Prometheus, the titan who stole fire from the gods. Was that what they were doing here? Seizing powers that were never meant for mankind? The thought brought a thrill, and dread, in equal measure.
The lift came to a stop and he wheeled her out into a broad hallway. The white walls were hung with the same bland paintings and photographic art that infests offices the world over. The mediocrity was broken only by broad windows revealing laboratories where men and women in white coats worked away at microscopes, computers, and other lab equipment.
“There is a staff of almost a hundred here now, not counting the guards and support roles,” Janan told her.
“But why?” Mackenzie asked with a twisted frown. “What for?”
“For you, Mackenzie. And people like you,” Janan said, wheeling her around a corner and through another set of double doors. “In a day or two we can answer all of your questions. For now, you need to rest and recover. Passing through the first barrier takes an incredible toll, but it is only the beginning. You’ll need your strength for what’s coming.”
He pushed her through a maze of corridors and down several levels in another lift, before he stopped beside a door, touching the key-card to another sensor and wheeling her in to what looked oddly like a hotel room.
“These will be your living quarters for now,” Janan explained. “There is a small gym in the next room and all the facilities you should need. Use the phone to call for food if you get hungry, but your meals will be provided on a normal schedule. For now, we simply want you to rest.”
She frowned, bemused as the black-clad men helped her out of the wheelchair and onto the bed.
“Use the wheelchair if you feel you need it,” Janan told her. “Your legs will be weaker than you think for a week or two.”
And with that he left, walking through the door without a backward glance.
She sat on the bed and tried to process it all. She hadn’t given much thought to what might lie beyond the room with the frame she�
��d been strapped to. It had been her cell, but it had never occurred to her that it was part of a complex; least of all a complex this massive and well populated. The door to the new room made a heavy thunk as it closed, and she heard the locks engage. For all its outward appearances of luxury and comfort, this was every bit as much a prison as the frame had been.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The bed felt strange. Months of being chained to a thinly padded wooden frame made the mattress feel too soft and giving. After tossing and turning for the best part of an hour, she threw the blankets and pillows onto the floor and slept there.
She woke hungry and sore. Her legs ached with a deep, bitter pain that had her curling up against it. Her stomach growled, and she found herself turning her head and craning for a feeding tube that wasn’t there. The phone turned out to be a closed system and began ringing the moment she picked it up.
“Yes?”
Mackenzie froze for a moment, unsure what to say. “I… I need some food.”
“Very well,” the voice was brusque. Not rude or abrupt, just clearly not interested in speaking. “Something will be brought to you. Is there anything else?”
“My legs hurt. Could I have a painkiller? Something like ibuprofen?” There was a pause on the other end of the phone and a muffled conversation before the man came back onto the phone. “Something will be added to your food. We cannot give you the pills.”
“Okay, thank you,” she said, but the phone had already gone dead. The food arrived quickly, and the sensor beeped as the key-card tapped against it outside her door.
“Stand back from the door, please,” the voice was low and guarded as the door nudged open. Mackenzie sat on the bed and watched as a tray holding a steaming bowl slid over the floor and into the room, before the door was pulled shut. It was like someone feeding a caged dog, or an animal in a zoo. Whoever had brought the food was clearly scared of her reaction. She looked down at herself, at the pitiful state of her body, and almost laughed. She was no threat to anyone. Just getting to the tray would be challenge enough.
The bowl contained a thick porridge. It was bland and would have benefited from both more cream and sugar but, compared to the cold gruel, it was glorious. She ate half of it before forcing herself to slow down and enjoy the sensation. Just feeling hot food go down was wonderful. The ibuprofen, if it was in there, was buried beneath the taste of the porridge and she finished it far too soon. She sat for a while, scraping the remnants of her breakfast from the edge of the bowl. It was made from a kind of rubberised plastic, like the spoon. The tray was thicker, more rigid, but still rubberised and unlikely to shatter.
Mackenzie pushed herself to the edge of the bed and levered herself to her feet, leaning heavily on the wheelchair. She explored the room with slow, shuffling, steps.
It hadn’t been as apparent when Janan had brought her in yesterday, but the place had an odd design. There were no sharp corners on anything. The small bedside table had rounded edges, as did the desk. The television was bolted to the wall, and the room had no window. A quick trip to the bathroom confirmed that, whilst there was a shower, there was no bath, and the mirror looked to be polished aluminium set into the wall. The room had been built to be suicide-proof. The notion almost made her laugh; but then, she hadn’t been far from wanting to die herself not so long ago, had she?
With no windows or clocks it was hard to tell what time it was. That was nothing new, but when she’d been tied to her frame things had felt different. It was as if now that she had the freedom to move, or at least as much as her legs would let her, her time belonged to her.
The gym was a small room on the other side of the bathroom. A range of resistance machines awaited her, built into the walls with touch-screens. No free-weights, naturally. She laughed again at the level of paranoia and made her way onto a treadmill. The touchscreen gave her a range of options as the machine itself weighed her. She blinked, staring at the screen.
“That can’t be right,” she muttered, looking at her weight.
The machine weighed in pounds, but a quick touch of a button converted it to kilos for her. Ninety pounds, barely over forty kilos. She’d always been slim, but that was insane. She looked down at her legs, at the pale skin and wasted muscle that had once been firm and toned.
Five minutes walking on the treadmill had her sweating and gasping as she clung to the bars set on either side of the track. Legs that had taken her through ten-kilometre races and one poorly-thought-out marathon, now would have struggled to take her the length of a shop. Her shock and dismay faded quickly, smothered by an anger that then faded into a grim determination.
She leant heavily on the wheelchair as she took herself into the shower. The water felt good, and just the simple act of washing herself was incredible. The wardrobes held simple clothes and she flopped down onto the bed, revelling in the feeling of having her skin covered.
The television had western channels. There were no news channels, which somehow didn’t come as a surprise, but she managed to lose herself in the mindlessness of sitcoms for a while. Lunch came and went. The same nervous voice asking her to back away from the door before sliding a tray in. Dinner was much the same, and the hours ticked slowly away.
By the third day she was climbing the walls. It was as if her mind had been freed as much as her body, and it craved stimulation. The gym helped to calm her a little, and she spent long hours working every neglected muscle group she could identify. But you can only work-out for so long.
She was slumped on the bed in a half-doze when the key-card sensor beeped and the door clicked open.
“Mackenzie?” Janan’s voice called as he knocked. “May I come in?”
She fought down a laugh. He’d had her abducted and chained up in a cell, before locking her away in this pseudo-hotel room, but still he knocked and asked permission to enter.
“Yes,” she called back.
He entered slowly behind a black-clad guard.
“You look better,” he told her with a smile. “Rested.”
“What do you want?” she blurted out, then cringed inwardly. She hadn’t meant to be so blunt.
If Janan was offended he gave no sign. “I’d like you to meet someone actually. If you’re feeling up to it?”
Up to leaving the room and the delights of talking to herself? “Of course!”
He stood back as the guard helped her into the wheelchair. She stiffened as he produced a set of Velcro cuffs.
“Merely a precaution, Mackenzie,” Janan said, with an apologetic smile that chased away his wince at her reaction.
She clenched her teeth tight together as her wrists and ankles were bound to the chair. Janan waved the guard away and took the chair himself. Apparently, all it took were wrist and ankle cuffs for him to find his courage.
He babbled away as they passed along the hallway and back towards the lifts. She made noncommittal grunts in response, or simply ignored him, but it didn’t seem to matter. The man seemed perfectly happy to carry both sides of the conversation as they went up several levels and passed through a maze of corridors.
He stopped outside a door and knocked, smiling at her with a wink as if they were somehow friends. Despite everything, she wasn’t sure how she felt about him, or what to make of him. She had to keep reminding herself to hate him, and a small, traitorous part of herself whispered that she was being foolish.
Janan pushed the door open at the summons and wheeled her into an office, leaving the guards in the hallway. The room was sparse, furnished in black leather and chrome, and dominated by a large desk. An older, black man sat at the desk, stabbing away at a computer keyboard with fingers far too large to be suited to the task.
“Doctor Elias, there is someone I’d like you to meet,” Janan said.
Elias looked up from the screen with visible irritation that melted away as he saw Mackenzie. “Is this the one? Is this her?”
“It is,” Janan said with a smile that was almost paternal.
>
Elias stood and worked his way out from behind the desk. The man was enormous, taller than Janan by a head or more and easily double his weight. For all that, he moved with a simple grace. He dropped to one knee in front of the wheelchair and offered his hand for her to shake.
“Toby Elias,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Mackenzie blinked, bemused. “Mackenzie Cartwright,” she managed, taking his hand.
“Dr Elias is our lead parapsychologist,” Janan explained.
“Parapsychologist?” Mackenzie said with a frown. “What, like Ghostbusters?”
Elias winced. “And this is why I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” he muttered up at Janan. “Parapsychology is largely dismissed as a pseudoscience. Foolish tests with flash cards and EEG monitors.”
Janan gave him an amused look. “What would you have me call it then?”
“Extra-normative psychology is one term that springs to mind. It allows us to go beyond the restrictive boundaries without all of the negative connotations of abnormal psychology.”
“Elias here is our lead psychologist.” Janan said, straight-faced.
Elias gave Janan a hard look and then barked out a laugh.
“I imagine this is all a bit surreal,” he said, standing and moving back to lean on the edge of the desk. “One minute you’re a captive, the next it feels a bit like you’re a hospital patient.”
Mackenzie nodded. “Yes, that’s it exactly!”
Elias glanced at Janan. “Maybe leave her with me for a little while to chat?”
Janan raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure?”
Elias looked from Janan to Mackenzie and back again. “We’ll both be fine.”
Janan didn’t look convinced as he left, and the sound of him speaking to the guard in a rush of Pashto carried easily through the door.
“I’m sorry about that,” Elias said, with an awkward glance at the door. “It rather goes with the environment.”
Mackenzie nodded, looking around the sparse room as she wound her fingers through each other. “What do you want with me?”
The Lore of Prometheus Page 16