“Eh,” she replied, her voice flat.
“The White Masks don’t share many specifics with us, but we’ve at least picked up on a title: Project Regen.”
“Regen?” I frowned. “Like…Regeneration? What are they trying to Regenerate?”
“We thought it had to do with a specific powerset at first,” Karen said. “Like maybe they were trying to figure out how to give someone healing powers. They are a pharmaceutical company, after all. Being able to heal injuries is pretty much a miracle drug.”
“Yeah, if you want to destroy your client base,” Mark muttered into his pillow.
“Pharmacy major.” I hugged my arms to my chest, embarrassed at my boyfriend’s rude tone.
I winced. Not boyfriend, ex-boyfriend. How long would it take for that to sink in?
“Regardless, that plan turned out to be pretty much moot,” Karen continued. “When someone with genuine regenerative abilities came around, they were treated as disposable as the rest of us. No, we think they’re trying to do something bigger here. I mean, the powers that some people have displayed are a lot more impressive than being able to heal a paper cut.”
“But why do the injections give people so many different types of powers?” I asked. “Um…look at Luiz. It looks like he can control electricity, right? That doesn’t have much in common with Diego’s ability to remove oxygen from the room.”
“Is that what he was doing?” Gerry mumbled. I heard the rustling of papers, and a sigh. “Karen, please remind me of this tomorrow.”
“Sure thing,” Karen said. “And you’re right, Dawn. The powers…don’t seem to have much in common. Some people don’t receive any at all.”
“I didn’t,” I said, looking down at my hands. Or, at least, in the general direction of them. It was awfully dark.
“Are you certain?” Gerry asked. “Most people’s powers are activated right away, as you witnessed when you first arrived. But with other people, it takes something else to trigger them. Have you felt different in any way since arriving?”
Different?
I frowned, thinking back. I felt scared, claustrophobic, overwhelmed. And while those weren’t exactly happy emotions, they were also ones that I was well acquainted with.
And that made me feel…strangely sad. But of course, I would get stuck in “the shitty Wolverine movie” and come out of it just as unexceptional as before.
“No,” I said.
“That’s not unheard of either,” Gerry replied. “There are other reactions to the injections that don’t come in the form of powers.”
“Like…personality changes.” I cast a glance at Mark’s back.
“Or other changes to your mental state.”
“What about you, Karen?” I asked. “Your powers…is that why you speak so many languages?”
“Nah, that one’s all me,” she replied.
“Karen is a polyglot,” Gerry replied, a hint of pride in his voice. “With the ability to speak six languages.”
“The sixth is debatable. My German is shit.”
“Regardless, it’s been a great boon to the people here. Finding yourself in Project Regen? You know how terrifying that can be. Now imagine how that would feel if you didn’t understand anyone around you. Karen is able to provide that comfort for people at least.”
“Mostly with Spanish. If I really wanted to help people, I’d start learning some Asian languages. Unfortunately, Project Regen doesn’t come with Rosetta Stone.”
She sighed, sitting down on the bed next to Gerry.
“No, my powers aren’t exactly showy. I can change the colors of something with the touch of my hand. My hair didn’t use to be purple, after all.”
“So, what…you’re a glorified paint set?” Mark quipped.
“I thought you were going to bed,” Karen snapped back.
“Are most people’s powers like yours?” I asked. “Or…um, are they more like Diego’s?”
“The question you wanted to ask there is how useful most people’s powers are when it comes to getting out of here. I don’t think you realize how dangerous a question that is, Dawn.”
“But it makes sense, doesn’t it?” I found myself leaning forward. “If the people here have powers, and the Black Hats don’t, then why not storm the glass doors the next time they open? Why not try and take over?”
“That’s the same question I asked myself when I first found out about powers. Now, I wish that I had been a little smarter about it, or maybe a little denser.”
“Wait. You’ve already tried to escape?”
“We’ve already failed.” She paused before speaking again. “It was only natural, of course. Project Regen treats us as disposable, but they don’t want us dead until they’re done with us. It’s why the Black Hats don’t carry guns, just nightsticks, tasers. So, I thought, why not go for it?
“We came up with two plans. Bixby favored a frontal assault, storming the glass doors, but I didn’t like that. We would have to go through the lab, and none of us really knew the layout. There was too much of a chance that we’d get lost. No, I pushed for a much simpler option. We would just go through the front door.”
I thought back to the massive door that I had been wheeled through on my first day.
“That seems…heavy,” I said.
“You need an access code to unlock the doors,” Karen replied, “and the Black Hats know those codes. Now, there was one of them who was a little…I don’t want to say sympathetic, but being a complete monster didn’t seem to come as easily to him. We figured that we could create a distraction, draw him aside, and get him to give us his code to the front door. If that didn’t work, we would start breaking things until he talked.”
I winced at the mention of torture but remained silent.
“The day of the job, everything went beautifully. We had a few people from Pod One start a fight out on the floor. The Black Hats came out, including our guy. Bixby, Khuong, and I got him to the showers, and got our code with a minimal amount of threats. By the time we got back to the doors, our people had overwhelmed the other guards by using their powers, and we had shoved shims beneath all the lab-facing doors to stop anyone else from coming out.
“We knew we needed to move quickly. Otherwise, the Black Hats would have enough time to make their way through the labs and head us off on the other side. I bolted to the door and entered the code.”
At this point, Karen’s voice hitched, as if overcome by emotion, but the shadows of the room kept her face hidden.
“I swear, every time Bixby or Khuong or one of the others gives me that…look. That look that implies that I am responsible for everything that happened. Part of me wonders, are they right? Was that code, the code that had only cost me two broken fingers, really the way to unlock the front doors? Or was it what set off the gas?”
She paused as if swallowing, then began to speak again.
“It came up from the floors, from the same ports as the security lights, so there was no escaping it. I ran into my room and buried my face in a pillow, but it was too much. When I came to, I discovered the blood of thirteen people on my hands. That they had died, painfully.”
A silence settled over the room. I found myself licking my lips before speaking.
“H-how many people survived?” I asked.
“Seven,” Karen replied. “Gerry, Bixby, Khuong, Justin, two people from Pod One, and of course myself. Pod Three was completely wiped out.”
“There’s no way you could have known what was going to happen, Karen,” Gerry said, his voice soft. “If we went with Bixby’s plan, then there would have most certainly been casualties.”
“There were casualties with mine. And in the months since then, Project Regen has brought in multiple waves of new subjects, most of whom die on the floor before we have the chance to learn their names. It has taken countless lives to get us back up to the numbers we were at before. You—Dawn, Mark—would not be here if I hadn’t made so much space.”
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I blinked, knowing that in this situation, a normal person would say something, anything, to comfort her. It wasn’t her fault. Project Regen was the one kidnapping people, after all. But when I tried to open my mouth to speak, I just couldn’t find the words.
“Since then, I’ve tried to keep things simple. I know now that I can’t save everyone. But I can at least help the people already here. Use my knack with languages for those who don’t speak English. Keep an eye on my pod. But I’ve failed at that too. You, Mark, and Diego are not the first people who have been put in Pod Four since the revolt, you know. I try and help people get acclimated, ease them into the reality of the situation. And then, what happens? I don’t explain the powers stuff early enough and Diego gets snatched as a result.”
I swallowed before speaking. “Um…in all fairness, I don’t think you could have stopped Diego from being taken. He used his powers on his first night here, after all.”
I quickly explained to them what I had seen.
“Fascinating,” Gerry replied. “It appears that anything caught in that sphere of his is completely at his mercy.” He paused before speaking. “I can’t imagine how they’re testing that particular skill.”
“What happens during testing?” I asked.
To my shock, Mark answered, his voice bitter.
“They push you,” he said. “To your limits. And then they shatter those limits and push further.”
“Which is why many people don’t survive,” Karen said with a sigh. “Then they throw them in that incinerator.” She snorted in disgust. “God knows, Diego is probably in there right now.”
“We don’t know that,” Gerry remarked. “Mark came back the following morning—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Karen replied. “We’re best off going to bed anyway. Not like we’ll know anything until morning.”
And with that, she turned and left the room, slapping the top of the doorway on her way out.
“I wish she would stop doing that,” Mark said. “It’s so annoying.”
“Karen suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder as a child,” Gerry replied. “In here, sometimes old demons come back.” He paused and sighed. “She is right, though. We won’t know what’s going on until the morning. Best to go to bed.”
I nodded, pushing myself up from the bottom bunk. I began to head toward the door.
“See you tomorrow,” Gerry said.
Diego didn’t stumble out of the glass doors during breakfast like Mark had. And when the alarm sounded to clear the table, I couldn’t help but notice that Karen had barely eaten any of her food.
As I walked the perimeter of the Big Room after breakfast, I couldn’t help but linger on how useless I was. I wasn’t like Karen with her six languages. All I knew was some conversational French. What did I bring to the table? Years of reading comic books?
A high-pitched laugh cut through my train of thoughts, and I looked up to see Chloe, from Pod Two, run across the room and shove her way between two people who were playing cards. She leaned forward and raised both hands, letting them fall with a loud slap. The cards flew everywhere, and the two players (understandably) cried out in protest. Chloe ignored them, dashing away from the table, almost half tripping over Luiz in the process who, for some reason, was sitting on the floor, the side of his face pressed against the stone wall.
Chloe was an…interesting case. Before coming here, she had been a professional violinist. Someone, apparently, had recognized her. But while she was always known for being a little on the eccentric side, these fits of mania appeared to be a side effect of the injection.
I frowned. Wasn’t snatching up an established musician like Chloe, or even someone like me, given my mother’s career, less than ideal? Wasn’t it preferable to target people who were easier to overlook? What was there about us that was made Project Regen so eager to take the risk? What was it that connected us?
According to Gerry’s “statistics,” a whole lot of nothing. We were all over the map. Most people were white, but it wasn’t that large of a majority, and the split between men and women was close to fifty-fifty. The only place where there was a noticeable trend was with age, with no one being underaged, or over the age of thirty-five. When I had asked Gerry why, his response had been automatic. People who were in their prime were likely to be the healthiest test subjects, after all. And missing kids made a lot of noise.
My eyes tracked Chloe’s progress around the room as she continued to slap different objects, seemingly at random. She made contact with the floor, the walls, tables, and chairs before sneaking up on a dark-haired guy with tanned skin from Pod Three. His name was apparently Sam. He was tall, broad, and covered in tattoos—the kind of person you might cross the street to avoid confronting.
Chloe had other ideas.
I watched as she slapped him right on his back. He whirled around, a look of obvious displeasure on his face as Chloe ran away, her sneakers squeaking against the floor. Sam let out a long sigh and turned back to the pods.
“Hey, Bix!” he cried out. “You gonna control your podmate?”
Bixby looked up at her name, and I felt my heart ache just a little because she was standing and talking with Mark. The breakup had been mere days ago, and every time I saw him, I found myself hit with this wave of complicated emotions that I could barely untangle.
Mark’s eyes hit mine and his gaze immediately closed off. He turned to enter Pod Two. I guess how he felt about me was a little bit simpler.
I forced myself to look away as I closed in on the glass doors that led to the labs. When I was five feet away, I heard a click as the locks disengaged. I froze in my place.
And then, the doors swept open, revealing not threatening men in black hats, but my podmate. Diego. He stumbled three steps out of the door before collapsing.
“Diego!” I gasped, running up to him.
I drew close, unable to keep my head from turning toward the still-open glass doors. I could see the backs of two Black Hats, listening intensely to a fair-skinned woman in a white mask, her dark hair pulled into a tight bun. At the sight of her, I felt my chest constrict. Was this the same White Mask I had seen on my first day?
The doors swung shut, and Diego let out a moan at my feet.
“Oh my god,” I said, crouching next to him. “Diego, you’re…well, we thought you might be dead. Are you okay? Do you need help getting back to the pod? I bet we could get Gerry to help…or maybe you’re hungry? Breakfast is over but maybe someone managed to sneak away some food?” Shit. Was I babbling? Yep. Babbling. “S-sorry. You probably don’t even understand me.”
“I understand you,” Diego said with obvious weariness. “Just…didn’t want to interrupt.”
I blinked at his response, clearly spoken in English with a Spanish accent.
“Oh!” I said. “If you could talk before, then why didn’t you?”
Dammit, Dawn, why’d you have to go and ask that? The man was clearly grieving. After my father had died, there had been plenty of times when I didn’t want to talk either.
“S-sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have—”
“No, don’t worry about it,” he said, waving me off. “Just help me into that chair, okay?”
I nodded, glancing over at the nearby tables. I helped him up and over to the closest chair, technically part of Pod One’s table. I swallowed, trying to ignore the breach of protocol as gazes around the room settled on us.
“Hey, take a seat,” he said, kicking out the chair next to him.
I nodded and complied, feeling stiff and awkward from all the attention on us.
“I want to thank you for helping me out yesterday,” he said. “You know, giving me the heads up.”
“Oh?” I said, blinking. “I…feel as if I should have done more.”
“You seem a little scrawny for a fighter.” He looked at me, eyebrows raised.
“Er… I’m not. That was incredible, by the way. And not just the fighting, bu
t…”
I raised up my hands, palms slightly facing each other. It was the same motion he had used to summon that glowing sphere.
“Yeah, the people in the lab thought so too. What’s it purple hair calls them? White Masks?”
I nodded.
“Right, the White Masks. And boy did they put a lot of effort into duplicating it. But…no dice. Whatever happened before isn’t so easy to recreate. All I got out of it was a bloody nose.”
He reached up to touch his nose, drawing attention to the line of dried blood beneath it.
“Yeah.” I shifted in my seat. “Maybe you should—”
BANG!
I must have jumped a foot into the air. My heart was racing in my chest as I turned to see Chloe leaning over the table. Just like with the guys playing cards, she had smacked our table, hard. She laughed, circling around us, reaching back to slap Diego on the shoulder. He raised a hand, grabbing her wrist with a frown before it could make an impact.
“Sorry to spoil your fun,” he said. “But I’m feeling a little bruised today.”
Chloe pouted, letting out a low, doglike whine, but ran off when Diego released her hand.
“I’m in a madhouse,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, “sorry about that.”
“If anything, I should be apologizing to you. If I remember correctly, I almost smothered you to death on our first meeting.”
“You didn’t know what you were doing.”
“I’m sure that would have been so helpful if you were dead.” His face darkened. “Not that it made much of a difference for Teresa.”
I swallowed before speaking. “You…clearly knew her. Beforehand, I mean. Was she a family member?”
“Twin.”
And then he turned toward me, his face a mask of pain. I felt my heart break, just a little.
“Perhaps one benefit of being trapped here is I don’t need to tell our parents how this all happened.” He snorted in disgust. “They brought us here to keep us safe. What about this is safe?”
I opened my mouth to say…something, only to be cut off again by Chloe running behind us, her laughter rising to a squeal. Only this time, she was followed by Justin, who slowed to a stop, wheezing from the effort.
Silver and Gold (Red and Black Book 3) Page 14