by Loki Renard
“What are you doing?” I mumble the question as he frees me piece by piece.
“Getting you out of here.”
For a brief moment, I feel a flush of hope. But it soon becomes apparent this is not a rescue so much as it is a commissioning. He’s taking me out of storage, like any weapon that’s been kept away in the dark.
He puts a fresh cuff on my wrist, then another on his, shackling me to his much larger body. That’s a mistake. I’d tell him, but I don’t know if he's my friend or not.
“Where is Tom? I need to see him.”
“Don’t worry about Tom. Worry about yourself.”
“I’ve never worried about myself. Not going to start now. Where’s Tom?”
“I don’t know,” Ken says. He’s not looking at me as he strides away, forcing me to follow him if I don’t want to be dragged in his massive wake.
“We are going out on a mission,” he says, answering the question I didn’t ask.
They just made the mistake I knew they would. They’re going to send me outside the wall. They’re going to try to make me do their bidding, some violent, desperate thing. But nothing on this planet is as desperate as I am to find Tom.
Ken leads me to the usual place where I am briefed for missions. It’s a sort of airlock. They can stuff me in one side, back a transport crate up to the other, and get me out of here without ever letting me actually see the sun. I have been through this procedure dozens of times in the past. I thought I was done.
Tom's brother walks me inside the lock, seals the doors, takes the cuff off my wrist and his.
Big mistake. Huge.
“UGH!”
That’s the sound he makes as I drive my knee into his solar plexus. He was expecting that. I know, because his muscles were tense when I made contact. He was already braced. And now I am spinning in his arms, and his big hand is making harsh contact with the seat of my pants.
Before Tom, that slap would never have had any effect on me whatsoever. It would have been a pointless small pain which did nothing. But because it was something Tom had done to me, something that made me feel small, secure, even trusting, I react incredibly. Tears spring to my eyes. My legs curl up like a pathetic little kittens and I go limp in his grasp. He could use the implant to control me, but he decided not to. He doesn’t have to anymore.
“Don't do that,” I hiss.
“Do what? This?” He smacks my rear again, just as hard as the first time. It sends a bolt of sensation right up my spine, and ignites all those chemical reactions which make it hard to think, let alone resist.
“THAT! YES!” I scream the words. “You have to stop!”
“Why?”
A third time, Ken’s palm lands dead center of my cheeks. He’s doing this hard, cold, mean, harsh.
“Because! It’s what your brother did to me.”
“Doesn’t seem to have done you nearly enough good,” Ken says, landing a fourth wickedly hard slap on my seat.
“He’s missing and you’re hitting me!? What’s wrong with you!?”
“You attacked me,” he reminds me. “I’m just doing what I do to girls in our family when they get out of hand.”
Girls in our family.
Those four words shock me. Ken thinks I’m family? I barely know him. I don’t know him. I met him one time, back when we first went into isolation. But he does feel familiar, even if it is only because he looks like Tom, shares that important DNA by which we are all defined.
“Now, are you going to behave, or I am I going to have to thoroughly piss my lady off by thrashing you senseless?”
“You can let me up.”
Just as he does, the door beeps. And then it opens. The woman I swore I would kill if I ever saw her again just walked in. Every muscle in my body tenses, and I know she has initiated the lock at the back of my neck. She’s cowardly, but she’s smart.
“It has been some time since you’ve been out of your room, Electra,” the Head says. “I hope you understand this is a privilege.”
“Where’s Tom?”
She ignores me, as if I haven’t spoken. I look over at Ken. “Do you realize she has your brother locked up somewhere? Or dead? Or, I don't know.”
“Doctor Ares is very much alive, and doing the job he was made to do.”
“I don't believe you.” I look over at Ken. “Have you seen him? Do you believe her?”
Ken says nothing. His expression is inscrutable. Something is wrong. A lot is wrong. I don’t think he knows where Tom is. I can’t move a muscle. I’m surprised I can speak. I think the Head wants me to feel pain and express it. I think she feeds on misery. It is the only thing that makes sense, why she does these awful, twisted things, treating us all like puppets dancing on her strings.
The beard makes it hard to see the small expressions Ken’s jaw makes. Is it clenched? Does he hate her as much as I do? Or is he a happy puppet willing to do her bidding in return for some unknown favor?
“Do not let your personal circumstances distract you on this mission. It is important.”
Empty words, said for no reason. She has a snake-like stare, I realize. It glitters and it goes deep and it tries to work its way to the very core of me before spreading like venom through my veins. I can’t look at her without feeling the kind of hatred which kills. I just don’t know if it will kill her, or me.
“Tell me where Tom is.”
Again, she ignores me. I used to think it was normal to be ignored when I spoke, but Tom has taught me that it is not polite to fail to respond to people when they talk to you, and that the Head's behavior is impolite, as well as evil.
“Don’t you care that your brother is gone?”
“Easy now,” Ken says, lifting a hand, as if the gesture might calm me, or make up for the fact that I am missing the love of my life. Or that he is missing his brother. If he is missing his brother.
“Easy? Easy!? How can you be standing there telling me to be EASY!?”
Ken gives me a harsh look. He’s a lot like his brother, but harder. Meaner. More likely to get his neck broken if he doesn’t turn out to be on my side.
“We’re going to focus on the mission at hand. You’re going to do as you’re damn well told.”
“Your brother is missing. Don’t you care?”
“I care about getting this mission off the ground. It’s time to get you geared up. The clock is running.”
The Head looks on with approval as Ken snaps at me, then strides over to a roller door and throws it up in one easy motion. Behind it, the gear for this mission has all been laid out. I still can’t move, so I don’t know what he expects me to do.
From what I can see at a distance, they have a full set of equipment waiting for me. No weapons, but plenty of other equipment which could easily be used as a weapon. There’s a fucking grappling hook, not to mention a utility knife, a flare. With just those three pieces of equipment, I could kill everyone in this room.
“Electra,” the Head says, getting my attention with her ice voice. “If you behave badly in any way, hurt anyone, disobey a single order, Doctor Ares will suffer the consequences.”
I stare at her blankly.
“Why?”
She stares back. “It is a means of moderating your behavior without having to have you contained at all time. It has become apparent that you care about Doctor Ares. Therefore, the consequences of any insubordination will be borne by him. Not you.”
“Well, that’s stupid.” I look over at Ken. “Are you hearing this? Your brother is being held hostage by this bitch.”
Ken nails me with a glare. “Watch your mouth.”
I am absolutely not going to watch my mouth. I let out a stream of expletives designed to prove that very point. I will not be kept this way, a pawn in the Head’s game of chess, which is another boring thing normal people know about, but hardly ever actually engage in.
The Head is blackmailing me. I suspect she planned this all along. She never wanted me to become civil
ized. She wanted me to become attached to something she could manipulate. Like a teddy bear she can threaten to burn, except it is a man.
“We will see how stupid it is,” she smiles infuriatingly. “Perform well on this mission, Electra. Your lover’s life depends on it.”
“Bitch,” I hiss under my breath as she walks away.
She leaves and my ability to move returns, too late to rip her spine out through her asshole.
“Calm down, focus on the mission,” Ken says.
“How can you say that? You heard her! She’s holding your brother hostage. If I do something crazy, she’s probably going to kill him. And I always do something crazy.”
“Not this time, you don’t,” he says firmly. “This time, you follow orders. We get in, we get the job done, and we get out again.”
“You shouldn’t be working for her,” I say. “She’s crazy. He’s your family, which, he taught me, means a lot. Don’t your biological bonds to him mean anything? Shouldn’t you be even angrier than I am right now?”
He looks at me and I can’t read his expression at all. If he is like Tom, then he will not accept this. But there’s no guarantee he is like Tom. I don’t think there are many people like Tom in the whole wide world.
“We have a job to do,” he repeats, his tone gruff, but perhaps a little softer.
He walks over to another roller door and throws that up to reveal our transport for the day.
"Get in the van.”
I look toward the doors swung open to the short interior of the van. When we went out to dinner, Tom put me in a car. He let me see through the windows, look out around me, and get my bearings. I suppose that privilege has been taken away from me, along with what I thought might be love. The van’s windows are blacked out, and in the rear of this thing I will have no idea where I am at all.
What choice do I have? I can refuse to get in the van, but what does that achieve?
I get in the van. He gets in with me. It’s just the two of us, apparently. That’s not standard operating practice, unless a mission is particularly perilous, or an utter waste of time.
As we drive along, I feel the road rumbling beneath me. I don’t know what they want me to do. I haven’t been briefed. Or maybe I have been and wasn’t paying attention. All I can think about is Tom, and the Head’s threat to hurt him. If she does, I will capture her and I will kill her so slowly she begs for death.
Previous times I’ve been out, the van has been loaded into the belly of a plane. I've been flown all around this big planet for hours at a time in sedated states, woken to do the job they wanted me to do, and then put back to sleep for the return journey.
Ken Ares reaches for me, a sedative injection in his hand. I hear the soft ssst of the needle but I don’t feel it. I look up at him, ready to tell him that he’s an idiot, and that he missed me, but he flickers a wink and moves away.
What is going on?
I sit quietly, behaving as I would if the sedative had taken effect, but I keep my eyes on Ken. He’s up to something, though he seems to be following procedure and protocol. I guess he’d have to seem that way if he was trying to fool the person on the other end of the video surveillance which covers every mission.
Seeing Ken makes me hurt inside. I miss Tom, and Ken is enough like Tom to trigger the memories we had together. Sitting here quietly, I have nothing to do but think. What did she do with him?
It’s funny how you can’t feel momentum until you lose it.
The van has come to a halt. Ken looks at me. “Alright,” he says. “This is where this ends.”
He throws the door open and I find myself looking out at the inside of a tunnel full of traffic. Cars zoom past, two lanes both ways, horns blaring for no discernible reason except maybe for the fact it is fun to make noise. I recoil from the sudden intrusion of the world that Tom once told me was more real than the one I have lived my life in.
“What are you doing?”
“This is a communications dead zone,” he says. “We’re getting you out.”
This is happening so quickly. I have dreamed of nothing but escape for weeks, but I never expected it to be simply delivered to me. This is too easy, and I don’t trust it.
“Getting me out? What does that mean?”
“Tom made plans for you, if anything ever happened. We were to get you out of the facility, set you free. That’s what we’ve done.”
“Who is we?”
“Mary and I. Mary’s my wife. Or will be, soon enough.”
I stare at him, suddenly terrified. “I can’t be free. I don’t know what to do with myself!”
“You have to go, Electra. I’ve got some money for you. And before you do, you have to beat the shit out of me. Make it look good. I’ll tell them that you overpowered me.” He smiles. It seems to be a rare expression on his face, and it breaks my heart, because it looks so much like Tom’s. I have been wanting to destroy someone from the moment they took me away, but not Ken.
“She threatened to hurt Tom if I did anything wrong. I don’t want him to be hurt.”
“She made that threat to manipulate you. We both know that.”
“Just like we both know she doesn’t make idle threats.”
“Let me and Tom worry about Tom.”
He’s telling me to abandon the man I love. I don’t need months of how to be a human lessons to know that is wrong.
“We never got to money,” I say. “He didn’t teach me about it. I don’t know how it works. Where am I supposed to go? What am I supposed to do?”
Ken shakes his head. “Like a little lost kitten, when it comes down to it, aren’t you.”
“I’m not… I’m just. I don’t know where to go or what to do. I need Tom.”
He looks at me, and for a moment, I’m almost certain he’s about to tell me that I don’t need Tom at all, that I can do this on my own. But I can’t and we both know it.
“Fuck,” he swears half under his breath. “I can’t go with you.”
“Where is Tom? Do you know?”
“Word is that she’s stashed him somewhere offshore. The location is still yet to be determined. Whoever she used to transport him isn’t talking.”
“What’s taking so long?”
A girl gets out of the driver’s side, slams the door and stomps around to glower at us. It’s Mary. Dark hair and pissed off eyes tell me she belongs to Ken. I can see instantly why he loves her. They fit. I wonder if Tom and I fit the same way. Could people look at us and see that we were made for togetherness? I feel a sinking sensation in my stomach when I realize that the answer to that question is probably no. Tom has a gentleness about him, and a civilized strength which I do not have. I am a whirlwind of barely contained chaos.
I look at the pieces of world flying by, and I feel small. My rage and my proclivity, even talent for violence aside, I am nothing in that great rush of humanity. A hundred people must have driven by in the time it took me to have that thought. How can I go out there among them and survive?
“We can’t just turn her loose. She’s not ready.” Ken says what I’m screaming inside my head.
“What do you mean, she's not ready?”
“She doesn't know what money is, Mary. We put her out here and she’s not going to be able to find a place to live. My bet is she’s going to steal something, get caught, kill a lot of people and end up back where she started.”
“Well she’s not that stupid, is she?”
Mary is rude and blunt. I like her.
“She's not stupid. She’s just not used to the world as we are. You don't know how complicated it is.”
“Uh. Sure I do,” Mary says. “And I bet she does too. Tom taught her for months.”
“It takes most humans years to become ready to exist in the world,” Ken says.
“She’s an adult. She’ll work it out.”
“While also being tracked by the Head.”
“We were just going to let her go with trackers in her? Are we fu
cking stupid or something?”
Mary raises a good question. I have several trackers implanted in my body, sewn so deep into my neurological tissues they cannot be removed without brain surgery. If I were to flee now, I would be picked up in less than an hour. I cannot run. I am owned. There is no flight. There is only fight.
“We are not fucking stupid,” Ken says. “There are ways of disrupting trackers, routing them through other centers. She might be broadcasting, but we can make that signal seem as though she’s in Kyoto, Japan or Vladivostok, Russia, or up the Head’s own ass.”
“Oh,” Mary says. “Well. That’s good.”
I felt a momentary rush of relief at the idea I might not be able to escape. Now that freedom is once more back on the table, I feel an ache of anxiety inside my chest and stomach. I can’t do this without Tom.
“Alright. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going dark,” Ken says.
“That doesn’t mean anything. What do you mean, going dark?” She turns to me. “He forgets I wasn’t in the military too and he uses all the terms on me, Alpha Bravo Footrot, etcetera.”
“I mean we’ll all run. The three of us.”
“So, we’re throwing our lives away,” Mary says. “The Head will be pissed. I was getting on so well with her too. She showed me her tummy scars. We're basically best friends now.”
I’m thinking that is sarcasm. Nobody is best friends with the Head. She is not a woman capable of forming human bonds. She is a cold machine with a taste for sadism where human compassion should be.
“We worked for her because that was the best option we had at the time. It got you out of hot water with the government. It gave us somewhere to be together. But she’s taken Tom. That’s an act of war as far as I’m concerned. We’re going to fight her.”
“We can’t fight her,” Mary says. “She has near infinite resources and she can have us all killed from outer space if she wants. Hell. She has that!”
When she says ‘that’, she points directly at me.
“I’m not a that. I’m a who.”
“You’re a borderline case, if what I’ve heard is true,” Mary says. “I’ve got a better idea. What if, instead of throwing our careers and lives away, we actually do whatever this mission is, lull the Head into a false sense of security, and not get our heads blown off?”