Defect. The stories come flooding back. Whispered rumors on the playground at school. Simon’s older brother was one of them. A Defect. He was kept in the compound for endless psychological testing, as they tried to uncover what was different about his mind.
She looks back up at me. “Defects who show certain abilities are taken to Ward B and trained to become guards, to work at the compound patrolling the fence and doing other jobs under the direction of the military.”
“What are we even discussing this for? She won’t make a good guard. Take her, Dorie,” O’Donovan says and turns to leave.
After a second, Will drops his eyes from mine and follows O’Donovan out of the room. I’m unsure whether he’s relieved or disappointed that he doesn’t have to take me.
Dorie grips my arm and pushes me forward. “Move.”
I stumble toward the door, nearly tripping over my own feet. I clutch the door frame and hold myself there. “Wait. It can’t be right. Do it to me again,” I turn back to face them, pleading.
“There’s no use, Eve. The mindscan is never wrong. And with the results you received – there’s no denying your fate.” What does that mean? What are my results?
Dorie pries my fingers from the door and shoves me forward. I pull the robe closed in front of me and let her move me farther along, down the hall, deeper into the compound.
I picture my mother in the waiting room being pulled aside and told of the news. I can see her eyes fill with tears and imagine her taking the news silently, nodding to their words. Words like diseased, and incurable. Defect. They are just words though. They will not define me.
***
An uncomfortable fullness in my bladder wakes me from a deep, but restless sleep. I shift on the bed, badly in need of a bathroom, before realizing my ankles are tethered to the footboard. Momentarily forgetting about the need to pee, I survey the length of my body. I’m wearing scratchy grey cotton scrubs that I have no memory changing into. I seem to be in one piece, yet feel woozy and weak.
I look over the rest of myself and become aware of new aches and pains. I’m certain I’ve been prodded and poked and shudder at the thought. My arms are bruised with track marks. The skin is tender and purple, puckered up where it met countless needles.
My eyes travel along my arm and stop at the new tattoo across my wrist. It’s a barcode with the number 5491 in block lettering underneath. The black numbers are raised and red, as if my skin is rebelling against them. I am marked as a Defect, a constant reminder that I can never go home.
My head throbs. I clench my eyes closed and curl up on my side, trying to lessen the insistence in my bladder. I try to recall the series of events between walking into the compound with my mom and ending with me in this bed. I’m strapped to a hospital bed in what I can only guess is a mental ward. My stomach grumbles loudly, forcing me back into awareness.
I breathe deeply, willing myself to stay calm. Freaking out, hyperventilating and giving into the gravity of the situation will get me nowhere. If I stay calm and look at things rationally, I’ll have a much better chance of surviving this nightmare. They can only take what you give them. They will not take my sanity, my inner strength.
The first order of business is a bathroom. Surely someone will come by soon to check on me. And then I can figure out where I am. Having taken stock of my injuries and various discomforts, I survey the room around me. Faint light seeps into the edges of the room from the narrow windows near the ceiling, like we’re underground. Row after row of hospital beds with sleeping women line the room. Some are old, their gray hair scattered across their pillows, and some closer to my age, their faces smooth in sleep. I look at the bed across from mine, and dark eyes are looking back at me.
“You’re up,” she whispers after a moment of studying me in silence. I watch her without answering. Her hair is black and frizzy, like she stuck her finger in a socket. Her face is expressionless. “I’m Willow,” she says.
“Eve,” I say. “How long was I out?”
“Two days,” she says without hesitating.
Two days? Lying in this dungeon for two days without food, without water? It seems unimaginable that much time has passed. My throat is dry and cracked. My hollow stomach shrinks into my ribs.
The doors to the dormitory swing open and a thin nurse with silver hair seems to glide across the room, as though her feet barely touch the floor. She pulls a cart in behind her, letting the door swing closed. The clicking sound once it closes tells me there’s some sort of locking mechanism in place. The cart is topped with steaming bowls of broth, and my stomach clenches in anticipation of something warm to fill it.
She parks the cart and comes to my bed. “There she is.” She helps me sit up against the back of my headboard. “Next time you won’t need so much – little thing like you – you were out longer than we expected.” She brings me a cup of broth, but stops before handing it to me. “Think you can keep this down?”
I nod, my mouth watering. She offers it to me, and I wrap my fingers around the warmth of the cup. My hands are shaking as I bring it to my lips. I manage a small sip. It glides easily down my throat, washing away the bitterness. It tastes like tree bark and something salty. I take a bigger gulp and the nurse turns to walk away.
Willow takes her cup of broth and downs it in one gulp, keeping her eyes on me. The others begin to wake and look in my direction. It’s like I’m the shiny, new toy in the room. I choke on a gulp of the broth and cough.
“You’re lucky we have Susanne today. She’s the only one who treats us like we’re still human,” Willow says, nodding to the nurse.
After the broth’s been distributed and the empty cups collected, Susanne begins to unshackle us, one by one. I rub my raw ankles and pull my knees to my chest. “What happens now?” I ask Willow.
“It’s shower day.”
We’re herded down the hall – single file – with two guards leading the way and two behind us. We’re taken into an open room with water spouts along the walls, every few feet or so.
The women and girls around me begin to undress while the male guards watch, smoking and talking casually at the edge of the room. I hesitate.
Willow pulls her shirt off over her head. “Just do it. We only get to shower once a week.” She strips the rest of the way and tiptoes along the tile floor to the shower head in the far corner.
I glance back at the guards. They’re watching me and seem to be waiting for something. I quickly strip off the too big cotton draw string pants and shirt they’ve dressed me in and follow Willow’s path across the floor. I feel the spray of the water lick my ankles and hear laughter behind me.
“Susanne, there’s been some mistake – there’s no way this one’s sixteen.” The men laugh, their eyes on my body. I keep my chin high and walk straight ahead. Once my head’s under the water it drowns out their voices, and I concentrate on the warmth. I wash quickly, and then we’re prodded back into the dormitory.
***
I jerk awake in the night, suddenly aware of someone watching me. I feel his presence before I see him. But once my eyes adjust to the darkened room, I’m pretty sure it’s Will – the guard I saw right after my mindscan. I gasp and try to sit up before remembering I’m chained to the bed.
He brings a finger to his lips. I watch his eyes in the pale moonlight. They are dark and intense and locked on mine. He lowers his finger once he realizes I’ll stay quiet. His eyes have the same serious, troubled look, and he’s just as silent as the first time I met him.
He reaches for my wrist and turns it over, then runs his fingers along the tattoo there, almost as if he knows his cooling touch will soothe the raised, pink skin. I watch him silently, and my chest gets tight.
I blink up at him and – just as suddenly as he appeared – he’s gone.
The next morning, I’m convinced I dreamed the whole thing, but there’s a thin layer of greasy balm smeared across my tattoo, making me wonder if he really was here. I bring my wr
ist to my nose and inhale. It smells like mint. I breathe it in again and again until I can no longer smell it.
Chapter 3
“They can’t hurt you unless you let them.”
– Unknown
As the days go by, I begin to grieve the life I’ve left behind: simple days with my mom in the garden; riding my bike to the market; skipping down my tree-lined street with my best friend, Cassidy. The city was utterly safe, and growing up there had been easy. It was divided into many different sectors – each with neat rows of houses, tidy office complexes, shopping centers and of course, happy, normal people. Sleepers. I had never spoken the word aloud before, but the term referred to people who had gotten their mindscan. I always thought I would be one, too. But for some reason, I am different. The feeling is unsettling.
Now that I’m here, I have no choice but to catch onto the routine. It’s mostly forced sleep, with occasional tests, but they’ve adjusted my dosage and now in addition to sleeping, I alternate between foggy periods where I just zone out, staring at a wall for the better part of an afternoon.
The nurse from my first day, Dorie, returns and my conversation with Willow stops abruptly. She closes her eyes and lets her mouth fall open and slack. Without thinking, I do the same.
Dorie goes from bed to bed administering more injections to those who are beginning to stir, but when she reaches my bed, she passes by. I peek an eye open and see she does the same for Willow. Once we hear the door click again, Willow peeks one eye open at me and offers a lopsided smile.
“I always skip the afternoon dose,” she whispers, like it’s a secret.
I nod my understanding. It’s her silent defiance at what they are doing to us. It seems impossible to close my eyes and turn my head from the abuse here, but at the same time, a tiny bit of hope stirs inside, like maybe, if I had to, I could figure out a way to survive here, too. With the help from my new friend, Willow.
Willow says once they begin to trust me, I’ll be unshackled a few hours a day. After a few days, I see that she’s right. I must have slept through it before, but my days take on a new routine. At midday, we eat our one solid meal in a guarded cafeteria, and then get some time in a common room down the hall from the dormitory. Most of the others are too strung out to know what’s going on, and they sit slack-jawed on the plastic chairs staring off into space. Willow and I sit on the floor under the one window to feel the warmth of the sunshine, even if we’re not directly in its path.
I need to know more about what it means to be a Defect. I always had such confidence in the mindscan. I knew I wasn’t a criminal; I’d never had a corrupt thought in my life. But what I never considered was that I could end up a Defect. “What happened for you to end up here?” I ask, staring straight ahead.
“Same as you. My future was spotted with holes, and they couldn’t say with certainty that I was cleared.”
I hesitate, wringing my hands. That wasn’t exactly the way it was explained to me.
“Same for you?” she asks.
“I don’t think so. They said I failed it – they did it twice and …”
She clamps a hand over my lips and looks around us. Her eyes are serious, more alive than I’ve seen them. “You failed it?” she whispers once she’s sure no one’s listening.
I nod. “What does it mean?” I don’t want to tell her that there was some strange connection to my mother, too, that they seemed to know about.
“Failing it means they couldn’t read what was in your mind at all – that your future was completely blank to them. That’s not possible.”
I register what this means. Their technology didn’t work on me – I wasn’t sick, I wasn’t a criminal – but rather than admit that I’d somehow outsmarted them, they chose to lock me up and throw away the key. It fills me with rage.
Guard your mind. My mother’s words echo in my head the first time since the mindscan. Why would she tell me that if it meant getting locked up? Did she know what would happen if they actually saw into my mind? Whatever they found couldn’t be worse than them finding nothing at all. But that seems odd. Certainly there’s no way to keep them out of your mind, despite my mother’s warnings. It’s not something I did – it was just some strange effect.
The door swings open. It’s O’Donovan. “5491.”
I look at my wrist. 5491.
“Come with me,” he says.
I follow him from the room, glancing back at Willow, whose face is tight with worry.
“Where are you taking me?” I say to his back as I follow him down the hallway.
He glances back, surprised at my voice. It’s as if everyone else here just willingly accepts this fate. The strange thing is, they actually seem to.
“You’re resisting the drugs, huh?” A grim smile creeps over his face, only I know instantly that he’s not to be trusted. A cold chill runs down my spine. “This way.” He turns suddenly down a hall I’ve never been down before. The floor slants gradually under my feet. This place is like a maze, and I get the sense we’re moving deeper underground. “We’ll be doing some testing. There’s something different about you, Eve Sterling,” he says, as though weary of me, like I’m something dangerous, rather than the small, clueless girl I feel like.
I walk with him for a few minutes until we’ve crisscrossed through so many underground hallways and tunnels that I know we must be in a different building altogether. He stops and presses his finger to the sensor at the door and it clicks open. He pushes it open for me. It’s more brightly lit and open than the place I’m being kept.
We enter a lab with steel counters that hold bubbling vials of liquid. There’s a row of data terminals in the center of the room, along with a desk and two stools.
He sits on the edge of the stool and watches me climb up and plant myself on top of the other. Everything here is designed to make me feel small – from the oversized clothes they put me in, to the guards laughing at my underdeveloped body, to the tall stool my feet dangle from. I’m not sure why, but it infuriates me.
“How much do you know about this place?” he asks.
“Just that this is where Defects are kept.”
“Let’s have a talk.” He sits facing me, his eyes examining me from head to toe. “Tell me how you did it,” he says finally. I can see he’s trying hard to portray himself as calm and reasonable, but I can also tell if I don’t do what he wants, this front won’t last long.
“You mean fail the mindscan?”
He forces a fake smile and nods once.
“I really have no idea. It’s not … common?”
He waits, looking me over while my skins crawls. “This has only happened one other time in recent history. Your mother.”
“My mother? She was never here.” I’m sure of it.
“Oh, she was here. She was our first.” He grins, somehow amused that he knows something I didn’t. “Back before we really knew what to do with them. But you won’t get out that easily. You try to pull anything like she did – be advised – we’ll take care of the problem.”
His comment makes no sense. How and why was she released? Once you’re here, you don’t get out. Everyone knows that. And why doesn’t she have the tattoo?
His words break my concentration. “You’re wondering why she doesn’t have the tattoo, aren’t you?”
I swallow.
“As I said, she was our first. We did things … differently back then. We learned our lesson after her, though.”
Though I want to ask him endless questions about my mother and what it means to fail the mindscan, my mouth goes dry, my mind completely blank. My mother’s erratic behavior over the years, her distrust of the government, the mindscan process, her fear for me is suddenly justified. The only piece that doesn’t fit is why she’d warn me to protect my mind. Maybe she suspected I’d end up here no matter what I did, and her message was meant to remind me to be strong and not let them break me. God, I wish I could just talk to her one more time.
“
So, what does this mean? What do you want with me?” My voice shakes, though I do my best to sound calm, strong. I have to.
“Instead of sitting in there to rot,” his head tips back toward the mental ward, “you’re going to become a side project of mine.”
I don’t know which is worse – laying in Ward A, drugged unconscious or being O’Donovan’s lab rat – but it’s not like I have a choice. Maybe I can find out what he knows about my mom.
He presses an intercom button on the data terminal. “Yeah, come in. We’re ready for you.”
The door pushes open, and a man with rectangular glasses and a white lab coat introduces himself as Dr. Nolan, followed by Will, who won’t meet my eyes.
“I want a full battery of tests, mental, intellectual,” O’Donovan says to Dr. Nolan. “Along with physical and endurance,” he says to Will who still won’t look directly at me. His eyes are focused on my hands that lie still in my lap, or more specifically, at my tattoo. The memory of him visiting me in the night floods my senses, and I blush involuntarily.
“We can’t seem to get inside your head.” O’Donovan reaches out toward me, and I try not to flinch as he taps a finger sharply at my temple. “And I intend to find out why.” The look in his eyes says it all. He’ll stop at nothing until I’m a broken heap on the floor. He turns back to Dr. Nolan and Will. “As long as it takes, as much as it costs, find me something. I want a report at the end of each day.” And then he turns on his heel and leaves the room, Will saluting him until he’s through the door.
The air in the room is heavy, too still. I can sense them deciding what to do with me, who should take me first.
“You start,” Will says to Dr. Nolan after a minute. “I’ll go set up for the physical tests.” The heavy door clicks into place behind him, leaving me alone with Dr. Nolan.
I position myself on the stool in front of the data terminal to begin the intelligence tests.
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