“How do you know how to do this?”
“Honestly?” he said hesitantly. “I learned how to do it so I could watch for Dana…”
“Oh…”
“Okay,” he sighed, backing away and showing me the screen with the twelve panels of camera feeds. “Here is the library’s main floor, you can watch me from here. I also set up the alarm system right here,” he motioned to his computer’s task bar. “If moving the shelf or opening the door alerts anyone, it will flash red, so keep an eye on that, too. It will tell us if there’s a sensor in the door.”
“What if someone walks in?” I asked, looking at Mark standing by the closed door of the conference room.
“Hit escape. It will shut it down,” Clark said. “And don’t move the computer from this spot. I have no idea if these cameras are live or not, but your body should block the screen from the ones that are behind you,” he explained. I sat down as he stood. “I’ll call you.”
He tapped the phone in his pocket and I nodded, glancing at my phone next to my books.
When he left, I took a deep breath to settle myself. I was hoping and praying that our secret passage was secure enough to be used without detection. We had been so concerned that we debated locking it again the previous day, finally deciding to leave the shelf unlatched so I could watch the security cameras while he checked the passage without fighting with the weight of the locks.
I waited quietly, my stomach jumbling anxiously as I watched the camera feeds. It still took Clark a while to get to the library, so my mind decided to wander while I waited. Wander back to Mykail…
The previous night we had been very careful around one another, not touching other than holding hands, worried that we would both lose control completely.
The more I thought about actually having sex with Mykail, the more appealing the idea became. If Mykail hadn’t been so careful about our relationship, we might have had sex in the bathtub that night. While I was sure I would not have minded, I knew our relationship was dangerous enough, and I had to be sure that I could handle it before we added sex.
My mind was torn off of Mykail when my phone buzzed on the table. I quickly answered.
“Hello?”
“Hey, can you see me?” Clark’s voice asked.
I looked around on the twelve panels of the screen and saw him standing by the door, his phone to his ear.
“Yep.”
“Okay, follow me and I’ll let you know when I’m standing in front of the bookshelf.”
I watched his figure move out of one frame and into another, watching his steps carefully to see where he would stop. He disappeared completely for several seconds twice before reappearing in the next frame.
“There are a lot of blind spots…” I breathed, unable to keep the hope out of my voice.
“It makes sense,” Clark nodded. “This place is large and the shelves make it difficult for everything to be visible. This place would be loaded with too many cameras to watch if they wanted to catch every inch.”
“Are you close?” I asked, watching him walk into one frame.
“Almost.” I watched him disappear from that frame. “Can you see me?”
I scanned each frame carefully.
“No,” I said, a smile spreading over my face as I double-checked each panel.
“I’m standing in front of it,” he said, his voice filled with the same disbelief and intense relief I felt. “You really can’t see me?”
I looked over the frames once again, carefully checking each edge and corner before I laughed quietly.
“No, I can’t.”
“Okay, I’m going to go into the hallway, now. Tell me if anything pops up on the screen.”
I heard him push the shelf and a small click as the passageway was opened. I watched the security alert system Clark had set up, but nothing happened.
“Nothing.”
“Awesome,” he breathed. “I’m going to try the door to Records. Tell me if anything happens.”
I had to hold my breath.
After what seemed like forever, Clark’s voice came over the phone again.
“Anything?”
“Nothing,” I breathed, my lungs working again.
“I’m going to look around here for a little bit and see what I can figure out. I’ll look for some places to hide, too, just in case we ever get walked in on.”
“Sounds g—” I stopped and jumped when Dana opened the door to the conference room. I was so caught off-guard that, for two seconds, all I could do was stare at him. He smiled at me as he closed the door behind him.
“Lily?” Clark’s voice hissed in my ear. “What is it?”
“I said, sounds good, Mom,” I said carefully. I measured my speech, being sure not to speak too quickly. I glanced at the computer screen and sighed as if bored, carefully hitting the escape key to close the camera feed and pull up Clark’s English essay as Dana walked around the table, patiently waiting for me to finish my conversation. “I’ll see you when I get home.” Clark had gone very silent, understanding the situation immediately. “Okay, bye.”
I hung up the phone and sighed, turning to Dana as he smiled and sat on the table next to me, one leg swinging carelessly, the other still touching the ground. His glasses were off, so I was under the full power of his gaze.
“How’s your mother?”
“Off limits,” I snapped. He backed away slightly, his grin getting wider.
“Ooh, there’s some bite in you today,” he chuckled. “I was just trying to be polite.”
“I saw you being polite with her at the meeting on Saturday.”
“Oh, that was just a little flirting,” he smiled. “Are you jealous?” He reached over, gently placing a hand on my hair and looking at me with his seductive power. “Would you rather I pay attention to you?”
My hormones had already been out of control due to Mykail, so the touch was more electric than it should have been. I could have blamed my hormones more, but his eyes were captivating and powerful, and I knew there was a part of me, some animal instinct inside me, that was jealous and craving his attention.
“No,” I snapped, pulling my head out of his reach, trying to put it out of my mind that I found Dana attractive at all.
He chuckled and leaned over, looking at Clark’s essay on the computer.
“Where’s Clark?” he asked, straightening when he was satisfied knowing what was on the screen.
“Bathroom,” I said a lot more naturally than I expected. Dana nodded.
“I came to tell you that I will be at your house Thursday evening.”
“What? Why?” I asked, terrified.
“Mykail needs his shots,” Dana said. “I’ll come over around nine in the evening. If you could pass that information on to your parents, I would appreciate it.”
“Do you have to do that for all the experiments you give away? Is it your way of checking up on what the families are doing?” I bit.
“That is a good idea, but no,” Dana said, his voice rolling easily over his tongue. “Just Mykail. He’s a special case.”
“Of course,” I groaned, rolling my eyes. “You and your special cases…”
“Speaking of, you seemed pretty fascinated in Eyna at the meeting,” he noted. “He’s amazing, isn’t he?”
“What do you plan to do with him?” I pressed. “I mean, any of the experiments? You can’t give them all away, so what do you do with them?”
“A lot of them are sold to other countries as elite soldiers or other intelligence personnel. The rest are kept in the back.”
“You’re not worried about those other countries exposing the Commission, or using the experiments to attack America?”
“The contracts are very specific,” Dana explained vaguely. “It’s all very peaceful, I assure you.”
I rolled my eyes, leaning back in my chair with a sigh.
“You really do just live in your own little world down here, don’t you? Controlling everything pe
rfectly like a god?”
“You’re part of that world now. Do I control you?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?” Dana pressed. “Because I see fear in your eyes and hear the tremble in your voice.”
“You don’t control me,” I said. “And fear seems to be a response you want in people, so you search for it.”
“Don’t assume to know what I look for in people, Little Lily,” Dana said with a condescending tone.
“How often are you in the back of the Commission?” I asked. “You resurface every now and then, but how often are you back there with the experiments? Do you even know what real people are like anymore?”
Dana laughed.
“What?”
“You just make me laugh,” he said. “Real people? This is a far cry from your previous arguments about how I needed to treat people fairly, even if they were criminals.”
Open mouth, insert foot… I ground my teeth together.
“Actually, it is a valid point to make,” he admitted. “I do know what real people are like because the best cases of humanity are in the back of the Commission right now. You can really see what humans are like when you put them in a situation like the Commission of the People. Humans are all the same at their core, this is true, but there is always something different about them. I’ve seen so many experiments now, that I could look at anyone in the population and know exactly how to break them on the table.”
“You really have a heightened sense of importance, don’t you?” I finally managed to say after the five seconds I took to shake off the shiver than ran through my body at his bold declaration.
“No, I just know,” Dana smiled. “For instance, you are a rare case, Little Lily. You would be like that eighteen-year-old who became the thing that killed Bryant Morris. It would take forever to break you, and everything would have to be timed just perfectly. But don’t think it’s not possible.”
I blinked at him.
“What?”
My brain made connections on its own that terrified me. Dana had said that Mr. Morris’ favorite experiment was the one that killed him, which was who Dana likened Eyna to. But saying that I was like him could mean that he believed I could get close enough to kill him, or that I would be perfect for the Machine of Neutralization project, like his other favorite experiment.
“Take a walk with me,” Dana whispered, standing straight and offering his hand. I accepted without hesitation, though I questioned my actions after my hand was in his. He was hypnotizing, and I had no will of my own when he commanded me in that tone.
I walked in silence, struggling to keep up with his long stride.
I wasn’t expecting to walk to the security station that led us into the Enterprise labs. Dana simply flashed his card to the security desk and they nodded, letting him through with me in tow. We stepped into the termination cells without speaking to one another.
When we passed through the door leading into the termination cells, Dana turned to me with a mischievous grin.
“You want to know about humanity? Look around at the experiments back here,” Dana grinned. “We don’t change humans, we amplify things inside them. Well, with the exception of Eyna, of course, we added to him.”
I did look, but I took the opportunity to glance around and see how the Commission was set up so I could think of ways to break out experiments. We were likely unable to sneak experiments out through the basement offices, so knowing the cells in the front was not as important as learning how the further wards were set up.
“Come, I’ll show you those that I give away.”
I followed Dana obediently, looking around the hallways for ventilation shafts or drains in the floor. The grates covering the ventilation system were too small for a person, and the drains in the middle of the floor were the same small circles in shower drains.
Dana led me through the termination cells and past the large hallway to Wards One and Two, and into Ward Three.
“I’ve wondered something,” I said. Dana turned to face me and leaned against the cells next to us, smiling and waving at the experiment inside that stared at him, frightened.
“Ask away.”
“Why do you give away experiments? Are you not at all worried that someone will find out about the Commission?” I asked, still looking around the ward.
“As I’ve said before, people already know that the Commission is not the textbook-clean operation people would like it to be, but it’s a more honest operation than almost every major company that ever came into being.”
“You really believe that?”
“I do,” Dana affirmed. “We don’t pretend that what we’re doing is for a different cause. Yes, we are making weapons out of humans, and almost everyone knows that we fund the training of soldiers, they just don’t know where the soldiers come from.” Dana sighed and also looked around the bright hallway, smiling thinly. “As for the Commission members and their gifts, most of them can pass as regular humans without much difficulty, so there’s not as much need to hide them. There are only three or four I can think of where special care must be taken to keep them hidden. But I only entrust those gifts to members I know to be loyal, or that I particularly like.”
I did not say anything. I walked in front of one of the cells, counting my steps. Five steps from one side of the cell to the other…
“Little Lily, what do you expect out of humans that makes you feel that what we do here is so wrong?”
“I expect that every one of these people was loved by a mother, and was selfish as a child, wanting everything they could get their hands on. I expect that all of them feel pain when you test on them, and that makes them human enough.”
“You think so?” Dana challenged. “You think pain defines a human being?”
“I think it’s what connects us to one another,” I said. “If we can empathize with it.”
Dana smiled and nodded.
“It’s an interesting point you raise, because there is so much more to being human than just empathy and compassion,” he grinned. “Fear is the only thing that spans the entire human race. Every human loves and cares for one another differently. Most can empathize with some humans but not with others because not every human thinks the same way as every other human. What spans the human race is instinct, pure and simple. Fear, hunger, lust…” Dana stood straight, stepping toward me. I stood my ground, listening. “It’s society that changes these instincts. Rules and regulations about how we are all equal are put in place, but the fact is that we’re not equal, not when society says we are, and not when society represses basic instincts in hopes for creating equality.
“Survival, Little Lily,” Dana whispered, “is all about instinct. Society and politics can put whatever spin they want on it, but in the end, the struggle all humans go through is simply to sate the animal instincts inside. Humans in power, those who are not equal to the others but say we are all the same, first put this idea into something called religion, that the struggle to sate that beast was not natural, but it was something all had to go through and overcome to achieve some sort of meaning, which put it in people’s head that there was a greater meaning other than basic survival. Suddenly, everyone is about goals, working towards something that you can conceptualize somewhere in the future and people are willing to work in all kinds of ways for this ideal.”
“So, you’re saying that humans are controlled by the sense of purpose we have?”
“Every animal has a sense of purpose: survival,” Dana corrected. “Humans have warped and perverted this idea. The reason people are so horrible to each other is because we have to be. We’re all animals, even though society and religion and politics and talking heads on television try to convince everyone otherwise. Humans are horrible because of the repression of that beast within, that selfish, wonton creature that we all pretend we don’t have inside us comes out in horrific, manipulative ways when humans use rational thought too much.”
“I don’t
see you pretending to be civil,” I told him, though my voice was weak now that he was looming over me.
“I’m beyond that,” he grinned. “The only thing I will give to all that bullshit about humans being unique is that they are. So drastically different from one another in the way we handle that beast within us. There is no such thing as equality, Little Lily. Unless you mass-produce humans on a conveyer belt, they will never be exactly the same.”
“So we teach people,” I said. “We don’t lock them up and mutilate them because they’re not the same as us.”
“Can you see Mykail as your equal? Even though he has wings?” Dana asked. I nodded slowly. “Do you think he sees you as his equal? He knows he could kill you with one strike. Do you think he doesn’t think about that? What about Mark? Do you see him as your equal, even though he could snap your neck before your body even registered that he had touched you?”
“But you created them like that.”
“And nature created humans black, white, tall, short, fat, thin, strong, weak, from one area of the globe or another,” Dana continued. “The only thing that is equal about them is the fact that they feel fear. You may see someone as an equal, and you might be lucky enough to have them see you as an equal, but with society breathing down people’s necks, someone is bound to notice you’re not on the same level as one another.”
“Then what would you have hum3333ans do?” I challenged. “Not try at all? Hurt and kill people further?”
“You’re advocating the very same by wanting to free these people,” Dana said, motioning to the ward around us.
“And I guess I’m advocating it by being a part of the Commission as well, so I can’t win,” I growled.
“You’re getting it now.”
“Getting what?”
“The concept of survival and purpose,” he told me. “You know you can’t win either way, but you are advocating for one option over another, and you and I are going to have fun little debates like this until you can no longer try to convince me otherwise, aren’t we?”
“I’m never going to believe that you do good by doing this,” I declared.
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