by Jacinta Jade
His soft voice made Siray feel like snarling at him, but she settled for a cold glare.
Silver merely turned and started walking away, and Siray’s guards pushed her forwards to follow behind him, each keeping one hand on her shoulders. As they forced her down the passage, she tensed as they drew closer to the room where the tests had been performed on her yesterday, the ache of her wounds growing.
Surprisingly, they kept her moving past the room of needles, and despite her best efforts, she couldn’t stop her shoulders from sagging in relief.
Silver continued leading the way deeper into the tunnels, turning a corner every so often, the last of which took them into a smaller network of passageways and rooms. Siray was forced to walk past the first room and then was halted at the second door.
‘If you will.’ Silver gestured to indicate that Siray should precede him into the room, his sweeping hand a mockery of courtesy, and her guards gave her a push in a far-less-subtle hint.
Without much choice, Siray tentatively walked into the room.
The room was the colour of the sand that lined their coastline, with streaks of grey crossing the walls in a faint grid pattern.
The only exception to the uniformity was that one whole side of the room contained a wall of a transparent material. Siray paused just inside the room and looked through the see-through wall to where she could see another room, which contained more guards and technicians seemingly standing ready to carry out Silver’s orders.
All of their eyes rested on her.
‘Today,’ Silver said, as if he were continuing some discussion they had been having in the passage, ‘I want you to relax as much as possible.’
Siray snorted, even as she twisted to face him in disgust.
Silver ignored her and continued speaking with that lazy lilt in his voice. ‘I want you to listen to each instruction you are given and comply with it promptly.’ A twisted, stretching of his blue eyes gave away the fact that he was smiling beneath his mask. ‘If not, then there are more … creative ways to do this. But in the pursuit of saving time, I do hope you’ll be sensible.’ Silver circled back to the door and walked through, the guards following him out and waiting on either side of the exit. ‘But do try to relax,’ he called back over his shoulder again.
All caution forgotten, Siray opened her mouth to snarl something at him, but the door closed between them with a quick hiss before she could say anything.
Left standing inside of the room, and without anything else to do, Siray switched back to look at those watching her from the other side of the transparent wall. She kept her face blank as she watched them going about the final preparations for whatever they had in store for her today.
Through the clear wall, she saw Silver enter the other room from the hallway.
‘Now that we are all in position, let’s begin.’
Siray half expected to see Silver rub his hands together in anticipation, such was the excitement in his voice. He obviously enjoyed his job. She saw the slight shift in the angle of his mask and knew he was looking at her once more.
‘I want you to shift,’ he said simply.
Siray stared at Silver through the glass. She could hear him perfectly, despite the apparent absence of devices to amplify his voice, but she looked at him as if he had spoken a completely unknown language.
‘Shift?’ Her voice conveyed her disbelief.
Silver nodded. ‘That’s right—I want you to shift.’ He waved his hand around in a vague twirl. ‘Or to use an expression your familiar with, I want you to Change.’
Siray’s face went slack as she stared at him for a moment. Then hysterical laughter exploded from her. It rocked her entire body in waves, shaking her still-aching muscles and causing her stomach to hurt. Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes, and she took in great, big gasps of air, even as she worried that she might be going insane. She shouldn’t be laughing. Who knew how they would punish her.
When she finally got control of herself, she swiped at her eyes and shook her head. ‘The whole reason I was brought to the research centre in the first place, you rock-head, is because I can’t Change.’
Silver just stared back at her, his cold eyes unblinking. He stared at her long enough that all vestiges of Siray’s amusement left her and she grew uneasy again. He wanted her to Change.
Siray swallowed and looked down at her hands. She didn’t want to hurt anymore. So she could do this. She had to.
She continued looking at her hands and thought of how they would look different following a Change. She thought about animals she knew of and, picking one, and began willing her hands to Change. She closed her eyes and focused. Pictured herself sprouting feathers—brown, cream, and white. Pictured longer feathers growing from the tips of her fingers and smaller ones shooting from the skin along her arms. Siray held the image firmly in her mind and opened one eye to peek at her right arm.
Nothing.
She turned her arm over and saw only soft pale skin. No Change. She looked up and through the transparent wall.
‘It won’t work.’
She was both annoyed, fearful, and happy, all at once.
Silver let loose a long-suffering sigh. ‘Ah, you give up too easily.’ He looked pointedly at one of his soldiers across the room before turning his blue eyes back to meet hers through the glass. ‘But not to worry. Happily, we have devised … incentives to help motivate you.’
Again, Siray could almost hear him smile as his cold eyes burned into hers.
A quiet buzzing from the room around her gave her an excuse to look away from him, and she twisted her head, trying to locate the sound. The buzz built to a hum, but she still couldn’t work out where it was coming from.
She rotated her whole body now, scanning the walls of the room, the ceiling, and even the floor. She spun back to the transparent wall, but no one in the other room had moved. They all still watched her silently, and Siray’s neck prickled. Something wasn’t right.
She looked to the walls again and noticed that the faint grey lines that she had noted earlier were now emitting a soft blue glow. The glow made her think for the barest moment about the glow bug from the previous night, but she shook the memory away quickly. This glow was not friendly but cold and artificial.
As Siray looked the glowing grid lines in confusion, they seemed to throb. Intrigued, she moved closer to the nearest line in the floor and stared down at it. It was indeed glowing a bright, solid blue.
As she moved to crouch down close to the floor, Siray put out a hand out to steady herself and leaned in towards the padded floor to listen.
The hum was definitely coming from the blue lines.
Standing, she was still studying those lines when she was viciously attacked.
The attack came from behind just as the hum sharpened to a high whine, the sound accompanied by an intense stabbing pain in her lower back, which caused her muscles to erupt into spasms.
It was over in a few breaths, but Siray reeled afterwards from the intensity of the pain, even as she spun to see what had attacked her. There was nothing. She was still alone in the room.
As she frowned and moved forwards on stiff legs, her back still throbbing, she heard the hum build again into a high whine. And this time she saw it happen.
A blue bolt shot from a line in the corner of the room to lance into her left leg, moving fast enough that it was almost a blur, and Siray gasped as fiery pain shot through her once more, making her leg buckle. The pain seemed to only a spread a short way through her body, but where it did spread was incapacitating. She fell to one knee and twisted her head to scream at her watchers.
‘What is this?’
A calm, purring voice answered her. ‘This idea came from your demonstration yesterday.’
As soon as the pain had faded enough for her to be able to move, Siray pushed herself back to her feet and limped to a corner of the room that met with the transparent wall.
‘When our tests sent your muscle
s into seizures yesterday, it trigged a shift response. We controlled that response with a bolt of energy.’ Silver spoke as if providing a training session to a class. ‘Thus, we theorised that shocking your system with a similar bolt might provoke a shift today.’
Siray tensed as the whine came again, and she dove forwards onto her stomach as a blue bolt shot down from the ceiling at her. Her long hair falling in her face, she rolled and scrambled to her feet again, moving to stand with her back against the transparent glass this time, the only surface of the room that seemed not intent on attacking her.
Silver purred at her from behind the transparent wall, ‘We only need you to demonstrate a couple of Changes, Siray. Your initial test results show you might not be limited to just one form, unlike so many others.’
Siray blinked at Silver’s words. He thought she could take more than one form? She couldn’t even Change into one! She shook her head, pushing back those thoughts—lies, that’s all they were. Lies and manipulation.
Even though she knew he could hear her perfectly, she raised her voice as she replied, still keeping a wary eye on the room before her and its pulsing lines. ‘Even if I could control it, I would never help you.’
A tapping sound caused her to turn her head and look backwards at the wall.
Silver stood right there, his eyes a breath away from hers, the presence of the transparent wall not lessening their intensity in the slightest.
‘You still don’t understand. You don’t have a choice.’
With her eyes on Silver, Siray didn’t see the bolt that sparked up from the floor right before her. It hit her in the chest, and her lungs erupted in fire. The breaths she tried to drag in didn’t seem able to carry enough air, and, gasping, she collapsed forwards onto her hands and knees, fighting not to black out. Bright points of light sparked in her vision, but, slowly, the pain began to fade. She tried to stand back up, yet the aftereffects of the attacks were having a lasting effect.
Siray’s muscles now twitched randomly and wouldn’t obey her when she tried to stand.
As the muscle spasms continued, she began to realise that, even without her capacity to control it, her body’s ability to shift would be triggered. And if Silver’s theory was somehow correct, that she could Change into a variety of forms, then this also presented a danger. If her body shifted into an uncontrolled form based on an impulsive instinct, she could face serious injury from a partial shift or from multiple parts of her shifting into different forms. Her mind might try to adopt the instincts of several creatures at once and be torn apart or, worse, lost.
And she didn’t even want to think about what would physically happen if only part of her decided to shift into a much larger or smaller form.
None of the possible scenarios were good, and Siray gritted her teeth against the trembling taking over her body, turning away from the transparent wall and the watching eyes. She tried to think of anything else to focus her mind on her normal form. She thought about her cycle class within the dome and of gatherings with her friends in the open areas by the forests. She tried to remember the smell of the trees, the sound of the wind through branches, and the feel of grass beneath her as she ran as a little one in games of chasey with the others of her class.
She wasn’t sure how much of an impact it had, but while her muscle spasms didn’t lessen, they didn’t increase either. She continued to focus and closed her eyes. Just breathe, she thought to herself. In, and out. In … and out.
The trembling subsided, just a little. She was gaining control.
A command sounded from the room behind her. ‘Increase the frequency of bolts.’ Silver’s voice was lazy and unhurried. As if he had all the time in the world to get what he needed from her.
Siray, however, had very little time. Siray dove and rolled once more as a quick whine filled the room and a blue bolt shot from the ceiling to hit the floor where she had just been. Behind her, the blue energy dispersed against the floor harmlessly.
Another whine built in the air, and Siray rolled again, causing the bolt to miss—but not the next one, which followed even more quickly. As more waves of pain rolled through her body and then subsided, her muscles began to ripple more violently than before.
Her breath came in ragged patterns as she wildly scanned her mind and surroundings for options. There was nowhere to hide in this room. She couldn’t break the transparent material between her and her captors with her bare fists. She couldn’t break free of the room.
And she couldn’t avoid the bolts for any great length of time.
Then a memory from the day before popped into her mind, and she formed an idea.
A crazy, desperate idea, and she spent the next few moments as she avoided more bolts trying to talk herself out of it. Yet some hard, cold part of her, a part she hadn’t even known existed, had awoken. And it refused to let her give up. Refused to let Silver win.
So she waited until the next whine filled the air, pretended to try to avoid the bolt, and, when it hit her, let herself fall and curl up into a ball as her muscles trembled and twitched.
The way her body reacted made her realise that she wouldn’t be able to take many more hits before she lost what little control she had left. But curled up as she was, she now lay facing away from the transparent wall.
Directly over one of the glowing blue grid lines.
While she kept her body still as possible, apart from the twitching that had started up again, Siray dug one hand resting against the floor into the groove of the glowing grid and, tensing a little, held her breath as she grabbed onto the bright conduit imbedded there.
She yanked.
The thin conduit gave a little, but not much. Tensing still further and placing her free hand on the floor as a brace, she gave the conduit another yank.
It moved a bit more.
As the involuntary rippling of her muscles began to open and close the hand she had gripped around the conduit, Siray decided to give up all pretence. Rolling forwards to lean directly over the groove, she grabbed a hold of the conduit with both hands and, gripping tightly, flung her body away from the grid in the floor. With her body as leverage, she caused a sharp crack to echo through the room, accompanied by an increased hum from the conduit.
Blue-white sparks showered from the splintered end of the conduit, and the lights of the room flickered and dimmed around her. As she rolled to her other side to face the transparent wall on her stomach, holding the sparking cable at arm’s length, a cry rose from the other room.
‘Stop her!’
As her guards burst into the room at a run, the high-pitched whine rose in her ears again, and Siray found Silver’s eyes through the transparent wall.
The blue of his eyes was wild now as he beheld the threat, and even as the guards reached for her and her muscles gave some of the largest twitches yet, Siray smiled triumphantly through the glass at him. It was a smile that held no warmth, only the satisfaction of one who has gambled everything and both won and lost.
Siray touched the live end of the conduit to her chest.
A white-hot pain lanced through her core, causing her head to arch back and her mouth to open in a silent scream. Her mind and body burned, and she barely felt the violent jolt of her body as it was thrown backwards across the room and to the floor.
Her mind went white.
Her heart stopped.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SIRAY AWOKE SUDDENLY, gasping as she became conscious. Pain was the first thing she felt, causing her to open her eyes as her last memories began to swirl back in a disorienting fog. Dark silhouettes moved in and out of her vision, and her body felt exhausted and barely responsive.
She let her head loll to the right and would have jerked upright had she been able to at what she saw.
Silver sat close by, his head tilted as he considered her.
‘I underestimated you.’ His voice was a caress.
He leaned forwards, making Siray want to back away. A jerk against her limbs
made her look down. Straps held her in place against some type of gurney.
‘It’s been awhile since I had such an interesting challenge to work with. I think it might actually be the first time someone has managed to kill themselves—voluntarily, of course—on my watch.’
Siray’s heart sped up.
‘I … died?’ She had known, obviously, what would happen when she had devised her plan. But to wake up and be told it had happened …
Blue eyes locked on hers. Held them. ‘Yesssss. Your defiance almost cost us both.’
Again, that breath on her face, the voice almost affectionate in its intensity. Siray shivered.
‘Yet even your stubbornness seems to be winning you favour with his lordship.’ Silver’s head tilted, and Siray saw the blue eyes gleam. ‘I think we’ll be getting to know each other much better soon.’
A hand in Siray’s hair again, soothing, playful. Then the grip tightened, and Siray tensed as the pain made her chin lift and her neck arch.
Silver’s mask hovered just above the expanse of her throat. Lingering there.
‘But only after we learn what we need to know from you.’ The pressure on her head disappeared as Silver leaned away. ‘The more difficult you are, the longer this will take. And his lordship’s patience will only last so long.’
Siray just lay there, her focus on keeping her face blank and her body still.
Silver seemed to consider her for another moment. ‘Siiirrrraaaay.’ He drew out her name in a loving whisper. ‘I will delight in thinking of ways to break you.’
Silver straightened, and Siray let her neutral mask drop as she glared at him with hatred, her heart thumping hard.
The voice from behind the mask became bored once more. ‘Take her back to her cell.’
Siray’s spine stiffened as the guards came and, unstrapping her, dragged her from the table. Her feet hit the floor with twin muted thumps that belied the pain that her legs and knees experienced at the impact.
As her limp body was dragged towards the door, her light weight of no consequence to those who held her, Silver’s voice sounded from behind her.