We continued to the back of the room, stopping in front of the door where I had found the mangled body. I took a deep breath to try and stop the panic that began to work its way through me. It had been weeks since my last attack, but I didn’t know if my damaged senses could take what was waiting beyond the door.
It was Frank.
When we entered the room, he was sitting on the metal table. His hands held tightly onto the edges and his head hung low. He had lost so much weight since I’d last seen him. As he looked up to find out who had entered, I noted the dark circles under his eyes. Had there ever been a chosen one who looked like this?
“Helloooooo, ladies!” chirped the man who had no doubt killed the defective chosen one. He wore the same silly grin that I’d seen when I cleaned up the blood—he really enjoyed his work. I watched as my supervisor’s mouth formed into a tight smile in response.
“Tess, we are to help the doctor make Frank feel better.”
“Yeppers! Going to make Frank here as good as new. He’s got himself a little transformation fever,” replied the creator as he slapped Frank on the back. The movement caused Frank to erupt into a fit of coughs. “Now, Frank, we’re gonna need you to lie back.”
Frank, visibly trembling, lay down on the table.
“I’m ready for you, ladies,” said the creator.
“Right. If you will help me strap him down, please,” my supervisor instructed me, moving toward the cabinet stationed in the corner of the room.
“Why? Why do you need to strap me down?” Frank asked nervously.
“Because you chosen ones are big babies when it comes to this medical stuff. I guess never being sick makes one mighty scared of doctors when you do have to see one,” the creator replied with a laugh.
His demeanor, the artifice of it all, made me angry. It was hard to believe someone could really be so heartless.
Gwen handed me a set of restraints before she went back to Frank. She secured the top part of his body, and when she motioned for me to do the same with the lower half, I closed my eyes and tried to will my hands from shaking. With a deep breath, I worked on strapping Frank’s body to the metal table.
“Wait. Don’t I know you? You’re James’s girl, right?”
I didn’t want to look up and acknowledge him.
Would I run from this as I had run from the girl upstairs?
“Yes. I know you,” I replied quietly.
I watched as my supervisor’s face transformed into a mask of shock. I also saw the warning in her eyes: I wasn’t to speak again.
The doctor returned from the cabinet holding a syringe. “Now, Frank, this here is going to make you feel all better.”
Frank began to thrash against his restraints, painful, guttural coughs breaking through the noise. “No. You’re…going to…kill me.”
“What reason would I have to kill you? You have been chosen,” replied the creator as he stuck the needle into Frank’s arm.
Frank closed his eyes. I watched as tears fell down his face.
“Tess, you will stay with him till the end. The doctor will be busy in the other room. When it is done, you will inform us.”
“When what is finished?” I asked, rounding on my supervisor. But neither she nor the doctor bothered to answer my question. They simply left. What had I ever done to this woman to make her hate me so much?
Frank, much like the girl from before, began to settle down. I knew, without a doubt, the creator had just killed this boy, and I’d stood by and watched it happen. I felt the walls of the room crawling toward me. My breath came out in uneven, desperate puffs. I closed my eyes in an attempt to keep it under control.
The truth was the council wanted us all dead—anyone who they saw as weak or useless meant nothing to them. They didn’t want to protect us. They wanted us gone. Now that I saw the truth, what could I do with it? It wouldn’t save the girl who’d died or the boy who was dying in the room in which I stood.
“They’ll come for him, too,” Frank whispered.
A feeling of dread settled over me.
“Come here. Please. I don’t want to be alone.”
I moved so I was kneeling next to Frank. I watched as he attempted to keep his eyes open, fighting to stay alive.
“Why did they do this to you?” I asked. Somehow I felt it—a sense of camaraderie between the two of us. I knew nothing about him and he knew nothing about me. But we were connected.
In this moment, we were human.
“Because I got sick. I wasn’t what they wanted us to be. The kicker is, I bet they could fix me. If they really tried, they could fix me. But they don’t bother because I am nothing. I can be replaced.”
“That’s not true,” I replied. I said it for his sake, even though we both knew it was true. Maybe I said it for my sake, too. I didn’t want to be replaceable, either.
A sob broke through as he clutched to the side of the medical table, his face turning red and sweat appearing on his brow. I wiped his forehead with my sleeve. “Shhhh. It will be over soon, I promise.” I wondered if my words sounded like comfort or damnation.
“Do you think I will go to hell?” he spat out from clenched teeth.
I didn’t know how to answer his question. Did the chosen ones, children of science, have souls?
“Probably not, huh? No heaven. No hell. Just nothingness. God doesn’t care enough to send us to hell.”
“Shh. Just rest.”
I didn’t want to think of James in such a way. It was too painful. Too final.
“No one will even care when I am gone.”
I brushed the hair from Frank’s forehead. “James will care,” I said with certainty.
These words seemed to bring a sense of calm to the dying boy. “You’re right. He might just be the best of us. But they’ll hate him for it. They’ll see it, and they’ll punish him.”
I shook my head. He had to be wrong.
I couldn’t lose James.
“Will you hold my hand until this is over?”
He sounded like a child. But I held Frank’s hand until he died. I did for him what I had been unable to do for my sister.
On the transport home, I said nothing to anyone. This wasn’t different from the usual routine, but unlike the other days, today I wanted to talk. I wanted to tell someone how much I missed my sister. I wanted to inquire about my father, to find out what had happened to him. I wanted to confess how I was the one who found my mother hanging in the shower. I wanted to understand the feelings I had around James, to ask if it was wrong for me to want him to touch me so much. I wanted to shout to the world what the council was doing to both the naturals and the chosen ones.
But I didn’t know who to talk to. As I made my way through the compound, I stumbled into the only place I knew I could be alone, a place where I could let it all out.
I didn’t hesitate before shutting myself inside The Void. There was something alive inside of me that was worse than my childhood fear of this dark room. I stumbled against the wall, sliding into an almost sitting position. My shaking hands moved to my hair, and I began to pull it tight from my scalp. The tension of the panic attack was getting stronger.
My hands made their way over my mouth.
I did feel. I felt too much. All the time. I could barely hold on.
My hands weren’t enough to keep the scream, the pain, inside of me. I felt pain all the damn time. Every second of my life. I just needed to control it.
But not now.
Asking for control was asking too much.
I pressed my mouth against the cold cement walls of The Void. I hoped the pain felt by so many others who had shared this space lived inside its walls. I wanted their pain to consume mine.
With my lips against the wall I began to scream.
And scream.
And scream.
The council wanted to take all they could from me.
They wouldn’t stop.
Unless I made them.
Chapte
r 16
Tess,
It’s been months since I have sat down to write to you. Sometimes I wish you were older so I could say these things aloud. Maybe they would be easier to believe then. I can hardly believe any of it myself.
The things I have seen.
The council trusts me; I don’t know why. It’s been easy to work my way up at the training center. Two weeks ago, the Western sector voted to allow the continued creation and training of the chosen ones. Democracy? Right. Like the vote really mattered. They have been working on this for years, decades. It’s estimated they already have an army of fifty chosen ones ready to fight, and several more batches nearing completion. Apparently, this had been in the works even before the great war. They’ll write the history soon, and these facts will be hidden away.
Technology was advancing at such a fast rate in those days that the United States felt genetic engineering, creating an army because its own people were so unwilling to fight, was the only viable option.
Did you know when the bombs fell the first people rushed to safety were scientists?
A creator has taken me into his confidence, Tess. I don’t flatter myself to think he actually likes me—he wants to brag. To show someone he can play God. And I’m just smart enough to pretend his talents fascinate me, to pretend his whole lifestyle doesn’t make me feel sick. So many of our people are starving, Tess. Yet life in the training centers is one of pomp and circumstance. It’s a place filled with art. Every day for lunch this creator eats two pieces of buttered bread with his meal. Butter? But of course I should say nothing. He’s creating an army of men who will change our world.
He is God.
All those problems the council promised would go away haven’t. It’s like a virus—they just found a way to mutate and attack again, but this time the council is smarter. They remind us of the past and all its death. They pass out pamphlets along with soup in the shantytowns. They program television documentaries for those of us lucky enough to still have some semblance of normal life. And as the people watch, they become more and more willing to give up their rights. The council is so damn convincing. Flash the carnage and destruction of our recent past and we are willing to give up anything to avoid going back there.
Two more laws were passed in the name of protecting the Western sector. Now the military can enter any town and demand room and board. They say it’s to protect us. More and more skirmishes are making their way to our borders. The battles with the Easterners that used to exist in the Middlelands, the battles our government could deny because no right-minded citizen would travel there, can’t be covered up any longer.
I think they have different reasons for this law. I think big changes are coming to the way they will allow us to live.
There is also a new program aimed at offering employment to the fathers and sons living in the shantytowns: they are to convert old factories and buildings damaged by the great war into living quarters. This way so many of our people won’t have to live in tents anymore. Just like the appearance of our army, I think these laws are to weed out the rats. Anyone they believe could cause problems will be marked. They can watch us now, and we can’t say anything.
When did my own home become so dangerous?
Even the appearance of our hodgepodge army of men, who were forced to volunteer in an effort to feed their families, sends a message. As they replay over and over again the scenes of the chosen one killing those terrorists, we can look to the men who walk our streets and see the difference. We can witness our own human weakness. Physically, of course, the weaknesses are obvious, but we can detect another weakness, too—weakness of purpose. We don’t want to fight. We want to live. Something in us questions the need to destroy. The chosen one who fought those men held nothing but determination in his eyes. We can see the difference between them and us, and we want the chosen ones to fight our battles.
This creator told me that for many, many years they were unsuccessful in their attempts at artificial life. They didn’t just want to create humans; they wanted to perfect them. He said they lost hundreds of these things before finding the right way to bring them up. They could, for lack of a better term, grow them, but struggled with how they would be programmed. They had to be different from us naturals. They had to believe in the cause so much they wouldn’t hesitate to die for it. You could make them strong and agile, but if you couldn’t make them believe, none of it would matter.
You can put weapons into the hands of men, but if they can’t be convinced to use them, it’s pointless.
In the early days, there was no incubation period. A woman would be inseminated with the perfect embryo, painstakingly designed to represent our country’s greatest needs: strength, agility, persistence, endurance. Once the child was born, the mother would be paid and sent on her way. They trained a group of nurses and psychologists to raise the creations, but many were found wanting. Too much human contact, the scientists proclaimed. It didn’t matter what training these nurses and psychologists went through, they couldn’t keep our weakening emotion from their voices or their touches, and it made the chosen ones weak as a result.
They killed more than they kept during those early days before the war, back when it was all secret. And after the great war, it was a race between the Eastern sector and Western sector to see who could create their army first. The creator said they didn’t care how many chosen ones were killed in the process. They weren’t children to him anyway. The creator told me these things without emotion. I thought of you, and I wanted to vomit.
But soon they came up with a way to limit human contact. They built machines that could simulate a mother’s womb. It was decided to keep the young chosen ones in a comalike state for the majority of their childhoods, as this would eliminate human contact and influence outside of the scientists’ control.
It’s so bizarre. There are rooms and rooms of them, Tess, each holding a different batch. A different age. Three-year-olds, five-year-olds, ten-year-olds. They just lay there. They have no mothers or fathers. They won’t ever know what it’s like to be scared of the monster in the closet, or want to hold a damn teddy bear. Instead, for two hours every day us workers are asked to wheel in giant projectors. On loops, they play the same educational videos. We hook cords from the projectors into their brains. Their brains, Tess. Every time I do it and look down at those children’s faces, I want to scream.
But then I watch the video. It’s about us—our people, our faults, our need to self-destruct. Countless images of war, greed, lust, and destruction play across the screen. And I can’t argue against it because it’s all true. Everything they show is a part of our history, our humanity. But they don’t show them the whole story. They don’t see love or affection. And I know that when these things grow up, they’ll hate us.
They’ll hate you, and I can’t stop them.
The naturals think the council has created an army to protect us. They don’t understand that to the chosen ones, we’re the vermin that needs to be exterminated.
I come home every night and I want to hug you and your sisters. I pray you can feel things like love and show it. I can’t. Never have been real good at it. But in the end, I think our capacity to feel these emotions for one another might be the only thing that makes us different from the chosen ones. It might be the only good thing about being human.
I hope you’re different than me.
Chapter 17
No matter how much I scrubbed, I still felt evidence of the crime on my hands. I had helped the council kill Frank. I had strapped him down. I’d ended a human’s life. I should have said no. I couldn’t just separate people into chosen ones and naturals—the council was to blame for all of this. I understood whom to hate now. There would always be bad people, chosen and natural alike, but the council had played us all.
How long would I let the council control me?
I didn’t hear her come into the bathroom. Julia. She was blocking the entrance as I made my way to leave.
“Can we talk?” she asked. Her eyes were blotchy and swollen. She made no attempt to look presentable. Her hair was disheveled and her clothes wrinkled.
I didn’t know if I wanted to talk to Julia, after I had forced myself to forget her. I didn’t want to be reminded of what could happen, what would happen, if I for one second lost control with James. Everything in life seemed to be so tightly wound, so controlled that it left one damn near exhaustion. No wonder so many around me simply gave up.
But then I remembered lack of communication was what had gotten her into this mess.
“Sure.” I nodded.
It was late and most people had turned in for the night. She glanced at herself in the mirror and frowned. A ticking time bomb. How strange it must be to know the very thing that lived inside of you would be your death, and yet you had to carry it around for nine months. Did knowing how it was all going to end make it easier?
I wished I had asked Emma.
Just thinking her name caused me such an intense, overwhelming amount of pain that I was unable to look at Julia again. Instead, I stared down at my feet.
“I wanted to warn you, Tess.”
I shook my head and swallowed the lump in my throat. “You don’t need to warn me. I know how this all works,” I said, my eyes darting to her stomach.
“Look, this isn’t easy for me. I don’t really know you, but Henry cares about you, and I care about him,” she confessed, wringing her hands. She took a deep breath. “I’m not really doing this for you. When I’m gone, you will be all he’ll have. The least I can do is help you out.”
She tilted her head to the side. “You have to know why they make us girls work there, right? We’re the entertainment. We’re expendable. And it doesn’t matter if you say no; they will just take it from you.”
I thought of the girl I’d helped clean up.
Julia cleared her throat. “There are ways to protect yourself, things I didn’t know about. He didn’t use them, of course. He also didn’t force me, but that doesn’t mean one of them won’t. I can get you some—”
Chosen Ones (The Lost Souls, #1) Page 11