Children of the Veil (Aisling Chronicles)

by Colleen Halverson

  “The nurse is going to take your vitals before we begin,” Dr. Fade said.

  The rip of Velcro startled me, and I flopped against the mattress, trying to break free. She leaned over me to grab my arm, and I sent my knee up and against her chin. She staggered backward with a yelp of pain.

  “Don’t touch me!” I screamed.

  “You need to calm down, Ms. Tanner,” Dr. Fade said, raising his hands. “We have a full set of tests to do today.”

  “Fuck you and your tests!” I slammed my heel into his chest, and he stumbled over his rolling chair, falling to the concrete floor with a hiss of pain.

  The blond nurse stood by me with her blood pressure cuff, her eyes wide and her hands shaking.

  “Wait!” Dr. Fade said. “Get away from her.”

  He collected himself up from the floor and pressed a button on the wall next to an intercom.

  It crackled and a smooth voice spoke through it. “Yes, sir?”

  “We have a code three,” he said. “And can you ask the boys to bring up some foot restraints?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Click.

  A few seconds later, the soldiers returned, booming through the double doors.

  Dr. Fade pointed to me. “Restrain her. We need to get preliminary exams completed. I can’t do diagnostics if she’s a hostile.”

  “A hostile?” My voice came out high and hysterical, my arms pulling at the straps.

  The two soldiers hovered over me, their blank faces as passive as statues.

  “Don’t you touch me!” I spit in one of their faces.

  The man blinked, wiping the spittle away with his sleeve.

  A bright blast of pain broke me in half, my body paralyzed. I hadn’t even seen the taser in his hand. My oxygen cut off and I swallowed an endless scream. A flood of bile burst up my throat, and I coughed, spluttered, choking on my own puke.

  “Jesus, really?” Dr. Fade said from the end of a long tunnel.

  One of the soldiers knotted his hands in my hair and turned my head to the side. His actions weren’t cruel or savage, but mechanical, measured. Hot tears pushed against my eyelids, and I didn’t have the muscle ability to keep them back or even push them away. They slid down my cheeks, mixing in with the orange tints of puke.

  “Clean this up,” the doctor snapped.

  The manicured hand of the nurse came into view, wadded up paper towels crumpled between her fingers.

  My hospital gown bunched up at my hips, and gloved hands grabbed my ankles. And then the past swallowed me whole.

  Bres’s hand rising up to beat me down.

  Hello, wife.

  An inhuman sound burst from my lungs, my chest closing in and tightening. I clenched my fists, my body shaking with the after-effects of the taser, the trembling starting in my toes and sweeping over my limbs. Bres’s face burned against the back of my eyelids, his wide Fomorian eyes a deeper shade of black against the night.

  I tried to kick, to escape, but a great dark shadow folded over me and I sank into the gurney, to the floor below, to the very core of the Earth, shadows cramming into my mouth, my nose. I couldn’t breathe, and my heart pounded in my brain, faster and faster.

  “What’s happening to her?” a feminine voice echoed on the other side of the world.

  “She’s having a panic attack,” Dr. Fade replied.

  His face swam into view, and I blinked rapidly as Bres’s face switched back and forth like ripples in an old film projector.

  “You’re dead…” I whispered. “You’re dead…”

  “Ms. Tanner we’re going to sedate you now,” Dr. Fade said, his nose close to mine. “It will be just a small pinch.”

  Bres smiled at me, a knife in his hands.

  “I killed you.” I croaked. “You’re dead!”

  Something pricked the delicate skin inside my elbow, and I screamed, throwing my head back. Old ceiling tiles met my stare, brown water stains making seaweed patterns across the gray expanse. I could no longer see Bres, but his colds hands moved over me, prodded me, whispered to me in his guttural Fomorian language. I was paralyzed, couldn’t even wiggle my fingers, but I felt everything. Tears spilled over, tracking down my cheeks, the salt hardening and pinching my skin. It felt like drowning, and I tried to crawl through the darkness, break the surface, but I remained at Bres’s castle, the nightmares dragging me down deeper and deeper. Maybe I had always been there. Maybe I had never left. I closed my eyes, trying to escape, but there was no way out.

  …

  Every cell in my body screamed at me as I rolled over in my cot. Someone had dimmed the lights, or perhaps they were on a timer. The sickly fluorescent glow from a single lightbulb draped over the sparse quarters, reflecting against the metal surfaces of the basin and toilet. My stomach cramped up, and I stumbled over to the toilet, the singular tinkling sound of pee strangely comforting. My body still functioned, so there was that. My powers may have gone to shit, but I was still breathing. I closed my eyes and tried one last time to travel out of there, but I may as well have been trying to sprout wings for all the good it did me.

  A small trapdoor on the bottom of the floor slid open and I briefly saw a hand launch a tray of food into my cell.

  “Hey!” I darted over to the trapdoor. “Wait!”

  It closed with a loud snap, and I leaned my head against the door, pressing the back of my palm to my forehead for a moment, trying to ease the pounding in my temples.

  After taking a deep breath, I crawled over to the plastic tray. A carton of milk, peas, and carrots, some rectangle beige block of something that might have been meatloaf. In one of the little compartments sat a small chocolate chip cookie. I bit into it, and it was dry as cardboard, the crumbs falling into the folds of my hospital gown. The chips were just tiny fragments of sugar and lard dyed to look like chocolate, no doubt, but it tasted heavenly. I picked off the tiny crumbs from my gown, savoring it to the end.

  The ventilation clicked off again, and a strange sound moved through it, almost like a whisper. I shook my head, thinking I was hallucinating, but then it came again, this time clearer.

  “Hello?” the voice echoed.

  My eyes glanced over the security camera in the corner, its ominous red light still shining on and off. I leaned down, letting my hair fall over my face.

  “H-Hello?”

  “Are you all right? They didn’t rough you up too badly?” The voice was female and British with a trace of—something—very strange. I couldn’t quite place it. The way she phrased her sentences sounded awkward, foreign.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I’m in the next cell over,” the voice said. Three small knocks sounded against the wall, and I placed my hand against it.

  My heart leaped into my throat. I wasn’t alone. I pressed my fingers against the vent, my fingernails tracing the edge of the metal, as if I could reach out and touch the woman next door.

  “How long have you been here?” I said.

  The voice paused. “I don’t know. Maybe seven years? It’s difficult to keep track in here.”

  I leaned my head against the wall and shut my eyes tight.

  Seven years?

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Something with the government. They do tests.”

  My chest tightened, and I leaned in closer to the vent. “Tests? What kind of tests?”

  “They test our abilities,” the voice said matter-of-factly. “The things we can do.”

  My ear perked at her mention of abilities. A thousand possibilities ran through my mind, many of them informed by vintage episodes of The X-Files. But if she mentioned abilities, maybe she was like me. Maybe I wasn’t the only one of my kind. Orin said there were more.

  “Are you an aisling, too?”

  “An aisling?” Her heavily-accented voice rolled over the word in confusion. “What is that?”

  I sighed, twisting it around my shoulder. “It’s uh…it’s com
plicated.”

  “You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t complicated.”

  I paused for a moment, wondering if I could trust this disembodied voice whispering up to me through the ventilation system. “What are you?”

  The voice let out a long exhale. “I’m not quite human.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “My father was of a, well I guess you would say a ‘magical’ race.”

  “We have something in common, then,” I said. “My mother was Fae.”

  The woman paused on the other side of the wall.

  “Are there a lot of our kind here?” I asked.

  “Yes, but I’ve never seen them,” the woman said. “I’ve just heard them…”

  Bang!

  The door next door boomed open. A shriek of terror exploded through the vent and then something hard landed on the floor. Incoherent whimpering echoed through to my cell, the woman crying no! No! Screams echoed down the hall and then the double doors snuffed them out. The abrupt silence turned my blood to ice water, and I brushed my sweaty hair away from my face.

  A new terror washed over me, sucking the air from my lungs until I thought I would pass out. I thought of Finn waiting for me in the café. Finn who loved me, who would never know what happened to me. I strained every muscle in my body, trying to break through whatever was blocking my aisling powers, but nothing flickered to life. I heard a small click and the last light in my room blacked out. I sat alone in darkness. I couldn’t see the walls, but I could feel them pressing in on me. I threw my tray across the room and screamed, clutching onto my aching sides.

  …

  Florescent light blasted through my brain, and I startled awake, grasping onto the coarse blanket. Someone had taken my tray while I slept. The door clicked open and the guards from yesterday marched in, tasers ready.

  “We want you to come quietly,” one of them said.

  My body ached from yesterday’s beat down, and I studied the massive arms on each of them. If I didn’t have my powers, there was no way I could get past them. I had to find a way to be alone with Dr. Fade and the nurse, get crafty. Observe and wait.

  I nodded to the guard and followed him out of my cell and down the hall, the other guard in my wake. I stared at the gun buckled at his waist, less than a foot away from my hand. Could I grab it before the other one taserd me? Could I take them both out?

  Boom. Shot to the back of the knee. Boom. Shot to the back of the head.

  Right. I’d be spazzing on the floor filled with 50,000 volts before I could say “don’t tase me, bro.”

  We reached the double doors and entered the exam room. Dr. Fade and the nurse stood in front of a computer, staring hard at a printout of data, the paper rolling to the floor as the doctor’s hands fingered through it.

  “Place the specimen on the gurney,” he said without looking up. “Make sure she’s strapped down tight.”

  I lifted my hands in the air. “I’ll comply. Please don’t strap me down. I swear I’ll do what you want.”

  Dr. Fade looked up from his printout. The nurse glanced at him uneasily.

  “Strap her down,” he said.

  I backed into the corner. “No! Please, it gives me panic attacks. I’ll lie on the bed. I’ll let you do anything you want.” I pushed through some fake tears. “Please don’t tie me down. Please. I’ve been abused. Beaten. I have PTSD. I’ve—”

  “Fine!” Dr. Fade said, throwing the printout onto a surgical table. Sweat beaded on his forehead, the use of the “abuse” word clearly making him uncomfortable. He had a pen in his hand and he clicked and unclicked it. “But if you make any bad moves…”

  “I swear,” I said, widening my eyes. “I’ll be good, I promise.”

  He paused and then nodded to the guards. One of them flashed an ID badge and the door opened with a click before they exited.

  The doctor sighed and then gestured to the gurney. I hopped up, stretching myself down across the crinkly paper. I scanned the walls, looking for a camera, but I couldn’t see anything, unless it was hidden. I wondered if the walls were soundproof.

  The nurse hovered over me, strapping a series of wires to my brain. A badge flapped on the hem of her shirt, the laminate cover catching the light. I could grab that badge, take it when she wasn’t looking.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, trying to mask the waver of panic in my voice. I needed to be calm, clearheaded.

  “We’re going to be mapping your brain today.” He sat down in his swivel chair, typing furiously into the keyboard in front of him.

  The nurse continued placing electrodes around my forehead. Her cheap perfume gave me a headache.

  “Is that what you people do here,” I said. “Study people like me?”

  Dr. Fade suppressed an eager smile.

  That’s right. Gain his trust. Distract him. Let him get comfortable.

  “What we do here is classified, Ms. Tanner,” he said, studying the screen. “But you could say we’re interested in…irregularities.”

  “I could show you some real cool stuff, you know.” I sighed, staring up at the ceiling. “But my powers don’t work in here. Why is that?”

  Dr. Fade’s smile widened. “We know all about you, Ms. Tanner. We know what you can do.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  He typed something into the computer, staring at the screen. “Hmm?”

  “You didn’t answer my question.” I swallowed hard, trying to soften my voice, make myself appear weak, vulnerable. “Why don’t my powers work in here?”

  Dr. Fade nodded, grabbing a stack of papers on his desk. “Oh, we’ve shot you with a special neurotoxin. A little something we concocted in the lab.” He squeezed my arm. “Regulation. Can’t have you running off now.”

  I suppressed a cringe, swallowing the expletive rising in my throat. A neurotoxin, huh? I wondered if it was the same thing Kent the Fir Bolg had slipped into my drink. I closed my eyes, playing the docile patient, but the whole time I tried to focus my energy, search for it beyond the dull fog of the poison they had shot through me. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find even a flicker of my aisling energy. I was powerless.

  Hey, you know what would have been useful here? A motherfucking spear.

  Clenching my fists I reminded myself to strangle Finn and kick his paternalistic mansplaining-ass later.

  Dr. Fade clicked his pen in and out, the sound like nails on a chalkboard. I gritted my teeth, longing to grab it from his hands and shove it right through his eyeball. But I had to wait my turn. Watch. Their time would come.

  …

  I sat on the floor of my cell, hunched over my food tray, listening to the ventilation system click on and off. I slurped up the sticky syrup from my fruit cocktail, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. Scrambling to my feet, I kicked the tray aside before turning to the camera in the corner.

  “Look,” I said. “Could you bring me a book or something? A magazine? I’m bored as fuck in here.”

  The red light simply blinked in response, my face reflected in the lens, stretched out and distorted. I wasn’t sure how many days had passed, but I felt my sanity slipping. The only thing keeping me lucid was the constant routine of tests and diagnostics. The girl in the vent hadn’t returned, and the constant staring into space was driving me batty. I had even tried to strike up a conversation with the guards, but I might as well have tried to strike up a conversation with one of those dudes in front of Buckingham Palace for all they wanted to chitchat.

  “I’m serious. Would it kill you to send some paperbacks down here? Maybe a few classics? The complete Harry Potter series or something? At least The Prisoner of Azkaban. I swear that would hold me over for like a month.”

  The red light blinked. Silence filled the cold cell. I plopped onto the floor and crossed my legs.

  “Welp. I guess I have no choice but tell you all about the time I got this horrible, raging yeast infection.” I paused. Nothing. “It
was my junior year of college, and—”

  “Hey,” a voice whispered through the vent.

  I jumped and crawled over to the wall.

  “Hey!” I grinned stupidly. The girl was back. “Are you okay? I was starting to think I imagined you.”

  “I’m fine…I’m…” She trailed off.

  “What did they do to you?” The words blurted out of my mouth before I could think. Maybe she didn’t want to talk about it. Lord knows I had experienced enough traumas to know the talking cure wasn’t for everyone. “I mean, you don’t have to tell me. I understand.”

  She sniffed, letting out a small choking sound. “It’s fine. They sometimes do these stress tests. This time it was…fire.”

  “Christ.” My stomach dropped to the floor, and I curled my knees up tighter to my chest.

  “Maybe it will be different for you,” she offered.

  Neither of us said anything for a long time, and I imagined our backs pressing against the wall. Somehow that thought brought me some small modicum of comfort. At least I wasn’t alone in here.

  “What’s your name?”

  She didn’t answer, and the minutes ticked by, so many that I thought she had left me, disappeared again.

  “Hey,” I whispered. “Are you still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “I don’t…” She let out a sob, and I pressed my hand against the vent, as if I could reach out to wrap my arm around her, help her see a way out of this. We had to find a way out of this.

  “I don’t remember,” she said.

  I closed my eyes, resting my palm against my forehead. Would this happen to me? How long would it take? A year? Two years? Ten? My shoulders slumped, and I thrust my fist in my mouth, biting on my knuckles.

  “My name is Elizabeth,” I said. “Can you remember that for me? I mean, if I forget?”

  “Yes. I will.”

  I brushed my hair from my eyes and shook my head. “What if I gave you a name?”

  A small giggle passed through the vent, and I smiled, the sound lifting my spirits a little.

  “I’m serious!” I said. “I need to call you something. ‘Girl in the vent’ isn’t going to work.”