by Thomas Green
That could be a start. I sagged down by the wall near them, placing my tray between me and the girls to serve as a psychological barrier. I bit into the apple and glanced at them. “Howdy.”
They trembled and huddled tighter together, glaring at me with dark eyes.
Right, I probably looked terrifying. Okay, perhaps my social skills got a bit rusty, especially when younger people were involved. Three teenagers entered the Male Ward in the past half a year. Two died within a fortnight and the third one killed himself after his first extraction.
“Hungry?” I pushed the tray toward the girls. “I’m fine with the apple alone.”
They stared at the food, eyes desiring but faces pale.
I sort of expected someone to storm in to protect the girls from the evil fallen angel. Since that didn’t happen, they had to be outcasts. I munched the apple, enjoying the sour taste.
After a lot more staring, the girls pulled the tray toward them, poured the milk into the cereals and sat in a way so they could eat, legs crossed under themselves. “So… you’re into young girls?” one of them asked, voice sharp.
I snorted. Not the question I expected. “No, not really.”
“Then? You wouldn’t give us anything without expecting something in return.”
“Yes, and no…” I smiled. “I only found it extremely curious you two are sitting alone.”
“And you came to… investigate us?” One of them sported an ironic laughter. “Running errands for Persephone?”
“No. I was once a private investigator and old habits die hard.” I eyed my half-eaten apple. “A lot of people are here because I arrested them.”
“What’s that got to do with us?” Her voice remained tense, but they started gobbling down the cereals.
“Perhaps nothing, perhaps everything. What’re you here for?”
They glanced at each other. Upon closer inspection, they were twins. “Bad things happen to people near us,” they said together in a perfect synchronization, which wasn’t creepy at all.
“What type of bad?”
“All sorts.”
I arched an eyebrow. “So, I could forget something if I’m close to you?”
“No.” They both shook their heads. “We aren’t the ones who do that.”
An unpleasant grin split my face. “And who is?”
They paused expressions frozen. Yes, they realized I was questioning them and, tricked by my well-practiced I got you grin, they now thought they slipped something. Well, they technically did, but nothing useful. Without another word, they grabbed the tray and turned their backs at me.
Excellent. The apple now almost tasted sweet. They finished the meal and skittered away. I waited for them to gain some distance and after one of them glanced back, I rose, and followed them.
I didn’t need to see them in detail to keep track. There were only so many hallways in here, and so I could estimate their general direction by how they moved around the prisoner groups. And their destination was clear. The woman who helped others forget was a well-known Samaritan in the Female Ward, and the girls just learned an evil, private investigator was searching for something connected to her.
Since they were too young to know better, their next natural step was to go tell the woman this happened and that she should be careful. Looking over their shoulders at every few steps, the girls ran across the sports hall to get to the second one and then continued toward the arena.
I slipped through the crowd, following them. An experienced eye would have noticed me. But to teenage girls, I disappeared among all the other men wearing orange jumpsuits.
They took the northern exit from the second sport hall and entered the hallways leading toward the local toilets. Out of the four bathrooms in the Male Ward, these were the furthest from the cells. The girls disappeared in the hallway and I followed.
An intersection stopped me. Bathroom to the right, blind tunnel straight. Okay, the corridor wasn’t blind, but ended with a door we couldn’t open. Toilets would’ve been annoyingly public for the woman I sought, so I advanced forward.
Voices echoed from ahead. “Tell me you didn’t run to me straight?” a gentle, female voice asked.
Awkward silence took over the air as the girls apparently realized their error. Too late.
I made the turning and saw them, the two girls standing in front a blond woman sitting by the impassable door. She was in her early twenties, golden-blonde hair, sky-blue eyes, and looked too pretty for this place. “Sorry, just needed to talk,” I said and stepped toward her.
The twin girls turned, glaring at me. An itching feeling ran up my arm. Did they use magic on me? How cute. I pushed aether through my arm, blended the energy with theirs and then absorbed all of it.
The itching feeling disappeared, and the girls gaped. “How did you do that?” one of them asked, eyes wide.
I stepped past them and messed up the girl’s hair with my hand. “I’m strong, kid.” With a smile, I sat down by the wall, glancing at the blonde woman. “Lucas Johnson, also known as Lucifer.”
She gave me an appraising stare, inching away from me. But she knew she couldn’t run since I would always find her since knowing what she looked like. She may have not wanted to, but she needed to talk to me. “Sophia.”
“Girls, how about you give us some privacy?”
With narrowed eyes, they looked at Sophia. She nodded. Reluctantly, the twins walked away. A moment after their steps vanished from the hallway, Sophia asked, “What do you want?”
“To escape from this prison.”
She laughed dryly. “Everyone says that. Yet I also see the same everyone remaining locked in here.”
“I’m not everyone.”
“That’s what everyone thinks.” She shook her head. “People believe they’re special, unique, different. I’ve seen memories of enough people to know better.”
“Come.” I rose. “I’ll show you something that’ll change your mind.” I stretched out my hand to help her rise.
She ignored the offer, getting up on her own.
I led her to the sports room where I searched for Wukong. The monkey king was easy to spot, playing basketball like every damn time we weren’t practicing wrestling. I motioned him to come with my hand.
He frowned, passed the ball to a prisoner standing by the side and joined us. Wukong gave Sophia a pitying smile. “Sorry to see you next to him.”
Really? I glared at him, wondering why we were friends.
Sophia chuckled. “He’s rather pushy, isn’t he?”
“Wait until he stops being shy.” Wukong grinned and introduced himself.
I turned and headed toward the mess hall’s bathrooms. They followed me, exchanging light chatter. I did my best to ignore them since I knew Wukong’s jokes would be centered on me.
We reached the bathrooms. Nobody was inside, so we went straight to the furthest stall.
Sophia hesitated as she approached. “Two men are dragging me to a bathroom stall, what could go wrong?”
“You’ll wish it was that,” Wukong said.
She neither laughed nor replied. Once we were in the booth, I grabbed the toilet brush. “Move the illusion to the stall’s door.”
Wukong raised his chin. “You don’t get to order me around.”
Oh, really, now that there was a pretty girl involved, he challenged me? How cute. I gave him a smirk. After a few seconds, he gave in and did what I told him to. The wall to our side revealed the slightly bent steel plate, lightly peeled off at the bottom edge.
Sophia ran her hand over it. “So, you wanted to show me a damaged wall?”
I stepped to it, struck in the toilet brush’s back end, and used it as a lever. The plate peeled off and I put it down by the wall, revealing the hole in the wall.
Sophia stared at the opening with wide eyes, breath shallow.
“Sophia comes in with me while Wukong stays as a guard.” I slid into the hole in the wall, entering the duct shaft.
> After a short moment, Sophia followed me and Wukong remained behind, as ordered. We crawled through the horizontal shaft all the way to the vertical one. Sophia stood next to me, staring at the massive pipes leading through the prison.
I caught onto the ladder and climbed up. Sophia followed me, speechless. I stopped a few feet above the maintenance door on the main pipe.
With one hand, I turned the valve and opened the door, revealing the torrent of water thundering down the pipe. “A few days ago, I entered this pipe, climbed up against the current all the way to the eastern pipelines. There, I destroyed the flow regulation, flooding the Female Ward. I did all of that to meet you.”
She stared at the current, mouth gaping. “You caused this… how…” She pierced me with her gaze. “Over seventy people drowned in the flooding.”
“Splinters fly when you chop wood. You asked me why I think I’m different from others. I’m not going to just escape this prison. I will destroy the entire facility, kill Hades and Persephone, and free everyone imprisoned here.”
She shook her head. “You’re insane.”
“I’m also halfway done with my plan.” I softened my tone, but not too much. “Everyone imprisoned here is as good as dead. And so will be everyone else that will ever be brought in here. Yes, my methods aren’t moral, my goals aren’t just, but the end result will save a lot more lives than I will take in the process.”
She stared at the falling water for a long moment. I played the greater good card, which I had no moral right to do. But it was also the one I deemed most likely to work on her. “If I refuse, you’ll force me to help you anyway, won’t you?”
“No.” I paused for a second to allow her to absorb the answer. “I have many escape plans. The best one involves you. If it fails, I will simply go with the next best one, and so on until I either die or escape.”
“What makes the plan that involves me the best one?”
“That the least people die in the process and the most prisoners get freed.”
“What’s the worst one?”
I motioned upward where the maintenance duct had door leading to the upper levels. “I take that exit, steal supplies and clothing, return here to blow up the Male Ward’s pipe and then escape in the chaos, alone.”
“Dooming everyone other than you to death….” She sighed. “Suppose I would agree to help you. What would you ask of me?”
“I’ve got the escape plan prepared. Within the next few days, Hades will adjust an extraction chamber to read memories and throw me inside. For that, I need to not remember the plan, or anything related.”
“That’s impossible.” She cleared the hair from her face. “I can’t block more than single moments.”
“What if you could use more of your power?” I motioned at the falling water. “Without using an excessive amount of aether, there would be no way for me to survive in that pipe.”
Her eyes widened, but overall expression darkened. “You’ll not like how that works.”
“Try me.”
“Memories don’t have a search function.” She closed the pipe’s maintenance door and left the valve for me to seal. “In the process, I will see every memory you have ever had, every dream, every speckle of imagination that ever sparked in your mind. I will see every awkward moment you went through, all your most embarrassing thoughts. I’ll see all of who you are, not who you want people to see you to be.”
Was she trying to scare me? In my younger years, this would have indeed terrified me. But now, I didn’t care. I gave Evelyn a promise I had to fulfill. “That’s not an issue.”
“You don’t get it. I’ll see everything and if I don’t like it, I won’t block the memories you want me to.” Her voice heated up. “I can’t just block memories. I can implant fakes, reorganize them, or wipe the head clean completely.”
This one I saw coming. Once she would be in my head, I would have no way to restrict her actions. If she wouldn’t like my plan, she would probably make me forget everything, including that she existed. This was the worst of the risks. My face hardened. “Have you ever killed anyone?”
She measured me for a long moment.
Once she looked into my memories, she would see the plan in its entirety, which involved me killing people. As she must have realized, but she also had to realize the blade hidden behind my question. She didn’t know how I would react to different answers. For all she knew, I could kill her right here in the duct shaft if I didn’t like what she said.
Sure, I wasn’t planning to do that, but she couldn’t know. She shook her head gently. “I sure have gotten rusty to have fallen into this trap.”
“It’s not really a trap.” I smirked. “I’m just generally difficult to deal with.”
“Yes.” She glared at me. “I’ve killed before.”
“Give me the details.” Now, I had to make sure she was telling the truth and not just lying to get away from me.
Silence filled the air.
Meh, I needed her to tell the truth, not to conjure what she thought I wanted to hear. “I’ve got a lover back home and I promised I would come back,” I said. “And I also promised her that once I returned, I would quit my usual life of a private investigator and find work at the Church. I plan to do both.” Telling the truth out loud felt strange, liberating and binding at the same time. Unspoken thoughts were much easier to ignore.
Sophia said nothing and her eyes widened. I realized she couldn’t erase memories, not permanently. If she truly had that ability, she would have no reason not to agree to everything I asked and then wipe my mind clean. So, she must have only been able to block them. And blocks could disappear or be overcome, meaning she had to find a way to deal with me without me desiring revenge in the future. “I won’t tell you anything about myself,” she whispered. “But I can tell you that my past has more corpses than yours.”
“Good. Let’s do this.” I was starting to like her and donned a cheeky grin. “You’ll fall in love with what you’ll see.”
She shook her head, obviously swallowing a sharp retort. “You’ll need to sit down.” She started descending the ladder.
Once we reached the shaft’s bottom, she said, “Okay, loosen my restrictions.”
I stepped behind her and with a set of gentle touches, I moved my fingers by her collar. “Tell me when you feel a surge of power.”
After three minutes, she said, “Now.”
That meant I was done. I sat down on the ground, turning my back toward her. “The plan has multiple decisions you will need to make. Be sure to go through those, including what I expect to be their outcomes.”
“Got it.” She stepped behind me and placed her palms on the sides of my head. “You’ll have a nightmare of a headache from this.”
With a nightmare of a headache, I stood in the mess hall, wondering how the hell I got there. Nothing came to mind. I didn’t recognize a single face around me. All I remembered was that they put me into a chopper and sent me to Tul Sar Naar. But the jumpsuit I wore looked like I’ve been here for a while already.
Following what everyone else was doing, I stepped into the queue leading toward the food-distributing machine. A moment before my turn came, doors slid open in the walls and guards rushed in.
With a puzzled look, I watched the prisoners drop to the ground, cursing. Twenty guards clad in tactical armor surrounded me. One of them, a man holding a baton in the way one would hold a sword, stepped toward me. “You’re coming with us.”
I shrugged. “I guess.”
A second of awkward silence passed through the air. The man stepped to me, pulled my arms forward and shackled my wrists together.
If only I had an idea of what was going on.
They led me out of the mess hall, through steel corridors, and then down an elevator. Minutes later, I entered a cell. Inside were three people. A man in a perfect, black suit with a greatly arranged beard. A woman in casual clothes that somehow matched the first man’s suit and a dark man
in a white suit with a mustache.
I had no idea who these people were.
The man in the black suit motioned at the wall. “Strap him in.”
The guard leading me did, tying my wrists and ankles to the steel wall before he attached my collar into some connector.
“Start,” the black-suited man said.
The mustached man tapped a screen in front of him and my vision blacked out.
Lucas 8
EMOTIONS CLASHED WITHIN ME when I stared at Evelyn. She looked the same as when we first danced, wearing a dashing, red dress, her crimson hair in free fall, her orange eyes sharp, her skin youthful and fresh. She smelled of cinnamon and wore her usual smile.
I, on the other hand, was tied between two wooden poles, naked. Blood dripped from the countless wounds on my body. Little but pain remained within me.
Gently, Evelyn placed her palm on my face. “Come on, Luke, why don’t you tell me?”
“I don’t… know.” The words barely left my throat, sore from all the wailing I’d done.
“How can you not know?” She frowned. “You always have an escape plan. You know I love you.” She leaned in to kiss me, her lips soft and sweet. Evelyn detached and grabbed a mallet from the table standing next to her. “Why do you force me to hurt you?”
“There’s no… plan.” I tried to brace myself for the pain, but had no strength left.
She stepped aside, swung the mallet, and crushed my knee. I wailed with pain, my eyes burning from searching for tears I no longer had. She returned the mallet and leaned against me, running her soft hands over my bleeding chest. “You know you can tell me anything.”
“I do.”
“So?” She raised an eyebrow with a smile.
“I’m… sorry… I don’t know.”
“Shame.” Evelyn picked up a long, saw-bladed knife. She made half a step back, grabbed my genitals, and placed the knife under them, the blade cold. “Are you sure?”
If I had the answer, I would had given it to her the first time.