Forgotten Darkness

by Cannon, Sarra

  She was hiding something. Something big. Something she didn’t want anyone—especially her own children—to know.

  “I’m going to fight in the King’s Games,” I said. “I’m going to win my freedom and go back to where I belong, Mother. And there’s nothing you or anyone else can do to stop me.”

  Tears fell across her cheek and she stared at me, a mixture of anger and disbelief in her eyes. She was hiding something from me, and she would let me die before she would allow me to figure it out. I could see that now.

  She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. She smoothed out her white dress and wiped the tears from her eyes.

  “I don’t know what I did to raise such disobedient children,” she said. “Fight in your games, but I’m telling you, you will do nothing more than learn your own fatal weaknesses, Aerden. Remember that when you’re dying on the battlefield of the arena. I tried to save you twice, and you wouldn’t let me help you. I won’t intervene again.”

  She took a shuddering breath and turned her back on me one last time.

  Some Things Are Worth Dying For

  I lay dying on the battlefield, the sound of war echoing in my ears. Bright lights blossomed into fireworks all around me, but I couldn’t seem to find the energy to lift my head.

  We had fought with all our hearts and souls, but it was too hard. They were too strong.

  A tear slipped down my cheek as I realized this was the end. I had failed them all.

  My eyes began to close, sorrow weighing heavily on my heart. But a warm breeze caressed my skin, and a glowing figure leaned over my broken body. I forced my eyes open, squinting against the light that surrounded him. I could just make out the white of his hair and the deep silver of his eyes.

  “Dad?”

  I called his name and reached up to touch his face, but the dream slipped from my grasp and his image wavered.

  “Some things are worth dying for,” he whispered. He placed an emerald stone in my hand and pressed it hard against my palm. “You are a true warrior, Harper. Set them free.”

  I tried to tell him that I didn’t understand, but before I could say another word, the dream disappeared. The light was replaced by pain as I woke.

  Every muscle in my body ached, and the moment my eyes opened, a headache began to pound against my skull.

  I groaned and tried to roll over, but my arms wouldn’t move. I forced my eyes open, wincing at the light, and saw that my wrists were bound by leather straps. I wasn’t in my normal room. They’d moved me to a small room with white walls and a white ceiling, much like the one I remembered from my first day here at the institute.

  The light was blinding, and I closed my eyes against it, wishing I could fall back into my dream. The man with the impossibly silver eyes had been trying to tell me something. Was he really my father? Or had my brain simply made him up?

  At first, I couldn’t remember how I’d even gotten here. I remembered being in the rec room when Nurse Melody asked me to follow her, but everything after that was gone, as if it had been erased from my mind.

  Slowly, though, the memory of the basement came back to me. I could see Dr. Evers smiling over me, so proud of her torture.

  In that moment, I knew with sharp clarity that this was no normal mental institution. Shock therapies may still exist in some extreme cases, but there was no way it was still allowed to be so barbaric. There was nothing medical or safe about what had been done to me. Even the nurse knew that.

  And yet, somehow, this institute was still functioning. They were allowed to do whatever they wanted to their patients, and Dr. Evers hadn’t seemed the least bit concerned about some government official shutting them down for what she’d done. Which meant that Brooke had been right.

  Brooke had been real. I hadn’t made her up. There was more going on in this place than anyone was telling me.

  I swallowed, my throat dry and aching. There was no IV attached to my arm, and I had no idea how long I’d gone without food or water. I lifted my head to try to find the door, but pain shot down my spine.

  I let my head fall back against the bed, too exhausted to keep fighting. It was pointless, anyway. I was strapped down to a bed in a locked room with no one I could trust to help me.

  How had I gotten here?

  Not just to this room, but to this place? The nurses and the doctor kept telling me I had burned down my own house and killed my family. They said no one could be sure if I had done it on purpose, or if it had been an accident.

  If that was true, wouldn’t I have been questioned by the police? Thrown in jail or brought to trial? Wouldn’t I have some memory of what happened to me after the fire?

  Instead of a trial, I remembered the pain.

  I remembered glass cutting into my skin, blood trickling down my arms and my face. I remembered a dark room and the chanting of voices. I remembered being immersed in scalding hot water, emeralds draped around my neck and tied to my arms.

  No court would have sanctioned something like that.

  So why was I here?

  What was this place, really?

  Whatever it was, it most certainly was not a rehabilitation center for the emotionally challenged or the temporarily insane. There was more going on here than that, and none of these treatments had ever been meant to rehabilitate.

  No, this was about control and manipulation. It was about punishment.

  I left my room for one hour and was subjected to torture in the name of making me better. But Dr. Evers had smiled. She was a sadist, taking joy from the pain of others.

  I closed my eyes and heard her voice in my head.

  I only wish my mother could have been here to see this.

  She probably thought I would be too messed-up to remember her words, or she never would have dared to speak them, but where my memory had failed me before, it was crystal-clear now.

  This wasn’t about a fire or any crime I had committed. This was personal, and as I lay there for the next several hours waiting for someone to realize I was finally awake, I vowed one thing over and over in my head.

  I would fight them. I would find out what this place was, and I would do everything in my power to remember my past and why I was important to them. I didn’t care if I had to go through a thousand shock treatments, injections, or other tortures. I would find the truth, and I would make them pay for all the things they had taken from me.

  Trusting My Own Instincts

  I don’t know how many days passed before they moved me back to my room. With no windows and a light that stayed on around the clock, there was no way for me to tell if it was day or night.

  Every once in a while, a nurse I didn’t know came in to inject me with vial of green liquid that put me to sleep for a very long time. When I woke up afterward, I always felt clouded and confused. But the memory of what they had done and the determination to find the truth always returned to me. The man with the silver eyes stayed with me as I slept, encouraging me to never give up.

  None of my roommates spoke to me when I entered our room, but I made a point to look at Judith until she found the courage to look back.

  I wanted her to know that I understood our relationship a lot better now. She was not to be trusted.

  She looked away, huddling against the wall with her legs pulled tightly against her chest. Her eyes were ringed with dark circles, as if she’d hardly been sleeping. I wanted to tell her I’d slept enough for the both of us.

  Nora sat on her bed, reading a book, but didn’t dare glance up at me as I passed her.

  The room was silent and still, Mary Ellen as quiet as ever with her back turned away from the door and her black hair hanging over her face. I was unsteady on my legs, but I managed to walk on my own from the door to the bed. I sat down, out of breath even from those few steps. Recovery would take awhile.

  I had lost a significant amount of weight, which told me I’d been locked away for days without much food. Maybe even a full week.

  I needed
to talk to Brooke, but I had no way to get in touch with her. I needed answers, and she was my only hope of finding them. Did she know that I’d been taken away? Had she tried to contact me while I was gone?

  In my current condition, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to follow the shadow back down to the basement even if she did send a message to meet her there. I’d barely been able to walk twelve steps without help.

  But I was strong, and I was going to get through this. All I needed was time, and here in this place, that was the one thing I had plenty of.

  I rested as much as I could when we were confined to our room. I ate everything on my plate at meals, though I noticed that ever since I had gotten back, my portions were smaller than everyone else’s.

  When we were allowed to go outside, I walked around the edge of the courtyard the entire time, not even taking a break when I was tired and thought my legs might give out. I kept moving, determined to regain my strength.

  Instead of pills, the nurses now injected me with the same green fluid every night at bedtime. Brooke had been right about that, too. The injections were much harder to resist. They confused me and made the memories harder to grasp, but somehow I managed to always fight against the medicine. It shouldn’t have worked that way, but by sheer force of will, I refused to let my memories fade.

  I practiced fighting against it. When the drug threatened to close my eyes against the truth, I forced them to stay open, allowing myself sleep only after hours of careful practice resisting its magic.

  Because that’s what it was, right? Magic?

  Nothing else could explain all of the strange things happening here: Brooke’s shadow. Her light. The emeralds all the nurses and doctors wore. The green poison they forced into my veins every night.

  It all tied together, along with the emerald flames that consumed my family’s home.

  It was all connected, and even if it killed me, I was going to find out how.

  Spring came while I wasn’t paying attention, and it brought rain. I stared out the window in the rec room, studying the courtyard. The grass was no longer brown and withered, but instead had become lush and green.

  I was growing stronger, too, as if a new season had arrived in my life. I kept my head down during group therapy, pretending to listen but never offering to speak unless I was forced to. In my private sessions with Dr. Evers, I barely said a word. I pretended that I had no clear memory of what she’d done to me. I played her game, saying the things I knew she wanted to hear. I followed her rules, and she seemed to believe that her therapy had worked wonders.

  Wouldn’t her mother be proud?

  I spent a lot of my time trying to piece together the puzzle of my memories, wondering how in the world my doctor’s mother could have any part of this. But between the injections and the endless, mind-numbing routine, I hadn’t gotten any closer to finding the truth.

  Just when I thought I couldn’t take it any longer, the shadow of a horse passed by the window one day when we were playing cards in the rec room. It took me by surprise, and I gasped.

  Beside me, Nora jumped. “Jeez, Harper, what in the world is your problem?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought I saw lightning.”

  “So? Is that any reason to scare us all to death?”

  “I’m terrified of storms,” I said, laughing and trying to play it off.

  “There’s no lightning. It’s just a little bit of rain,” she said. “Get it together.”

  “Sorry,” I mumbled again.

  I glanced back up at the window, hoping to see the shadow again, but it never reappeared. It was enough to see it once, though.

  Sneaking out again would be tougher this time. Between the nightly injections that made me sleepy and confused and the fact that I had a tattletale roommate to worry about, I wasn’t looking forward to risking everything for a few minutes in the basement with a stranger. But I needed to see her.

  When Nurse Melody came to mark us off her list for lights-out, though, she skipped my injection. I watched her check it off her list, but she never gave it to me. Instead, she held my gaze for a few seconds and nodded slightly. Her eyes dropped to her tray with its white paper cups full of pills.

  I glanced at them, at first not noticing anything out of the ordinary. But as she handed one to Judith, I saw that one of her normal green pills had been switched for a white one.

  A sleeping pill.

  It was the closest thing to an apology I’d gotten in the weeks since the incident in the basement.

  I nodded back and crawled into bed, praying Judith hadn’t noticed the change in routine.

  I wasn’t sure why Nurse Melody had decided to help me, but the fact that one of the nurses knew what I was planning to do tonight scared me to death. I hoped she wasn’t setting up some kind of trap, and that she genuinely was trying to help me get to Brooke.

  I lay awake, listening to the rhythms of the girls’ breathing. I could tell when each one of them finally drifted off to sleep. Judith snored, which made it easy to tell when she was out. Nora’s breathing simply slowed and calmed. She hardly moved at all when she slept. And Mary Ellen, who was always quiet, grew as still as death itself.

  When the nurse came in to check on us at three in the morning, I pretended to be asleep. And as soon as I could no longer hear her footsteps in the hallway, I carefully slipped out of bed. I rearranged my sheets and pillow as best I could to make it look as though I were still in bed, asleep.

  I stared at the lock on the door, my skin prickling with excitement and fear. Brooke told me I knew exactly how I had opened the lock last time, but I hadn’t wanted to believe it. It was easier to believe that it was some kind of trick.

  If it worked again this time, though, I would know.

  I placed my hand on the lock and closed my eyes. I took a deep breath and pictured the mechanism inside the lock turning. A light click sounded and when I turned the knob, it opened with ease. Somehow, I had just opened a lock with my mind.

  I quietly made my way down the hall, through the corridors, and down to the cold basement room.

  Brooke was waiting for me.

  “I’m glad you made it,” she said. “Are you okay? God, I’m so sorry about last time. What happened?”

  “My roommate woke up while I was gone,” I said. “She told Dr. Evers I broke the rules.”

  “I heard you were gone for a while,” she said. “Did they hurt you?”

  I rolled up the sleeves of my plain gray dress and showed her the needle marks. “Dr. Evers gave me shock therapy, and then they started injections,” I said. “You were right about this place. It isn’t a normal mental institution, is it?”

  “Not by any stretch of the imagination,” Brooke said. “Have you remembered anything new?”

  I shook my head. We didn’t have much time, and I needed answers. “No. I think the injections are keeping my memories locked away,” I said. “I need your help. I know that there’s more going on here than just treatment for mental illness. Dr. Evers thinks I don’t remember the shock therapy, but she let something slip that’s been on my mind ever since.”

  “What?” Brooke asked. The same glowing orb of light rose from her hand. It flickered slightly, casting shadows around the small room.

  “She told me she wished her mother could have been there to see it,” I said. “Do you know what that means? Why would her mother have anything to do with this place?”

  “Her mother has everything to do with this place,” Brooke said, but didn’t offer more of an explanation.

  I was tired of cryptic messages and half-truths. I wanted to know what the hell was going on and how I was going to get out of here.

  “I know you said you need for me to remember on my own, but nothing is happening. After what they did to me when I met you last time, I realized there has to be more to this place, but I’m powerless to find the answers on my own. Not with them injecting that poison into my veins every night,” I said. “You remember, don�
��t you? All of it? I need you to tell me. I can’t keep going like this.”

  “You can’t give up, Harper,” she said. “I understand how frustrating this must be for you, but handing you all of the answers isn’t going to do you any good. You’d just forget them again with the next injection. You have to remember so that you can reconnect with your magic.”

  I stared at the glowing orb. “So it’s real?” I asked. “Magic is real?”

  “Very real,” she said. “Every girl in this place has some control over magic. That’s why they keep us drugged and locked away.”

  It sounded crazy, but I knew she was telling the truth.

  “Try it,” she said, nodding toward the orb of light.

  “I don’t know how,” I said.

  “Yes, you do.”

  I swallowed and lifted my hand. I had no idea what to do, but at some point, I was going to have to start trusting my own instincts. I was going to have to admit that something was different about this place and about me. I couldn’t fight back against the doctor if I had no idea who I was or why I was really here.

  It was time to start remembering.

  I stared down at my palm, waiting for something magical to happen.

  “Breathe deeply,” Brooke said, her voice calm and soothing. “Imagine there is a well of energy deep inside of you like a bubbling spring. Reach into it and connect with it. Let it flow through you until your skin is buzzing with its energy.”

  I listened, slowly taking deep breaths into my lungs. I closed my eyes and imagined that deep wellspring of power. At first, I thought it was useless. I didn’t feel anything at all. But then it happened. A tiny tingle of energy prickling at my senses. I latched onto it, going deeper toward that power.

  I imagined it flowing through my veins and traveling to every part of my body. I imagined a bright light forming in my hand.

  “That’s it,” she said. “Harper, open your eyes.”