by J B Cantwell
“What did they do with your chip?” she finally asked. The opening to the cave was looming ahead now.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what they could accomplish with it out here in the dirt. Maybe they have a lab somewhere, or someplace clean where they can look at it, maybe reverse engineer it. But I haven’t seen anything like that in the woods.”
My stomach dropped as I saw Prime Mitchell on the other side of the tunnel, guarding the entry to the base. A shiny pair of handcuffs swung back and forth in his fingers.
This is it.
Don’t forget the truth.
And don’t forget to lie.
Chapter Three
They clicked hard and tight against my wrists. I was happy to see Mitchell inspecting the irritation already there.
“Well,” he said. “Looks like we’re not the only ones who wanted you locked up.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said.
“Soldier,” he said, turning to Laura. “Report back to your group.”
“Yes, Sir,” she said, saluting.
She took one last nervous glance at me, then made for the entrance to the tunnel.
Mitchell extended an arm.
“After you,” he said.
Of course. He didn’t need to tie my feet or keep me on a chain. We both knew that there was no way out of this place for me now unless I wanted to make a run for one of the tunnels, and the only thing waiting for me on the other side of any of those would be more soldiers. More force. So I followed his direction wordlessly, waiting.
“Left,” he said as we approached another hallway.
My jaw dropped open as I saw what was housed there.
Beds. Medical beds lined up in rows, some filled, some empty. In the beds with the occupants, IVs were attached to their forearms, and strange goggles covered their vision. They were entirely still, almost as if their mouths were sewn shut. I wondered if, inside, they were screaming.
“Right,” said Mitchell.
I was relieved that he wasn’t planning to admit me to this strange, terrible hospital. Maybe he was saving that for later.
As we turned the corner, the hospital beds disappeared. Here there was a long hallway of doors. Strange symbols decorated the front of each, indiscernible to me, but clearly meaning something to the Primes.
One door at the end was our destination. It was decorated with a circle, nothing more. It waited, open, and I stepped inside.
Sergeant Holmes waited in a seat in the center of the room. He sat casually on the metal chair, a mug of some liquid in his hand and another on the desk for me. There was a small window in the room, letting in just enough light for us to see each other clearly.
“That’ll be all, Mitchell,” he said.
“Yes, Sir,” Mitchell said, saluting.
“Soldier Taylor, please have a seat,” he said.
Before him he held a manila folder, and as he opened it I saw with horror that it was all about me. As if I were a criminal, the folder appeared to hold information about me I never thought anyone else knew or cared about. He took out photos, random papers. I even saw a report card from tenth grade in there. Pictures of Mom. One of Dad from years before he died.
And Alex. Alex walking me down the street on the way to school. Alex grabbing me by the shoulders at boot camp, insisting that we get out. Alex, my note slipping through his hands, just as my kiss had slipped from his lips, unnoticed.
“You’re not in trouble for anything that has happened here,” Holmes said. “Others have sought to leave the Service once they’ve pledged themselves. You, however, were taken in the field. When you had the ability, you came back to our camp. Though you do show yourself again and again to be quite slow in physical training, your scores on intelligence and marksmanship are exemplary.”
He turned around the folder and pushed it across the table. My wrists still in cuffs, I flipped through the pages. It was all there. Dad’s death certificate. Accounts of Mom’s drunkenness. Our need, for years and years, to survive on nothing but nutrition squares. My conversations with Lydia, transcribed but not perfect.
They don’t have the notes. I assured myself. The notes were all flushed.
And there was one other thing they didn’t have. My experience while outside of their control, in the woods with Sam and the Fighters. The hours I had spent with my chip removed had been free ones, my thoughts unable to be examined by anyone but myself.
I could tell that Holmes was hungry to add those lost hours into this perfectly organized representation of my life.
“So,” he said, leaning back into his chair. “What happened?”
I sat quietly for a moment. Then, staring at the pictures, a lone, stubborn tear spilled from my eye.
“I killed someone,” I said.
My throat felt tight with emotion that I was trying to suppress.
“And?” he asked.
“I had never done that before.”
“And you ran,” he said.
I looked up into his eyes, finding a combination of anger and understanding there.
“The whole time you have been in the Service, you have clung to the bottom rung on the board. You’ve come close to going to the Burn many times.”
I nodded, trying not to cry. Was that where I was going next? The Burn?
“It has been … frustrating to watch you,” he said. “Your lack of physical strength particularly bothers me.”
His eyes flashed toward the door, and immediately I knew he was thinking about the people lined up in those beds.
“I don’t want to,” I said.
“You don’t want to what? Fight?”
I was starting to panic now. My situation was looking more more and more dire with each moment that passed.
“I want to fight. I can fight, I know that now. I just didn’t understand before … the change in mentality you need to do it. But I can do it. I know I can.”
“What is it, then, that you don’t want?”
I swallowed hard, refusing to let any more emotion show on my face. I would keep that for tonight.
“I don’t want to be … altered,” I said. “I don’t need it. I don’t want it.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Holmes said. “Unfortunately, that decision is not up to you. It lies, instead, with me.”
The silence stretched.
“I can do it, I can shoot straight,” I said. “I know I can now. And you know I’m one of the best shots on my team. It’s a waste of resources to make changes to me now.”
Please don’t. Please don’t.
“Tell me about what happened in the woods,” he said. “I see your chip has been removed, and not delicately.”
I started out by telling him everything I had told Laura in the tunnel. How they hit me on the head and taken my chip, how they had kept me bound and questioned me for hours about what the enemy was planning.
“I lied to them, mostly,” I said. “Anything I said was information they already had.”
“And what did you lie about, exactly?”
“Numbers,” I said. “I told them that we only had twenty on our team waiting to fight. They were on the move away from us after the first assault. I thought that, maybe if they knew, they might change direction again and we could pick them off when they arrived.”
“Hmm,” he said. “That was a smart move on your part.”
“Thank you, Sir.”
“Did they tell you anything about their plans?”
“Nothing specific. They said they have other camps, maybe fifty Fighters in all. They were excited by my false information about our numbers.”
“Tell me about your chip,” he said.
I put my hand to it again, the scab finally starting to get hard enough to protect the damaged tissue underneath.
“They ripped it out,” I said. “They had some sort of tool. They took it out that way.”
“I imagine that would have been very painful,” he said.
&
nbsp; “Yes,” I said. “They left after the first night, but I couldn’t really move around on my own for a few days. Will I get a new one now?”
It wasn’t so much that I wanted the chip, but that I wanted to feel some sort of relief from its absence. The lightning jolts that ran through my brain hadn’t stopped. And though I might have preferred freedom, right now all I wanted was relief.
“It remains to be seen if you’ll get anything at all,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Just one more question,” he said.
“Yes?” I asked.
“Why is it, do you think, that they didn’t kill you?”
I didn’t have a good reason for that one. How do you tell your sergeant that it turns out the enemy is nothing but a group full of good people? People who fed me, took care of me, and even told me about their side in the protection of the precious water source up north.
The reason they hadn’t killed me was exactly the reason I didn’t want to kill. They cared about human beings, and as long as they weren’t being directly fired upon, they let them go.
But this was war. There were other considerations.
“Pity?” I tried.
Holmes leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head.
“Maybe they thought that, if they saw me again, I could give them more information.”
He liked this answer better.
“And will you do that?” he asked.
Would I?
The lie came easily.
“No.”
But my wish had not been granted.
“Thank you for your testimony, soldier Taylor. The health division will take care of you now.”
The metal legs of his chair scraped across the concrete floor.
My eyes widened and pulse quickened. There was no explanation of what they would do next. It sounded like they wanted to keep me alive, but that could mean anything here.
Holmes left the room, seemingly satisfied with my story. But others came in right after he left. Two enormous Primes that I didn’t recognize. They positioned themselves one on each side of me and, grabbing my biceps, lifted me to my feet.
“Wait,” I said, starting to panic. “What are you doing?”
They didn’t speak to me, either because they couldn’t, or because they were under orders not to.
I struggled. I couldn’t help it.
“Where are you taking me?” I shouted, squirming in their meaty hands.
Together they carried me down the hallway as I kicked and screamed. I managed to get a good hard kick into one of their shins. The man winced. But there was no reward for me having hurt one of them. Now they picked me up entirely, both arms and legs immobilized.
They turned left at the end of the corridor, and I saw that we were entering the hospital wing of the building. The Primes on the tables lay still, plugged into their training, their hormones.
Suddenly a man appeared before me. I squirmed and fought, but he just smiled and revealed the needle he was holding in one hand.
My eyes bugged.
“No!” I shouted.
But it was too late.
I should have stayed with them.
With the Fighters.
I shouldn’t have told them.
About Alex. If I had left out the information about Alex, told them I was free to leave now and to help them defend what was rightly theirs. If … if …
I hadn’t, though. Instead, I had spilled the truth to a group of people I instinctively trusted more than I trusted my own government. And now, waiting just beyond the glass, there was one of those hospital beds, reserved just for me.
I barely felt the sting in my arm as the tears ran down my face.
This was it. When I woke up on the other side of this drug, I would be a changed person. I didn’t know exactly what awaited me, only that it would be a life forever altered.
Chapter Four
I felt swirling in my brain, a sickening, dizzying misery. A bowl sat beside where I lay, and I immediately threw up into it. I moaned.
“Ugh … Make it stop.”
“It will stop,” an unfamiliar voice said. “Take it easy. It’s just the connections searching around for their targets.”
“No! No!” I yelled, my eyes flying open. “Take it out! I don’t want it!”
I reached for the chip and found my head heavily bandaged. I started working on removing it when another wave of nausea hit me.
“We should just put her out now,” another voice said, this one familiar. “She’ll feel enough as she goes through the rest.”
“No,” the first voice said. “I want to watch her. Here, take one hand.”
He lifted one of my arms and stretched it out to the other man. I tried to move it in dissent, but I found that my whole body felt floppy, like I was all deflated muscle just barely held up by brittle bone.
A handcuff wrapped around my left wrist, then another on my right, securing me to the bed.
“Ugh! It hurts!” I yelled.
“What, is it the cuff?” asked the second man.
“Of course it’s not the cuff,” said the first one.
Of course it wasn’t.
It was the thousands of tiny nano-wires digging through my brain, looking for the right connections to get me back online, to once again track every move, every word.
At some point the second man left the room. I was vaguely aware that the first one had stayed. That he was watching over me right now.
The repeated vomiting seemed to have stopped. Someone was there, wiping my mouth and face with a clean, wet towel.
The man moved closer then, scooting his chair so that it was right up alongside my bed.
“I’ve never seen one implanted,” he said, his voice amazed. “Well,” he corrected, “of course I’ve seen them, but only in small children. At the beginning, you know. It’s a different process then. The nano-wires grow with the infant, and so there is no pain.
“But in an adult …”
He smiled, and something about the light in the room made his teeth look razor sharp.
My fingernails bit into my palms as I tried to breathe through this new nightmare, a combination of unending pain in my head and the image of the man who was responsible for it.
“Why, then?” I choked.
“Why what?” he asked.
“Why put them back in?” I asked.
He laughed, actually laughed.
And I screamed. At the pain. At the man.
He lurched forward, grabbing both bars of the hospital bed and moving close enough to spit on me with every terrible word he uttered.
“What would you have me do, girl?” he asked. “Kill you? Would you prefer that?”
I shook my head back and forth despite the pain.
“Because that could be arranged, of course.”
“No,” I said, my voice growing weaker. “I don’t want to die.”
Lie, Riley.
“What about that friend of yours,” he went on. “Should we take him out too?”
“No!” I said. “Leave him alone. He barely knows who I am anymore.”
I paused for a moment.
“I really want to stay,” I said.
“And why?” he asked.
Lie, Riley.
“Because I believe in our country. And I’m a great shot, you know. I could still be useful.”
Was it enough?
“Yes, and I imagine the prize at the end is nothing to you,” he said.
I squirmed in the bed.
“Of course I want the money,” I said, struggling. “Anyone would.”
The man crossed the room and grabbed a needle and vial.
“What is that?” I asked, a new horror taking over me.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “This one won’t hurt at all.”
He carefully attached the needle to the tube in the IV. It was only a moment before I felt the stuff entering my bloodstream. Whatever it was he had put in there had the combined effect
of burning and soothing. I wasn’t sure if I should fight him or just succumb to his will. Though with my hands cuffed, I didn’t really have a choice.
Then he pulled out another needle, this one much larger than the first. He inserted it into the IV. I waited. No warmth from the drug. No pain from its entry.
“This one will take a moment,” he explained.
And he was right. Suddenly my entire body was wracked with shooting pain. It made the pain in my head seem dull by comparison. I screamed and screamed. The second doctor came running into the room.
“What did you do to her?” he demanded.
Immediately he grabbed a third vial from the medicine cabinet opposite my bed. He took a heavy dose of the stuff and pushed it into my IV. The medicine didn’t numb the pain, not all the way, but it did help bring me back down from my volley of hysterical screams.
He leaned over and, unlike the other doctor, his voice was just slightly warmer.
I opened my eyes and realized the I knew him. It was Chambers, the doctor I had met months ago when I had first joined the Service.
The doctor who had let me pass the medical exam even though he knew I was injured, and lying about it.
The doctor Lydia had talked about. Her point of contact.
My eyes opened wide in recognition. He shook his head ever so slightly.
No
“It will hurt for a while,” Chambers said. “But soon your body will get used to it, and the pain will go away.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why are you doing this?”
The first man began to talk, but Chambers cut him off.
“It’s just as Doctor Roberts here explained. We have not seen a chip re-implanted into a live adult human brain.”
Tears welled up in my eyes. The pain was so much less now from just a moment before, but I suddenly found I couldn’t take any more.
I lay back onto the bed and sobbed. I knew they were watching me, maybe even trying to soothe me. But in the end they left me to my misery.
Here I was. No family. No Alex. No prize. Tomorrow I would wake up a different person. Maybe they would brainwash me like they had the others.
That would be fine. I could live out the limited number of days I had left in total oblivion.