Crawling around him, my eyes watching for any movement, I rounded to his back and my eyes widened. I was positive that the other ten scars would easily be found across his broad back.
The first ones I touched were the two long, jagged scars along his right shoulder blade. “Nine…” I whispered, tracing one. “Ten…”
“My father was fond of the belt, you already knew that,” Dana elaborated. “When I was sixteen, he became a fan of using the buckle part of the belt.”
My stomach turned again and I closed my eyes, my hand resting against the skin. There was another jagged scar running very close to his spine that I traced.
“What’s number eleven for?”
Dana chuckled.
“Oh, that one. Believe it or not, Bryant Morris sent me on a few assassin jobs before he was killed. I got that when another assassin was trying to kill me before I killed his client.”
“…obviously, you won.”
“He did surprise me, though,” Dana chuckled. “After I had shattered his femur, he still managed to leap after me on one leg and drag that knife down my back. Barely missed my spine which was very lucky for me.”
“And then you killed him?”
“He was in so much pain,” Dana shrugged. “I put two bullets in his skull and put him out of his misery.”
Trying not to think about younger Dana as an assassin, I looked for other marks. There were three small, crescent-shaped burn scars on his lower back near his left hip.
“What the hell happened here?” I asked, pressing my fingers to the shapes delicately.
“Numbers twelve through fourteen?” he asked with a smile in his voice. “Every experiment had their own form of punishment. When I went after Bryant Morris, he grabbed the poker out of the fire and hit me three times with it. The hot part connected there while the rest of it hit across my back.”
Swallowing hard, I scanned his lower back, seeing a large scar running from just above his tailbone across his left buttock.
“Dare I ask?” I asked, touching the top of it.
“Number fifteen happened before I was taken in by the Commission,” Dana explained. “I jumped a fence…or, I thought I did, but the barbed wire at the top of the fence around the deportation compound decided to keep a chunk of my flesh as a souvenir.”
“What were you doing at a deportation compound?” I pressed, my eyebrows furrowing.
“Sneaking two people out so I could get them across the northern border into Canada and not send them back to their death camps in the Middle East.”
“Smuggling people out?” I gasped.
“Little Lily, I was taken into the Commission for helping Commission criminals across the borders,” Dana said, looking over his shoulder.
“You’re kidding me…”
“No,” Dana chuckled. “Incidentally,” he reached behind his head and moved some of his longer hair away from his neck, showing me a scar that ran into his hair, “that was how I got scar sixteen…” he lifted his right arm and pointed at another small scar on the side of his ribcage, “and seventeen. Seventeen is from the Tasers. Sixteen is from the Billie Club I took to the back of the head, both from when they finally caught me and brought me into the Commission.”
I stared at the back of his head for a long moment, surprised and a little annoyed that the man who had broken up our rebellion had once aided Commission criminals as well.
I looked over his back, trying to find another scar but when I could not find the last one, I moved back around his front, looking him over one last time, even studying his face carefully.
“I…I don’t see the last one…”
Dana sighed and looked thoughtful for a moment.
“Alright,” he said, looking at me seriously. “It’s not exactly a scar, but it might as well be. My Commission number tattoo.” He moved his left foot out of the crossed position and set it on the bed, heel on the covers, facing the bottom of his foot toward me.
My stomach flipped.
41141.
Almost frightened to look, I moved my eyes back up to Dana, who smiled wickedly, showing all his teeth, his eyes crinkling in the grin.
“Come on, really? You didn’t even suspect?” he teased.
“No…” I whispered, shaking my head and backing away from him. “It’s not possible…you-you can’t be…”
“Why not?” Dana challenged. “Because the experiments all told you that four-eleven forty-one was a myth? Or because I’m your long lost uncle?”
“No…it’s not…” I shook my head, frightened tears rising to my eyes as I tried to process what those numbers meant. “It’s not true…you…you did that…just to fuck with me…”
“I can think of a lot more ways I’d rather fuck with you than tattooing my foot,” Dana chuckled. “Little Lily…” he said, waiting for me to look up but I did not, my tear-filled eyes focused on the five numbers. The mark was older, worn and faded with a blue tinge, showing that it had been there for quite some time.
His foot moved and suddenly his hands were on my wrists, pulling my hands away from the side of my head, which I had no recollection of moving there. He then took my chin.
“You…you said you…didn’t r-remember…”
“I don’t,” Dana confirmed. “You were born after I was brought into the Commission. Tommy was eight when I left the house and ten when I was captured. But your name rang a bell in my head, and I did some research into where I came from and who I was before I was Dana.”
I broke down slowly, my walls crumbling as the realization crashed through my thoughts like a freight train.
“You…none…none of the tests…”
“None of them worked on me,” Dana completed my thought. “They beat me and tortured me and did things to me that you can never imagine, but that’s all part of it,” his voice sounded excited, thrilled about what he was saying. He ducked his head to look me in the eye, though I could not focus through the tears and the churning in my stomach. “I still rose above it. I grew stronger. And you will, too.”
I finally looked up at him and he smiled at me, a smile that would almost be considered comforting if it weren’t for the bright look in his unnerving eyes.
“Wh…what?”
“You’re going to join me, Little Lily,” Dana whispered. “I’m going to turn you into more than you ever dreamed. You’re going to be able to do and take whatever you want. I’m going to give you that freedom. I’ll give you everything you want…”
“You’re…you’ll…kill me…”
Dana leaned forward and kissed my forehead, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me into his chest as I cried.
“Only a part of you…”
* *** *
My eyes snapped open and were burning immediately. I was frozen, my eyes wide as I stared into the chest in front of me.
Dana.
He was holding me.
He was also lying very still…
Was he asleep?
I dared to look up at his face and saw his eyes closed, his head resting on a pillow as he breathed slowly and deeply.
Afraid of waking him, I remained completely still, assessing where I was and what state I was in.
Everything seemed like a blur, the way I had searched Dana’s body for scars…the numbers tattooed on the bottom of his foot—what numbers were they again?—and the way he held me as I cried, promising me all the power I could have ever dreamed of. All I had to do was kill a part of myself to achieve it.
The tears came back with a vengeance.
This was my uncle, the experiment I had come to admire and strived to imitate if I was ever brought into the Commission. The irony was not at all laughable. Now, Dana was going to force me to walk down the same path, force me to become like him.
I no longer had someone to look up to. The one I had seen as a hero, as a pillar of strength against the corruption and terror of the Commission for the People, had actually been turned into the man running the entire ci
rcus.
There was a click at the door and I jumped before forcing myself to be still in fear of waking Dana.
The door slowly opened as I watched, trying to crane my neck to see who was there. Sean’s worried and pale face poked into the room. I blinked, surprised to see him and when his eyes met mine, he bowed his head, his eyes apologetic as he walked in, closing the door behind him.
“Dana,” Sean called.
“Whatever it is I’m supposed to do, I refuse,” Dana said simply, not even partially asleep.
“Leader Simon needs you at Central Hall,” Sean continued, walking to Dana’s side of the bed. He placed a hand on Dana’s shoulder and tried to pull him onto his back, away from me. “Come on, get dressed. We need to go in twenty minutes.”
“I said, no,” Dana snapped, swatting at Sean distractedly, still keeping his eyes closed.
“Dana, you’ve been in here for four hours.”
“Really?”
Dana finally cracked an eye open and turned to look at Sean, still keeping his arms around me.
“Four hours?”
“Yes,” Sean groaned, exasperated. “Now, will you please get dressed so we can go?”
Dana sighed heavily and released me, rolling over the side of the bed and to his feet, stretching his arms above his head before walking to his clothes. Sean’s eyes turned to me and he placed one knee on the bed, reaching over and placing a hand against my cheek.
“I’m sorry…” he whispered.
“Don’t be sorry, Sean,” Dana smiled, pulling his clothes on. “She’s going to go through an amazing transformation. She’s going to become like me.”
“That’s why I’m apologizing,” Sean growled, fixing Dana with a harsh stare.
The leader of the Commission glared playfully as he stood straight from grabbing his socks and took a step forward, flicking his wrist and using the socks to hit Sean across the ass.
“Don’t be naughty, or I’ll have to spank you,” Dana warned with a playful tone. He was out of that Dormant State and back to his normal, electric self.
“You would do that if you wanted to, regardless of my behavior.”
“Don’t give me ideas,” Dana smiled mischievously, pulling his shirt over his shoulders. “It distracts me from my work.”
“You distract you from your work,” Sean bit back.
“Restrain her for me,” Dana ordered. Sean turned to me and his eyes nearly broke my heart.
“Dana…why not just let her back into the holding cells and—”
“No,” Dana cut him off. “She can’t go into the holding cells.”
“Why not?”
“Because if she goes back there, she will meet with all her little revolutionary friends and they will organize a riot during Free Hour. No,” Dana growled.
“What makes you think she would do that?” Sean pressed. “She needs to be around other people besides you.”
“I know she would do it because that is what I did.” Dana smiled thinly. “And if you’re worried about her social interactions, don’t worry, she’ll be on the table soon enough. She’ll see plenty of people, then.”
“That’s not what I meant…”
“Just tie her up before we’re late for this meeting you insisted was so important,” Dana droned, annoyed.
Sean threw one more apologetic look at me and then gently took the raw skin of my wrist in his hand, moving my hand to the cuff, tightening the restraints as carefully as he could. I watched him, trying to school my expression to assure him that I understood he was not the one to be angry at. I watched Dana fix his tie and grab his jacket, but I could not find it in my heart to be upset at him. My brain had not recovered from the shock I had received four hours previous.
My brain and body were frozen, trying to process information into memory and understanding, but there was too much going on in my mind, too many thoughts buzzing around my already-pounding head.
Sean finished fastening my second wrist just as Dana placed the pocket watch back in his pocket.
“Alright,” Dana said. “Little Lily, I will be back later.”
“Sean…” I called. The head of security turned to me. I took a deep breath and slowly let it out, closing my eyes tiredly. “Feel free to crash the car…”
Even though I had no way to tell time in the room, I could tell that it was far longer than normal that Dana was gone. I was beginning to think that Sean had crashed the car.
If he hadn’t, I had every intension of shooting Dana when he returned.
My uncle…
There was a small part of me that still did not believe that Dana was William Sandover, the man who had been on the domestic terrorist list since he was a teenager for sneaking over three hundred people over the different borders and having one of the most extensive networks of safe houses ever known in the history of America.
I continued to remember how much I had admired 41141. In life, my uncle had been unyielding in his belief that the cleansing of America was the worst thing that ever happened to the country, believing that people were equal. And then the Commission changed him into a monster living under the name of Dana Christenson.
If William had been changed into Dana, there was no one the Commission could not break. The strongest experiment that they had ever had—the one who had been immune to all the tests—was now running the tests…he was breaking people who had been much weaker than him on the table as if he was filing paperwork. It was thoughtless, easy for him to change a human to be something else. He must have been able to see into people and change them the way he did because he had found that same part of himself when he was going through the same test.
Dana knew all the results before testing even started.
And he had taken those skills to dealing with people who were in the government, strapped to a different kind of slab, more metaphorical than the tables in the labs of the Commission of the People. He found that little weakness he could exploit simply by meeting the person and watching the way they reacted to him.
For some reason, I thought of an ad I had once seen in my first school’s counseling center when I had been waiting for my turn to talk to the counselor after punching Tommy Barker in the nose. The poster was a cooking sheet of gingerbread men, perfectly shaped to match one another, except that all of them had a different edible ornament attached. Some of them had a gumdrop sitting on top of their chests, while others had a light sprinkling of sugar, a few had little cracks in them that were filled with a thin line of red icing. The caption had read: “Not all scars are visible. Be kind to all.”
Only, rather than thinking about the emotional scars people in the Commission had to bear, I realized that Dana was the edible ornament on those gingerbread men. He enveloped people like batter, hardening around them with something as simple as a handshake and finding their cracks and bumps, filling them with red icing and completing their flawed beings by changing himself to match them.
He was not a man.
He was not a monster.
He was what everyone wanted.
He was an idea…
An empty vessel that people filled and took from as they wanted.
He had told me this before.
“I’m absolutely nothing, Little Lily…All I am is a thought, and people read into me however they wish…They can turn a blind eye to everything else because there is that one thing that I can give them that nothing else can: a sense that they have accomplished something, fulfilled something, had power over their own lives and gained something for it…”
Before I could stop the thought from forming, it was there, wrapped in a sense of awe and amazement and lined with fear.
What an incredible creature…
* *** *
Dana finally returned, wearing the same suit and looking annoyed.
“I swear…have to run the entire country on my fucking own…no one is competent enough to do anything…” he mumbled. He turned to me and smiled. “I’m sorry, you must
have been lonely.”
“No,” I said as strongly as I could manage.
For some reason, I felt very small and weak in front of him in a new way. I had felt helpless several times—increasingly so since the end of our insurrection—but this was different. This feeling did not make me defiant. This time, my brain understood that I needed to be afraid and be quiet. This thing in the room was far more powerful than me and there was no way to know what it would do next.
“Oh,” he started, remembering something as he unbuttoned his vest. He smiled broadly. “You got your number today.”
I could only blink silently.
“88911,” he told me. “Tomorrow, you get your tattoo and tracer and then we start you on the table as soon as your blood work clears.”
“A-Already?” I choked.
“Yep.” Dana kicked his shoes off. “No time to waste. I’m going to need you by my side as soon as possible.”
“Why?” I whispered, watching him tug his shirt off and then his pants. He smiled mysteriously and stalked to the bed, climbing on top of me and grinning at me with a cat-like quality that frightened me.
“Rehan is almost finished.”
“Who?”
“Eyna’s sister,” he chuckled. “She’s almost done. The testing is going seamlessly. She’s responding just as her brother did. When she’s complete, we’ll impregnate her and see if she can give birth to another Machine of Neutralization.” He shuddered with excitement. “It’s so incredible. Just imagine being able to breed an army of these warriors…”
“They’ll destroy everything…” I barely managed to breathe.
“I know,” Dana smiled.
He kissed me hard, crushing his lips against mine, his teeth nipping at my lips as his body settled heavily over me. I had never realized just how much larger he was until he was resting over me like a blanket, warm and soft, but weighing down on my body.
He bit my bottom lip hard enough to draw blood and I flinched from the pain. He backed away, licking his lips with a predatory smile.
Then his head dropped to my neck, kissing and biting at the skin, one of his hands running from my hair down to my breast, cupping it completely in his large hand, but remaining gentle. He pressed carefully on my ribs, his mouth sucking a mark to life on my neck as his hips pushed forward, grinding him against me and causing me to cringe, afraid of the coming pain.
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