Awakening (Elementals Book 1)

by Sara Preucil

  Chapter 21

  The first thing Emmy was aware of as she slowly regained consciousness was her splitting headache. Dazedly, she blinked her eyes open to find herself sitting on a chair in a tiny, blindingly white room. Her head had been resting against her left shoulder as she slept, so she straightened her neck with a groan as the small muscles protested. She tried to stand, but when her arms and legs found resistance, she realized that she was handcuffed to the metal chair.

  Panic took over with full force, evaporating the residual fog of sleep. Emmy struggled against her binds, the metal chair clanging loudly against the white tiled floor as she fought to free herself.

  The door to her room opened then, and in stepped a woman that Emmy vaguely recognized. Her platinum-blonde hair was tied back in a severe bun at the nape of her neck, and she wore a navy pantsuit. As Emmy looked her up and down, she realized that it was the same woman that Austin had been chatting with at Krystal’s desk during their last time interning.

  And then Emmy realized that she hadn’t come alone.

  Austin entered after the woman, and close behind them, followed Tara. What were the employees of Modern Alchemy doing here?

  The blonde woman and Austin stepped closer to Emmy, while Tara hung back with a wary expression, avoiding looking directly at Emmy, and clutching a notebook to her chest.

  “Austin,” Emmy looked up at her boyfriend, “help me get out of these.”

  But Austin didn’t budge. He looked at her with such detachment that it brought stinging tears to Emmy’s eyes.

  “She is still attached to you.” The blonde woman remarked blandly as if she were studying the actions of a strange creature. “So she must not remember fully. Interesting. Tara!” She snapped, without taking her eyes off Emmy. “Write that down.”

  Behind Austin, Tara sighed, and began scribbling in her notebook.

  Emmy looked up at Austin again, the rising panic blurring his face as tears swam in her eyes.

  “Austin, please help me,” she whispered.

  “I’m afraid he won’t be doing that,” the woman stated. “His responsibility over you has officially ended.

  “Responsibility?” Emmy repeated.

  “Yes.” The woman smirked. “He was your handler for as long as you could be managed. And that no longer seems to be the case.” She cast a disapproving glance sideways at Austin, who dipped his head.

  Handler? Emmy’s gaze flicked to Austin, but he kept staring at the floor.

  “It seems that, despite his best efforts, you are starting to remember.”

  “Remember what?” Emmy gaped up at the three of them.

  The woman didn’t answer, but continued to appraise Emmy with an expression of near amusement.

  Emmy struggled against her bonds. “My foster parents will be wondering where I am. They’ll call the police if I don’t return home.”

  The woman examined her immaculate red-polished fingernails. “No. They won’t. We left a rather convincing letter tendering your decision to run away. As we speak, your car is being driven down to California. And since you are already eighteen…well…there isn’t much they can do, legally speaking, to retrieve you. Even if they wanted to.” She sneered at Emmy.

  “Mariah will know something is up.” Emmy glared at Austin. “She won’t buy it.”

  “Really?” Austin gave her a pitying look. “She seemed to buy the teary phone call we just had. ‘Emmy r-ran away!’” He reenacted, mockingly choking out his words to Mariah.

  Emmy faltered; confidence leaving her as her last lifeline was yanked from her grasp. There was no one left to wonder, to care, about where she was.

  She slumped into the back of the hard, metal chair.

  “Where am I?” She asked, looking up at the woman. The woman bent down in front of Emmy, their faces only about a foot apart.

  Emmy watched her lips part as she readied to speak. Then suddenly, something sharp stabbed into her left bicep.

  “OW!” Emmy yelled, more from the startle than the actual pain.

  The woman slowly retracted a syringe from Emmy’s arm, and then stood up. She smirked at Emmy, her red lips curling unpleasantly. Turning on her stiletto heel without saying another word, she walked out of the room. Tara followed immediately without a backward glance, looking all too relieved to leave. Austin filed out last, casting one last look at Emmy before closing the metal door securely behind him. The clank of a bolt sliding into place sent chills down Emmy’s spine.

  An odd whirring sound started up; Emmy twisted around as far as her binds would allow. In the ceiling behind her was a large vent through which, she quickly discovered, frigid air was being pumped into the tiny room.

  In no time, Emmy began to shiver. She struggled against the handcuffs, frantically at first, but as the temperature in the room dropped, her energy seemed to drop with it. Soon, she became listless. Her breath, now coming in short pants, created small wisps of fog against the cold. Her thoughts became as cloudy as her breath; she was trembling all over, she knew that if she stayed too long she was in danger of hypothermia, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. Her head slumped to the side and eventually she lost consciousness.

  ✽✽✽

  She was lying down, arms pinned at her sides. The air was cold and she shivered to keep her blood circulating. She felt clammy; maybe she was sick. Her heavy lids fluttered open, and Emmy blinked in confusion as she took in the unfamiliar room around her. It was bright, too bright. The white walls hurt her drowsy eyes. An air conditioning unit attached to the wall to her right was pushing out cold air. On a nightstand next to the bed she was lying on was a humidifier. She blinked at it sleepily.

  Experiment with humidifier.

  Those words, written in a familiar hand, surfaced out of the bog of her fuzzy head.

  Emmy gasped. The last few day’s events came crashing back: finding Austin’s research, confronting him, waking up in that metal chair.

  Emmy tried to sit up, but she was strapped down. Heart pounding, her eyes darted around the small windowless room, trying to figure out where she might be. Besides from her bed and the nightstand, there was no other furniture. There were two doors, one presumably to the exit, and one perhaps connected to a bathroom. It looked like she was in a small hospital room.

  Not a minute later, one of the doors opened, and a stout, middle-aged woman walked in, carrying a metal tray. She walked around Emmy’s bed and set the tray down on the nightstand.

  “Are you hungry?” She asked, in a pleasant tone that didn’t at all fit the dire circumstance that Emmy had found herself in.

  The woman pushed a button on a panel at the side of the bedframe. Slowly, Emmy was moved into a seated position. She then started to undo a strap that tied Emmy’s wrist to the metal frame.

  Quickly, Emmy twisted her hand, grabbing ahold of the woman’s wrist.

  “Let me go.” Emmy snarled.

  The woman tried to pry her arm out of Emmy’s grip, but she clamped down even tighter. The woman let out a shriek, and Emmy smelt it before she felt the heat.

  Burnt flesh.

  Immediately, two men rushed into the room, one carrying a large bucket which he dumped unceremoniously over Emmy. The cold shocked her system; her breath caught in her chest, every muscle seemed to constrict at the sudden cold. The woman wriggled herself free of Emmy’s grasp. Her wrist was scarlet, her skin raw and shiny where Emmy had grabbed her. She snatched up the tray.

  “You can eat when you’ve learned how to behave,” she snapped, before leaving the room.

  The men checked her restraints, and lowered the bed back down before leaving as well. Soaked to the bone, Emmy stared up at the ceiling. Finally able to catch her breath, she laid there gasping.

  What is going to happen to me? She thought, miserably.

  Chapter 22

  Your ice bath is ready, dear.” Nurse Barnes, a plump, middle-aged woman, knocked softly on the door before peeking her head into Emmy’s small hospital room. Em
my was sitting on her bed, shivering, despite having pulled all the blankets around her. The air conditioning was constantly pumping out frigid air in her room.

  The thought of having to get even colder would have angered Emmy, if she had the energy. She had long given up on protesting, as it did absolutely nothing. Besides, she knew that the treatments were only meant to help.

  It had been a little over a week since she was brought here. She was having a hard time recalling the details, but apparently she had collapsed after going home sick from school. Luckily, Austin had been there and had taken her to the hospital. After exhaustive testing and the taking of multiple blood samples, she had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. The odd thing was, she didn’t feel sick. Except for her head; her thoughts were sluggish and felt weighed down by a thick fog that wouldn’t dissipate. But other than that, she felt perfectly healthy.

  When Emmy said so to Dr. Prince, the specialist assigned to her case, she explained that these kinds of illnesses could lie dormant for years without becoming symptomatic, which is why it was so lucky that they caught it early. It was Dr. Prince who had recommended this series of experimental treatments.

  Reluctantly, Emmy pulled back the covers and got out of the small hospital bed. Nurse Barnes walked with her into the private bathroom that joined with her room, and then turned around while she untied the strings of her paper-thin gown.

  A small privacy screen was set up in front of the tub. Emmy hung her gown on the screen and stepped around it. Pulling her dark hair up into a bun at the top of her head, she stared at the bath, and sighed.

  Better get it over with, she thought to herself, and before she could talk herself out of it, she lowered one foot into the tub. The freezing water stung, and she gasped, but quickly followed with her second foot. Taking a deep breath, she lowered herself into the water. Her chest tightened painfully, and she gritted her teeth against the numbing cold.

  There was absolutely nothing more she hated in this world than being cold. It was cruel irony that most of the experimental procedures involved Emmy being cold in some way. Dr. Prince had tried to explain the methodology behind her revolutionary work, but Emmy’s fuzzy brain didn’t absorb a word she had said. What she did understand was that they were optimistic that the cold would, at the very least, slow the progression of the cancer.

  To alleviate the pain of the ice bath, Emmy tried desperately to think of something else, but it was nearly impossible. It was like the cold had frozen her brain. She began to shake uncontrollably.

  “C-can I g-get out yet-t?” she stammered through her chattering teeth.

  “Another minute,” the nurse replied, cheerfully.

  An eternity later, Nurse Barnes appeared around the screen, holding out an open towel between them. Emmy stood up on shaky legs and practically tore the towel out of the woman’s hands, hastily wrapping it around herself. When her body was dry, she put on her gown and returned to her room. As soon as the nurse left, Emmy yanked the blankets from her bed, wrapped them around herself, and began pacing around the small space to heat up her body.

  Her blood now pumping warmly through her body, Emmy crawled back into bed and huddled under the blankets to conserve the little bit of heat she had just produced. Soon, she slipped into a light sleep.

  A couple of hours later, Emmy lay listlessly in her bed, listening to snippets of nurses’ conversations as they walked down the hall outside her door. She had finished her dinner of bland hospital food, and was waiting for her next treatment.

  Emmy sighed. She didn’t feel lucky, as Dr. Prince claimed she was, she felt bored. She wished Austin could visit her more, but school and football were keeping him busy at the moment. And the Lewises hadn’t visited once. But Emmy wasn’t exactly surprised about that. But she was surprised that Mariah hadn’t visited either.

  A male employee passed outside Emmy’s door; by the sound of it, he was some kind of maintenance worker, because he was saying, “2-3-0-7?” He walked so close to Emmy’s door than she could hear the voice on the other end of the radio mumble an affirmative. “Yeah,” the worker replied, his voice trailing away. “In the furnace…”

  A few minutes later, there was a small knock outside Emmy’s door, and a young woman with a short black bob stuck her head inside the room. She was familiar, but Emmy was having a difficult time concentrating, and wasn’t able to place her.

  “It’s time for your next treatment,” she said, sounding as though this was the last thing she wanted to be doing.

  Emmy nodded, and slowly got out of bed, shuffling across the floor in her hospital socks.

  The young nurse led Emmy down the brightly lit hall, but instead of turning right to where Emmy usually went for treatment, she opened a door to the left and took them down a new corridor.

  Confused, Emmy asked, “Where are we going?”

  The nurse walked on, avoiding Emmy’s gaze. “To your next treatment,” she explained, shortly.

  “But this isn’t the way nurse Barnes takes me,” Emmy replied, expecting to be heading to the usual sensory deprivation room. She hated floating in that small, dark, claustrophobic pod until she was pruney and more muddled than when she began.

  “Are you sure?...” The young nurse looked at the signs as they walked past room after room. Abruptly, she turned right down another hall. The temperature suddenly spiked, like this area was being kept much warmer on purpose. “Hmmm, maybe this isn’t right. Such a pain…” she murmured.

  Emmy knew that she hadn’t been in this area of the hospital before, but it was the first time in days that she felt warm, so she wasn’t about to confirm it.

  To her right was a sign for a “Dry Sauna” room. Longingly, Emmy wished that could be her treatment.

  A male nurse stood outside the door, and held out a hand as they approached, stopping them. He looked at Emmy and then back to the brunette at her side.

  “Where are you taking her?” He narrowed his eyes.

  “To her treatment. I normally work downstairs, but they needed the extra day.” She spoke impatiently to the male nurse. “Can you tell me how to get back to the sensory deprivation room?”

  Emmy groaned inwardly.

  The man sighed, but started giving directions anyway.

  Emmy glanced to the sauna door behind him. There was a small rectangular window. She stood on her toes to get a view into the room beyond.

  Someone was already in the sauna.

  Lucky…

  Emmy could see the top of his platinum hair. His head was drooping forward, and it looked like he may have fallen asleep. Emmy craned her neck to get a better look, and at that moment, the person inside raised his head.

  Piercing blue eyes met her gaze. The beautiful face they belonged to shifted from a look of exhaustion to one of anguish.

  Images flashed through her mind, too quickly and too many to make any sense of.

  A teenage boy standing in a glittering lake, a man holding out his hand from a riverbank, a boy staring up at her from the bottom of raised bleachers…

  Do I know him?

  “Hey!” The male nurse yelled suddenly, grabbing Emmy’s arm, jerking her away from the door. “Get away from there!”

  From behind the door, she head a muffled, “No!” And a loud banging that sounded like the teenage boy inside was pounding his fists against the door.

  “Get 2381 out of here!” The male nurse growled.

  The brunette nurse took Emmy by the elbow. “We need to go,” she insisted, and although Emmy wanted desperately to stay, she trusted the earnestness in the girl’s voice and allowed herself to be rushed out of the hall.

  The young nurse hurried, towing Emmy. Following the given instructions, they turned down corridor after corridor until their whereabouts became more familiar.

  “Don’t tell anyone where we were,” the young woman hissed, as they turned around another corner into a hallway that finally looked familiar to Emmy. “I’ll get into trouble.”

  “
Okay,” Emmy replied, not entirely sure what they had seen, let alone what she would say. Why would they get into trouble for seeing another patient?

  The nurse slowed her pace, and Emmy followed suit. They turned one last corner and Emmy saw another woman standing in the hall outside her room.

  “What are you doing here, Krystal?” A blonde woman in a white lab coat with forest-green eyes asked the young woman at Emmy’s side. “You don’t work on this floor.” Her gaze fell sharply on to Emmy.

  “Dr. Olsen.” Krystal greeted her. “Councilor King sent me up. Barnes is sick today.”

  Councilor? The title perplexed Emmy. It didn’t sound like it belonged in a hospital.

  The blonde doctor surveyed Emmy, then glanced at a clipboard in her hands. “The patient needs to go to the sensory deprivation chambers. “Down the hall this way,” she pointed to the right. “Then take a left.”

  Wordlessly, Krystal started off again, and Emmy followed obediently. They arrived at their destination, a room no bigger than a walk-in closet that held only the sensory deprivation tank—a white pod-like contraption that, when open, looked like a futuristic space clam.

  Reluctantly, Emmy stepped into the contraption, laying down on her back, and floating easily in the salt-heavy solution. The top of the clam closed over her, and soon the interior light shut off, submersing her in total darkness.

  As usual, once the light extinguished, Emmy began to panic. She tried to calm herself by focusing on her breathing, attempting to ignore the overwhelming claustrophobia: the tightness in her chest, the constriction in the back of her throat that made it feel like she wasn’t getting enough air. Normally, she would remain like this, rigid and panicked until the lid was opened and she was allowed out.

  But today, she tried to give in to the sensation—or lack thereof. She kept breathing, letting the soft swaying of her body as it slowed to stillness lull her into some semblance of calm.

  To her surprise, it actually started to work. Worries she carried with her began to fade. Her illness, the fact that she hadn’t had any visitors in a while, that boy’s emotional reaction at seeing her, and the male nurse’s anger at them being there, none of that seemed to matter. She let it all go, let her mind drift…