Chapter 2 Chapter 2

​CLEO'S POV

​It had been exactly seventeen minutes since the guards locked us inside. Seventeen minutes since the heavy hydraulic door sealed, leaving us trapped in a square box of blinding, clinical white.

​No seams in the wall. No windows. No clock. Just an overwhelming, artificial brightness that seeped into my retinas and made my skull throb at.

Four security cameras rotated in synchronization from the ceiling corners, their tiny red lenses glinting like blood-fed parasites.

High up near the crown molding, hundreds of tiny, jagged numbers were scratched into the pristine white paint—1, 2, 4, 11, 43, 108, 212—desperate, fingernail-carved tallies left behind by whoever had bled in this cage before us.

​My spine was pressed flat into the cold corner where two walls met. My knees were drawn tight against my chest, my arms wrapped around them like an iron vise.

​Three feet.

​The silver collar around my neck gave a tiny, warning hum whenever he shifted his weight.

​Kenji was sitting cross-legged on the floor a few feet away, leaning his back against the base of the room’s single, narrow steel cot.

His dark hair was messy, sticking out in strange angles, and a dark, purpling bruise was already blooming along his jawline where I had punched him after he bluntly refused to keep his distance from me. It earned us both an electric shock from the collars….serves him right though.

​He didn't look like a killer. He looked like an annoyance. A bright, noisy glitch in a world that was supposed to be silent.

​"You know," Kenji said, breaking the silence for the ninth time. His voice was smooth, bouncing off the hard surfaces with effortless energy.

"Most people at least say 'ouch' after they break a man's neck. Or 'sorry.' Or 'gosh, Kenji, you have a really handsome face, I’m so glad I didn't punch you six inches lower.' Standard manners, really."

​I stared straight ahead at the far wall. One thousand, four hundred and twenty-nine. One thousand, four hundred and thirty.

​"Right. The silent treatment," he sighed, leaning his head back against the wall with a dramatic groan.

"Classic. Majestic. Very mysterious. Are we playing a game? Is the prize a trophy, or do we just get to sit here until our brains melt into our socks?"

​I didn't blink, nor did I breathe too loud. If I didn't engage, the noise would stop.

Everything was input and output. If I gave no input, the system had to stabilize.

​"Come on, rainbow alien girl," Kenji whined, turning his head to squint at me. His dark eyes flickered over my multicolored hair, my white sports bra, the stamped tag on my waistband: SUBJECT 01.

"Work with me here. We're chained together by thirty thousand volts of administrative love. If I’m forced to listen to the sound of my own thoughts for another ten minutes, I'm going to start singing, and trust me—nobody wants that."

​I kept my eyes locked on a tiny black speck in the white tile near his sneaker. Don't speak. Speaking requires oxygen. Oxygen fuels pulse. Pulse triggers reaction.

​Kenji leaned forward slightly, resting his elbows on his knees. The playful, theatrical smirk on his face flickered, faltering just a fraction as he studied my face. The absolute absence of twitching. The lack of blink response.

​"Hey," he said, his voice dropping an octave, losing its sharp, sarcastic edge.

"Can you... actually talk? Or did those guys in the lab coats fry your vocal cords before they dumped you in here?"

​My jaw tightened. "I speak."

​My voice sounded dry and gravelly, like two flat stones grinding together in the dirt.

​Kenji blinked, looking genuinely startled, before a slow, warm grin spread back across his lips. "Holy shit. She lives! Okay. Progress. See? That wasn't so hard."

He settled deeper into his seat on the floor, adjusting his position so he was facing me directly.

"Let's start small. Simple human interaction 101. How old are you?"

​My brain searched the filing drawers. Blank pages. Torn edges. Scraps of voices from dark alleys, bad rooms, cold tables.

​’She looks seventeen. No, too skinny, maybe sixteen.’

‘Nah, look at her eyes, she’s eighteen if she’s a day.’

​"Eighteen," I rasped.

​"Cool. I'm twenty-one," Kenji said softly. "When's your birthday?"

​Long silence. The cameras above us clicked simultaneously as they angled down toward my head.

​[Red. Yellow. Blue. Green. White. Orange. The colours were pretty, also noticeable on the white walls if you stared hard enough.]

​"Don't know," I said.

​Kenji’s brows pulled together. The curiosity in his eyes shifted into something heavier, darker. "You don't know? Like... you forgot?"

​"Don't know."

​He swallowed hard, his throat bobbing. "Okay. What about your parents? Where are they?"

​"In America."

​"Where in America?"

​"In a fortress," I said flatly.

​Kenji went completely still. The silence returned, but this time he didn't immediately jump to fill it with a joke.

He just stared at me, his eyes tracking the line of my collarbone, the raw scrapes on my knuckles, the flat, dead hollows beneath my eyes.

​"What's your favorite food?" he asked quietly.

​I looked at him. Really looked at him. His dark eyes were wide, bright, brimming with an unsettling, disturbing amount of emotion.

Why was he asking these things? What was the strategic value of an appetite?

​"I eat nutrient paste," I told him. "Gray tube. Four hundred calories."

​"No," Kenji said, his voice dropping into a gentle, disbelieving whisper. "Not what they give you. What do you like? Pizza? Ice cream? Strawberries?"

​"Food is fuel," I murmured, my voice devoid of cadence. "Taste is an unnecessary sensory overload."

​Kenji leaned back slowly, his spine stiffening

​A sudden, sharp tremor ran through my left hand.

​I clamped my right palm over my knuckles, trying to pin them down against my knee, but the violent shaking spread up my forearm. My chest tightened, my lungs seizing as a cold, greasy wave of panic washed straight up my esophagus.

​Click-click.

​It wasn't physical pain. It was worse. The noise in my brain was turning into a roar.

Without the rhythm, the colors wouldn't align. Without the alignment, the walls were leaning in. White wall, white floor, white ceiling, white bra, white skin. There was no green. No yellow. No red.

​"Hey," Kenji said, his tone shifting into sudden concern. He leaned an inch closer, his dark eyes locking onto my trembling wrists.

"What's wrong? Are you having a seizure? Is it the collar?"

​"My cube," I whispered, my teeth clicking together as my body began to rock, just half an inch back and forth against the wall.

​"Your... what?"

​​"Stop!" I cracked my head against the wall again. Harder. "Just Stop talking! Your voice is noise to my head!"

​Kenji froze, his breathing ragged, staring at the raw blood starting to bead on the back of my skull.

​The silence stretched, heavy and suffocating, punctuated only by the hum of the fluorescent tubes.

​Kenji lowered his hands, looking down at my shaking frame. "What did they do to you?"

​I let my head rest against the cold white wall, my eyes dead, staring right through him.

​"They said feelings are inefficient," I whispered.

​BEEEP! BEEEP! BEEEP!

​The wall speakers shrieked. "LIGHTS OUT."

​CLICK.

​Total darkness swallowed the room. A second later, a sweet, heavy fog hissed violently from the ceiling vents.

​Kenji scrambled to his feet in the pitch black, coughing violently, slamming his fists against the iron door. "What the hell is this?! Open the door!"

​I didn't move. I smoothly laid back on the freezing tile, uncurled my legs, and folded my bare arms over my chest.

​"Cleo?!" Kenji choked out, hearing me move.

"Why are you lying down?! Fight it!"

​"They punish people who fight the medicine," I murmured into the dark.

​"You can't just—" Kenji’s knees slammed hard against the floor as the paralytic hit his bloodstream.

"God... damn..."

​His body thrashed against the tile for five seconds, then went dead quiet.

Silence returned.

I counted three more breaths before the medicine reached me too. Then the darkness took us both.