--VIII--

There were no words for how cold, how empty, how completely removed from life you felt, when things like this happened.

She was behind a screen to my left. It was tinted, and thinner than paper, but could not be penetrated. Marie, I thought her name was.

I heard a voice: the same voice everyone else there was also hearing. It was a man's voice.

It sounded like the voice of evil itself. It was disembodied; it was fluctuating in the air all around us.

"Those of you who were injected will need to obtain your key," said the man. "The key is the same color as your ID. It will also have the same number."

We all had some kind of device, completely stuck to our left hands. I looked down at it.

Pure white.

But there was no number on it...

Marie looked at me. She had a black version of the same contraption; it was marked in red with the number 74.

"What will happen, if we don't find the right key?" she said. "What if we don't find a key at all?"

I looked around for Kaylee. There were walls around us, but I knew not to be fooled; there were more. Only invisible.

The voice spoke again.

"The key will allow you to access the platform above you. That is where you need to go," said the voice. "Thank you for participating."

Participating?

I woke up here. I didn't even know if I was injected on that day; did he mean previous injections in the experiment?

Weren't we all injected?

A hundred times?

I let go of trying to find Kaylee, for the moment. Either I couldn't see her or she wasn't nearby. I didn't think that she was dead- Kaylee was too strong; too smart.

I looked up. Dark glass walls and a ceiling. What platform?

"How much time do you think we have?" Marie said.

"I don't know," I replied. "Find your key." I wiped tears off my face; I saw them but couldn't feel them. I didn't know what felt worse to me at that moment: not knowing where I was, being trapped, the pain in my chest, the pain in my wrists, or the pounding in my head. There was a bruise on my left arm and I had no idea where it came from.

I looked at Marie. For a moment, I wondered if the fear in her eyes was the same thing she saw, on my face. And then I dismissed the thought.

I couldn't feel fear; I had none left at that moment. It had all been used up in the weeks before.

"Find your key," I told her, in my best attempt at an encouraging voice. "You can do this, Marie."

"You remember my name," she said.

"Second grade," I said. "Science experiment."

"You blew up the frog," she said with a laugh.

It wasn't me- the boy who blew up the frog was a non-telepath who could manipulate fire. Pyrokinetic, like Malcolm.

I let her laugh without interrupting; I was happy she had something to smile about.

When I saw Marie again, I couldn't make her smile anymore, because she was a dead body.

--

"Midnight, the door! GET THE DOOR, NOW!"

Belinda's lip was bleeding profusely- she probably was going to need stitches. Her dyed pink hair was disheveled in its knot. Her gun was pointed towards the chandelier at the top of the large and beautifully decorated room, a room which extended from the lobby to the second and third floors of the hotel. Everything expensive imaginable was in it.

"Connor and I can take care of the windows. Hurry, or this all was for nothing!" Belinda yelled.

"Belle," I said. "There's, like, a million doors. Could you please be a little more specific?"

James answered me.

"Lobby emergency exit," he said, in a voice so different from his usual enthusiastic chatter. It was even and steady. It was loud, yet soft at the same time. Firm but gentle.

A shower of sparks came down from the ceiling.

I admired this most about James; in an extremely heated panic situation, he was calm. He said I was like that, too.

As long as the PTSD wasn't kicking in at the command of some random trigger, of course.

He was standing beside Belinda Klein, on the staircase. He was surveying the room before us. Concentrating.

I grunted as I pushed myself up off the ground. There was a colossal mess of dark, almost black blood on Caleb's jacket- a shard of glass had buried itself into the left side of my neck. There was another one, even longer, in my rib cage. I didn't pull out either one.

Belinda pulled the trigger.

I flinched, and made some kind of a sound; I HATED gunshots.

"Midnight, now, go," said James.

"Understood," I replied.

I took a breath, stood straight, and leaped off the third floor railing and onto the ground floor. The chandelier soon followed; James used it to smash the glass doors of the main entrance, destroying it. I watched debris and wreckage fall from the ceiling in front of me. Telekinesis, he called it.

I bounded towards the emergency exit, and almost immediately realized I didn't need to secure it- it was on fire. In fact, the entire hallway toward it was on fire. Nobody was going to be using this path as an exit any time soon.

Whoever we were after was trapped.

I ran back toward the center of the lobby. A man was standing there, looking the other way. I approached him, coughing and wincing.

"Hey," I said.

He turned towards me.

"Hi, do you need any help?" I asked.

Fortunately, he wasn't injured, not that I could tell. Not as badly as I was at least.

And then, something shifted. It happened slowly. The atmosphere in that room- the smoke, heat, the dust from the ceiling and the burning wreckage all around us- turned cold, like there was no fire; like I couldn't feel the torridness. The entire hotel lobby started going dark, beginning with the floor, and moving up toward the ceiling. Our surroundings were engulfed in flames that seemed to turn, creepingly, into motionless black holes. Everything around us was turning into blackness. Clearly, something was going very wrong- I looked at the man, trying to make sense of whatever was happening, when I recognized him. Either it really did take me a while to put it together, or my brain didn't process it correctly at once when he turned around. Standing in front of me was the man who had me prostituted.

For years.

I was a child.

I didn't know his real name, ever.

I didn't know my real name, ever.

He looked at me with dark eyes, soulless eyes, and spoke to me.

"Well," he said. "Hello there."

I sometimes wondered if he was my dad. And then I'd rule it out, because we had no similarities, physically or otherwise.

"You know, you're funny," I said. "You said we-" I tried to think, but then, thinking was impossible. "You said you only did what you did, so we could live."

"We did live."

"No," I said. "You lived."

I stared him straight in the eye, the same way I did the last time I had to do special favors for him. My thoughts were a house on fire. I was a knife in a gunfight.

"I died," I said. "I died every day."

I felt like I was choking; I felt like my body physically could not breathe the air near this man.

If he was a man at all.

"The money you were getting was enough. Enough, already. And you used it," I said, still unable to comprehend it, even at eighteen. "You used it to make more victims, and even more victims."

"Bigger business," he said. "You should understand it now. You're older. More gold."

"I don't understand it."

"Well," he said, with a voice that belonged to a demon, a demon that belonged, for all eternity, in hell. "Go cry about it, then."

"Don't worry, I will," I said. "I do it every day. I do it in my sleep."

I closed my eyes.

"But before I do that again..." I said. I was stronger and older, and trained; I imagined myself on top of him, slamming my elbow into his throat, and into his temple, my fingers in both his eye sockets, and taking the knife from my pocket- to go directly for both his carotid arteries: the ones that brought oxygenated blood from his nonexistent heart to his immoral, corrupt, completely twisted, completely defunct, and completely depraved brain.

I took the knife from my pocket.

And then I dropped the knife on the ground.

And then I walked away.

Because we aren't like him. His victims aren't like him.

I flicked off the switch for the simulation.

The underground floors of the Webwork were designed for US agent training. I was in B14.

I sat alone, on the floor of the training room.

Extra training on Saturdays was my new form of acceptable self-harm. It definitely worked; it certainly took my mind away from memories of Experiment Nightingale.

The darkness turned back into flames, and turned from flames back into the grand and beautiful lobby of the hotel, and from the lobby back into the dim, vast, empty training room.

The real lights flickered back on.

I was afraid of this man, his size and power.

But weak people pull other people down to feel make themselves feel stronger.

So I was never afraid of the tears.

I was never afraid to show that I do have weaknesses- because with weakness comes strength.

And it makes us human.

--