01: Fireworks

“You seem to be progressing very nicely, Hitaki,” the woman said with a smile, marking something on the clipboard she held. The board was pale blue and vaguely translucent, just enough to goad the patient into believing that they could see what was being written if they stared hard enough. Hitaki had given up trying a long time ago. After so long in this pit one would give up almost everything. “Hold out your arm for me, will you?”

The youth almost refused, but instead let out a sigh and held out his left arm. The white-clad woman checked his pulse and, apparently, marked it on the board, then took his blood pressure and marked it as well. Her lips, an unnatural shade of bright red, pursed slightly and her pale eyebrows slanted downward. “Your blood pressure’s a bit high today,” she said softly. “It’s nothing dangerous, but Doctor Tyne should be notified, I suppose.”

The boy rolled his black eyes. “Doctor Tyne gets notified about everything anyway, doesn’t he?”

The nurse seemed to become slightly detached, hazel eyes glazing over. “Now Hitaki—” The boy shook his head and jerked his arm back, averting his narrowed eyes, and said nothing. The nurse sat in silence for a long moment. “Doctor Tyne said that if you’re good you can see your friends today.”

That caught his attention. He turned to her with wide eyes, the barest hint of a hopeful smile lighting his attractive features. “Really?” he inquired. “Damion and Grace? You promise?”

“If you’re good,” she repeated. “Now let me get back at your arm to take a blood sample, okay?”

Hitaki sighed again and held out his arm. “Another one? Didn’t you just get one yesterday?” He kept his unsettlingly dark eyes rooted on the older woman’s this time, not rolling them in spite of his obvious annoyance. He bore his arm again, pale and wiry, and winced slightly at the chill of the alcohol-soaked cotton ball as she cleaned the inside of his elbow. She only shrugged in reply. He sighed again and turned to face his arm, watching with detached interest as she pricked his skin, affixed the vial onto the end of the tube, and let the pressure of his blood transfer it from vein to glass.

“It’s so dark,” he murmured. The nurse gave a nod, face twisting in what appeared to be some form of disgust, but still said nothing. The draw went quickly, as always, and the young woman sealed the vial, rose to her feet without even sparing the youth another glance, and disappeared out the door without another word.

That was how it always was—Hitaki had been through so many injections and blood draws that he could probably do them himself; he was sure the nurse didn’t like that. And the fact that he watched his blood be drawn from inside him didn’t seem to please the young woman much either. She was new, Hitaki couldn’t blame her for not understanding the way his mental processes progressed.

Doctor Tyne had once told him that he didn’t seem capable of linear thought, that it was because of that that he never fit in back in school, but Hitaki had no clue whether to believe him or not. It had been so long since school it felt almost like it had all been a dream.

The youth’s pale lips curved in a dazed grin. “Just a dream…” His eyes drifted shut, but he could still see the white room even behind him eyelids. He had been subjected to nothing but this room for so long it had burned into his retinas. This scene was different, though; where he was alone in his real room, the after-image burned into his eyes showed someone else in it with him. A woman, dark-haired and dark-eyed like himself, stood before him. The way her inky hair flowed about her suggested that she was underwater, even though Hitaki could still breathe, and as she opened her mouth a single bubble flew from her parted lips.

Hitaki angled his head backward to see if it would pop on the ceiling but found his attention snapped back to the woman when an odd sound reached his ears. A distant, muffled splash, like someone trying to scream underwater; Hitaki looked back at the woman and watched as her eyes went wide and a plume of scarlet blood drifted from her open mouth, staining white teeth the color of rubies. She coughed once more, reached up to touch her throat, then—in an action so quick the youth couldn’t even tell if her figure had swelled—she burst.

He cried out and leapt to his feet, jumping backward, eyes snapping open. He stared for several minutes to make sure what he was seeing was real, and sighed in relief at the pristine whiteness that greeted his vision. He didn’t dare even blink for several long seconds, lest the scarlet floating about in unfelt liquid would scream behind his eyelids. When at last his eyes dried and lids scraped down over them, there was only the faintest haze of red in the alabaster after-image.

The dark-haired youth let out another relieved sigh.

That’s how it started, isn’t it? He thought as he padded silently to the corner and dropped to the floor, pulling up his knees and burrowing between them until only his black eyes stared out over them. With Mom. Mom getting sick, Mom visiting Doctor Tyne, Mom getting better, Mom… The thought trailed off as the firework explosion of blood ricocheted through his memories.

He closed his eyes, trying his very best to clear his vision, and his breathing slowly evened out. Finally, one long exhalation wafted from his slightly-parted lips, and Hitaki was asleep.

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Recovered Report 742-a

Terminal 143

16:24--------021409--------Subject 742

It’s Valentine’s Day today. I don’t really care but the doctors said I should just write what comes to me, so here it is. Today is Valentine’s Day, and Mom died four days ago. It was so awful I can’t even describe it. Four days from her anniversary, four days from a lot of things. Four days.

I’ve spent the last four days getting poked and prodded by all sorts of needles, had blood taken and medications given, had samples of my hair and fingernails and skin taken too. I don’t know why they want them, but I don’t really care. Maybe I will later, but now I’m still too numb. Too traumatized. That’s why the doctors say I was brought here in the first place, me and Damion and Grace, it was because we’re all traumatized. They keep telling Damion that she has Schizophrenia, which isn’t a big surprise, considering; as for Grace, they won’t say. I think she’s probably a little bipolar.

And me? I’m suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and a form of Schizoeffective Disorder. The Schizo part has always been pretty mild, to the point that I’ve always been able to keep control of it without medication, but after what happened

USER IDLE 9.47 MINS

After what happened I’d be surprised if anyone could keep themselves under control. My mother exploded for God’s sake. EXPLODED. Like a firework made of bones and blood and little bits of her insides and

USER IDLE 5.72 MINS

I can’t do this anymore.

USER LOGOFF 27.64 MINS

End Report

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Hitaki woke up with an unpleasant sting in his arm, and turned to face the offending appendage with curiosity. Sticking out from his forearm, just past his elbow, was a familiar dart. He took hold of the blue-fletched object and pulled it from his skin, uncertain at first as to what was going on, then suddenly all too aware. He sighed and leaned back against the padded wall.

“Hey, why the tranq?” he inquired of no one inparticular. “I’m not being violent, am I? Or was I thrashing around in my sleep again?” There was no answer.

He sighed and looked at the dart again. Blue fletching—this was a low-level tranquilizer. If he had been behaving violently they would have shot him with a yellow or even a red one. He had only ever been shot with a red one twice during his stay here, and really didn’t want to go through it again. Blues were used by the guards when he was being annoying, and by the doctors when they had to prep him for surgery. The mild tranquilizer would wear off by the time they were ready, and he would be too weak to protest when they anesthetized him.

The youth raked a hand through his shoulder-length dark hair and leaned his head back, angling it upward to look at the ceiling and the lights. The one in the far corner was flickering a little, meaning it would need replacement soon if he wasn’t going to be trapped in relative darkness.

“So,” he called amicably, “why do I need surgery this time?”

Now the slat in his door opened and a man’s voice spoke through it. “Not surgery, therapy. You have to be unconscious for it.”

“Sleep-learning or something, right?” the boy ventured. The guard made a noncommittal grunt and Hitaki let out another sigh, lowering his black eyes. “Okay, fine, whatever. Can I write in my journal first?”

“No.”

The boy sighed, narrowing his eyes. “Damn.”

He hadn’t been allowed to write in his journal in a long time, so long he could barely recall. Doctor Tyne said that he wrote in his journal the least out of everyone in the facility—not that Hitaki could be certain of that, he hadn’t seen anyone except that guards and the doctors in what was most certainly months—and so the youth found himself massively annoyed when he was denied this simple request. The doctor said that Hitaki’s journal was the only privacy he had left, and encouraged him to write in it often, yet when the youth asked to do so he was denied. It was horribly unfair.

His heartbeat quickened as anger heated his skin and he clenched his hands into fists, fingernails that seemed to long biting into the pale flesh of his palm too easily to be normal. Of course, he might not have hurt himself at all—he was insane, wasn’t he? The thought that all the pain he experienced, the dark dreams and hallucinations he saw on a nightly basis, were fake made the boy’s stomach turn.

They said I was doing better, he reminded himself. They promised I could see Damion and Grace if I was good. I’m being good. I have to keep being good.

Leaning back against the wall, Hitaki closed his eyes and took several careful breaths; the steadier he could keep his respiration—and thus his heartbeat—the longer it would take for the tranquilizer to set in. He had once lasted an entire half-hour by doing this, according to his old nurse.

The recollection that he had been under the care of a different nurse brought a flicker of confusion to the youth’s mind: What had her name been? What had happened to her? He couldn’t quite recall either. She had only recently been replaced by the blond with the nametag bearing ‘Karissa,’ so it didn’t make sense for Hitaki to forget her so quickly. She had been his nurse practically since he came here, right after the ordeal with his mother—he should have remembered her.

This made his heartbeat speed up again and his breath come in shallow gasps. He was forgetting things again, just like the first month. He couldn’t remember his nurse, he couldn’t remember the last time he wrote in his journal, what else had he forgotten? How could he ever know if he had really forgotten it, or if it had ever happened at all?

With these thoughts rushing through his mind and the rushing of blood through his veins and breath through his lungs quickening, Hitaki fell prey to the tranquilizer that had only moments before been housed in the blue-fletched dart clenched tightly in his pale hand.

--------------------

Damion let out a sigh as she rose from her cot, stretching out her arms with a quiet groan as the stiffness of a full night’s sleep worked its way out of her muscles. The girl brushed both hands over her short-cropped brown hair, wondering how long it would take to grow out now that it had been cut again, and yawned hugely.

It was just another day.

She heard yelling from the room to the right—more like a loud conversation, she supposed—and wondered what time it was. The voice yelling was familiar, but not quite within her ability to place, and the fact that any of the others were awake enough to yell proved that it was most likely late morning. Perhaps even afternoon. In her white room there was no clock, no windows, nothing to betray the time of day, so she really had nothing to go on aside from the noises in the rooms and halls beyond her space.

The grey-eyed girl straightened out the medical scrubs she wore—also white, like everything else in this place—and rose groggily to her feet. She had had that dream again, the same one as last week and the week before. She couldn’t say how long she had been having these dreams, but she knew that they couldn’t simply be caused by an overactive imagination. They were too real, too detailed.

When they were younger, Hitaki had come to school regularly with tales of the most epic dreams the young would-be boy Damion had ever heard, but these dreams were nothing like her best friend’s. They weren’t epic, they were barely even possible. Damion’s dreams were simply real; there was an element to all of them that was so realistic it made the girl’s stomach hurt to think about them.

She padded silently up to the door and knocked on it—technically she knocked on the slat, the door itself was padded. The slat opened and a pair of hazel eyes met hers. “Good morning, guard,” she said so amicably it felt unnatural. “Can I write in my journal?”

The slat slid shut and Damion caught the familiar series of beeps that denoted the guard was calling his superior for permission. It would take several minutes, so Damion turned around and leaned against the padded door while she waited.

The short-haired girl crossed her arms over her relatively flat chest—though without the binding material she had used back in high school she wasn’t nearly as masculine as she preferred—and lowered her head. Doing this let her catch sight of her bare arms, the crisscrossed lines of scar tissue that ran up both of them; the circular, shiny places where a cigarette had been pressed against porcelain flesh, searing the skin so quickly it didn’t even have time to bleed…

She clenched her eyes shut and resisted the urge to be sick. Most of those scars had been her own choice, but the round ones, the ones that shimmered grey-brown when the light hit them, had been anything but her own decision. She had been more unbalanced then than now, she thought, but even she hadn’t been that twisted. Gender-confused, self-mutilating, disturbed, but most certainly not that badly.

She ran one finger over one of those puckered scars and shuddered. She wondered if her father had even noticed she was gone all that time ago—how long she couldn’t be sure. He probably first noticed it when he turned to put out his cigarette and found his ‘ashtray’ missing.

The door clicked and then swung slowly open, revealing a man dressed all in white. He could have been a doctor, if it weren’t for the nickel-plated gun seated at his hip in a white holster. His hands were gloved and he wore a mask, as though Damion held some sort of virus he could catch, and he skirted past her with nervous haste as he entered the room. The young man—he couldn’t have been past his twenties—reached out to press his hand against the wall just to the right of the door, and a loud beep rang out. That portion of the wall sunk into the floor, padding and all, to open the small space holding this cell’s computer.

It was amazing, Damion thought, what they could do in this place. It was all so high-tech, like something out of a science fiction novel. Damion had seen her terminal opened enough times to know that there wasn’t much to it aside from a moveable wall and a fingerprint scanner, but it still looked undeniably space-age.

She smiled as the guard retreated, the computer booting up, and pulled the stool out from under the white desk. There wasn’t a whole lot she could do but pretend she was okay, pretend that she was content with her life here. In all honesty, she had to admit that this place was much better than life with her father.

That thought was a dark one, made even darker by the fact that Damion had her hypotheses in regards to what this facility truly was. It might have just been her own insane mind telling her lie after lie, but there was something to utterly wrong about this hospital, just as wrong as her dreams were real, and she knew she was right.

With this thought planted firmly in her mind she began typing in her journal, fingers dancing over the keys so quickly they kept a tempo a master musician would have trouble matching. She typed and typed and typed, determined to get these thoughts out of her head but unable to do much more than ramble. She wrote about the dreams she had, wondered if anyone else had these dreams, used all the profanity she could remember and taunted anyone who happened to be reading the entry.

The girl started when a low sound caught her attention, and she turn to face the padded wall. She stopped writing and closed her eyes, listening intently for some flicker, some hint of sound…

There it was again. A low moaning, like a song or a sob. It was muffled but nearby, as though it came from the room next door. But if it came from another room she would be able to hear it in the hall as well, and when she rose to her feet and pressed her ear to the door there was no matching echo. When she did the same to the wall, the song grew louder. It was a feminine voice, but deep and husky, breaking at all the wrong times.

Damion slapped one hand against the wall. “Hey, lady, quiet down,” she said easily. “It’s really hard to write with you singing between the rooms.” She had never tried speaking to this crazy-sound before, knowing perfectly well that there was really nothing there. She was crazy, whether her dreams were reality or not. She had always been insane, for as long as she could remember there had been something wrong with her, and she had always known that this sound was just the result of that madness.

A long moment passed as the song trailed off into nothing before a muffled voice reached Damion’s keen hearing. “Sorry.”

That made the boyish girl’s blood run cold; she jerked back from the wall as though it was on fire, eyes wide and breath heaving. She had always thought that the woman in the walls was a facet of her insanity, something that didn’t really exist as anything more than background noise. But she spoke. She spoke in reply to something Damion said. None of her other crazy-sounds ever did that, they just kept going as though she wasn’t really there or had no voice. But this thing, this thing that was more real at that moment than anything Damion had ever seen, had spoken to her.

She took a shaky step forward, then another, then another, pressed her ear to the wall again and listened. “H-H-Hello?”

A moment passed. “I’ll leave,” said the voice from the space between the rooms. “You write.”

Damion thought she heard footsteps stumbling off into nothing, but couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t be sure of anything anymore. She spun around and shouted for her guards, hollered louder than she had spoken in what felt like years. “There’s something between the walls!” she shrieked. “It’s alive and it—it’s sad and—”

She broke off as the slat slid open and something flew through it, hitting her squarely in the chest. She looked down at the red-fletched tranquilizer dart and her eyes stung with tears. Not a red one, she thought brokenly.

Damion’s knees gave out and she collapsed onto the floor in a heap of white clothes and scars.

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Recovered Report 813-a

Terminal 153

17:56--------021309--------Subject 813

I think you’re all insane and we aren’t. What we saw was real, I know it was real. I don’t know why but I know.

The doctors say my writing is disjointed right now, that I’m writing like an infant because my mind is having trouble coming to terms with what I saw. What we saw. Maybe it is, that would explain a lot.

USER IDLE 2.78 MINS

Yeah, it would explain a lot.

What happened to Hitaki’s mom? The doctors won’t tell me, but I know what is saw and it was real even though it can’t be real. It couldn’t have happened. Three days ago, Hitaki’s mom exploded. What happened to her? Was it real? Were we all hallucinating the same thing? Come to think of it, what did the others see? They won’t tell me because we aren’t allowed to see each other right now. The doctors say it’s for our own good. Last time I heard that was when Mom sent me to live with Dad.

The doctors asked about the scars on my arms and chest and the one I have on my neck, and I had to tell them where they all came from. The long ones, the straight ones, are from me. To prove that I could still bleed, that I was still alive. The others, the crooked ones and the round ones that look different than mine, are from Dad. The only thing he ever needed me for.

Maybe that’s why I was crazy. What if what the doctors told me is true, and I hallucinated the whole thing with Hitaki’s firework-mom? If that’s true, then maybe I imagined Dad using me to put out his cigarettes, too. Maybe none of it was real.

But it had to be real, it felt so real I still want to scream when I remember it. It was real. My Dad really did those horrible things and Hitaki’s mother really went supernova. KABOOM. Sounds funny, huh? It’s not, not when it’s a person doing it. Not funny at all.

I’m done now. No more.

USER LOGOFF 20.97 MINS

End Report

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Grace would have clenched her teeth, if only she wasn’t so sure she would bring them down on broken glass. When she was younger, before Hitaki’s mother exploded and she was brought here, she had wondered what it would be like to chew on glass. It would be cold, she had thought, and smooth like ice but hotter. Then it would turn metallic and sweet when the glass broke her skin, the blood would turn the glass hot.

Now she wished she had never thought of such a thing, now that she felt that it was real. It couldn’t be real, she knew it couldn’t—her cell was empty save for the rubber-framed cot in the corner, holding nothing that she could use to hurt herself. No glass for her chew on. But she could still feel it sitting on her tongue, just waiting for her to swallow to rip her apart. She had tasted blood enough to know with certainty what this would feel like, and she wanted nothing more than to be able to spit out the shards in her mouth.

She couldn’t, though, because they weren’t there. She reached back into her mouth and felt only her tongue and teeth, no glass. As soon as she removed her probing fingers, however, the angular chill of cold shards was back. She clenched her peridot eyes shut and let out a short whimper. She couldn’t even talk, moving her tongue at all would move the glass and break her skin.

Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop… she thought frantically. Please, God, prove that it’s not real! It can’t be real, none of it’s real…!

Grace’s green eyes snapped open as a sound caught her attention. She spun around, allowing the blanket clutched around her shoulders to fall as she moved, to stare at the wall. She could hear screaming again. Last time it had been a song, but this time it was a sobbing howl; what had happened to change the tone so drastically?

She rose shakily to her feet, emaciated limbs barely able to hold up her weight, and staggered to the wall, leaning her head and one hand against it to listen. Such a sweet voice, so pretty and so sad; she felt her heart ache at the pain in those howls. They broke at the crescendo, ragged for an instant before the pitch lowered and they turned into hurt sounds once more.

“What’s wrong?” she found herself asking, in spite of the fact that any words were supposed to make the glass cut her mouth open. Her eyes widened as she realized she was unscathed, and swallowed to prove it. No sting, no blood, no chill of glass in her mouth. It was gone. She smiled and leaned up against the wall, almost as though she were embracing the padded surface. Grace thanked the woman in the space between the rooms for making the glass go away, then pulled back. The screaming had stopped, and she was gone again.

“Thank you again,” she whispered, uncertain that the entity beyond her room could hear her. With that she turned around to face the door, setting her jaw and steeling herself for the confrontation; she always ended up arguing when she wanted to write in her journal, and she most certainly needed to write in her journal about this. She took a step toward the white padded door and stumbled as pain lanced through her back.

The girl fell to her hands and knees, fingers digging into the alabaster carpet as she ground her teeth and clenched her eyes shut. The pain flared again and she gave a strangled cry, arching her back. Not another fit, she couldn’t handle another one so soon after her checkup. She simply could not deal with another fit so soon after being told she was recovering.

These fits were the one thing, her nurse had told her, that kept her from being released. These fits and hallucinations that never hurt anyone or caused any violent behavior were the only things that kept her from rejoining the outside world. Grace thought that she was probably the worst off out of everyone in her group, though, so it made n sense that the others hadn’t been released yet.

Agony lanced through her shoulderblades again, and this time she couldn’t keep from screaming. The sound of tearing air cut through her shriek and blood stained the white floor; Grace felt as though her back exploded. Maybe she was going to end up like Hitaki’s mom, a firework of blood and nothing more than a memory. Maybe none of this was real at all and she was deluding herself.

The pain faded and the girl fell to the floor, pressing her face to the soft carpet as she struggled to regain her breath. They were there again, she could feel them. Her last fit had only been a week ago, having one so soon was jarring to the young girl—she had never had two fits in such rapid succession before. Even more jarring, however, was the sudden sensation of having extra appendages; Grace could feel wings at her back. Her wings, a part of her.

She lay there, tears forming in her eyes and trailing down into the carpet, too exhausted to push herself up and too afraid to look behind her. If she really had wings then what she thought about this place was true—if they weren’t there then she really was insane, and everything she swore to be true was only fantasy. Madness and twisted visions. Like those dreams she used to have.

The blonde took a shaky breath, closing her eyes, and didn’t bother to wonder why the sudden sting of a tranquilizer hit her in the arm. It must have been at least a yellow-fletched dart, because she felt everything spin away from her even as she lay still, the world slipping from her grasp as darkness came up to claim her. What did they need to do to her this time? Or was this just because she had been thrashing about and screaming? The world fell away, and Grace didn’t have enough to time to even guess an answer.

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Recovered Report 812-a

Terminal 133

16:53--------021409--------Subject 812

The doctors told me that I should try writing in this journal to clear my head, so I’m trying it out. I don’t think it’s going to help, though, it never really has.

I miss Damion and Hitaki already, and it’s only been four days since I saw them. The doctors separated us to give us special treatments and I haven’t even heard their voices since the split. I miss them both so much it hurts. I want to ask them what happened, what we’re doing here, who these people are… When they came to take us away Hitaki called one of them by name, so he must know at least a little of what’s going on. Which doctor was it? I have a phonetic memory, I should be able to remember this.

“Professor Thonael,” he said. “What happened to mom?”

That was it. Thonael, the one with the long black hair and black eyes. He’s kind of good-looking, I think. At least, I think I should think that. It’s kind of hard to think at all with all these crazy thoughts bouncing through my head. These voices and screams, all of them things I heard four days ago, ricochet off this inside of my skull until it’s just one big NOISE and there’s nothing I can do to calm it down. I hate it.

These journals are private, so Doctor Tyne says, no one is going to read them but us. If that’s the case then I’m going to say exactly what I think happened, and then I’ll come back and look at it later and see if I really WAS crazy when I came here.

Hitaki’s mother blew up. She didn’t spontaneously combust or anything like they show on TV, she just blew up. If I close my eyes I can still see it perfectly, like it’s burned into my retinas or something.

Heh. That sounds like something Hitaki would say. “Burned into my retinas.”

God, I miss him. I hope he’s okay.

Anyway, Miss Tsubame gasped for a minute, coughed blood, and then she blew up. Blood shafted out in points and splattered in bits, until she looked like a firework. It was horrible, I think, but I’m too numb right now to care. No, I care, I just don’t know what I’m saying.

Really, I have no idea why I’m writing this. I’ve been typing so slowly it doesn’t seem natural for me, and I’m sure the lockout the doctors mentioned it going to kick in any time now. In any case, Hitaki’s mother exploded and these doctors showed up and took us away from treatment. They wouldn’t even listen to what we were saying, but we’re just kids so that’s not surprising.

That reminds me, tomorr

TIMED LOCKOUT 40.00 MINS

End Report

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“How’s he doing?” Tyne inquired, glancing over the report sitting on his desk. The nurse, a young woman with pale hair and hazel eyes, bearing a nametag that read ‘Karissa’—though considering this compound’s reputation she might very well have been named something else entirely—shifted uneasily in her seat. The patent leather squeaked with her movements, and the Doctor winced at the noise, grinding his teeth.

“H-He’s all right, I guess,” she said weakly, eyes downcast, hands clasped together in her lap. “But…he scares me, sir.”

The brown-haired man laughed. “He’s supposed to. We didn’t take him because he was pleasant, we took him because he was traumatized. An excellent quality for a good subject.”

Karissa leaned forward slightly. “And is he a good subject, sir?” she inquired in a daring whisper. Tyne looked at her, finding her eyebrows arched and face pale. She really looked quite ill—perhaps she had heard about what happened to Maria, the boy’s previous nurse. That had been a mistake, the catalyst dosage given to the boy had been two milliliters greater than Tyne had ordered, so it wasn’t surprising things had gone wrong.

The man sighed, lifting one hand to push up his square-framed glasses. It had taken almost a week to get all the blood off the walls in the boy’s room.

“Professor Thonael thinks so,” he replied, “and he’s the leader of this project. If he says seven-forty-two is a good subject, then he is. So, apparently, are his friends.” He squinted slightly in thought. “Did you tell him he would be seeing them today?” Karissa nodded and Doctor Tyne let out another sigh, this one laced with annoyance. “This development,” he tapped the paper she had given him, “might change that. If his friends see him then they might notice this change and point it out.” He paused for a moment, eyes narrowing in thought.

A moment passed in silence before the man sighed and shook his head. “Put him under,” he ordered. “A dose big enough to keep him out for the next week or so with routine injections. We have to see if this development accelerates his changes any more than it already has.”

“What about the others? Eight-twelve and eight-thirteen?” Karissa inquired.

Tyne thought for another moment. “Put them under, too. I’ll be checking on them and making sure their changes are settling properly.” His mouth curved in a dark smirk. “And we all know why they can’t be conscious for that.”