Chapter 11

I spent the next few hours as a boneless wreck on the floor. I couldn’t move when the pain subsided, too exhausted to move from my position on the floor. When it came back my body was forced to contort and bend in so many ways that I believed I would end up as a pile of broken bones.

Time blended together into one long stream of pain, memories and dreams most impure. I saw flashes of my childhood, the training hall, the years at North Keep, darkened corridors during night-kills of men whose names I still could recall. I watched the red of my sister’s hair blur into puddles of blood. Then I saw our first kill when Leja had turned so very cold and I had become so very aware of what we were capable of, what I was capable of.

I saw Leja slitting a man’s throat. Leja curled up in an armchair with a mug of tea. Leja reading a book and me curled against her back, napping. Leja drinking wine the night of New Year’s, completely miserable. Leja beheading Nalmen Taro in the garden. Leja laughing at my ridiculous rabbit story. The images spun in my mind until I was convinced that I had dreamed all the peaceful moments of just she and I, where the walls weren’t stained with blood and the only concern we had was something as trivial as the office being too cold.

All the love we had shared between brother and sister had been a delicate lie; I was just too oblivious to see the truth. My sister lost her ability to love me the day she was born and needy, clingy Kairi had been too afraid to let go of her because the fear of being alone had been his worst nightmare. He had been a fool. It would have been better to have been alone than to live with a person as cold as the darkest depths of any ocean, impenetrable and pitiless.

It would have been better if she had never existed in the first place.

I played the images of my memories over and over again in my mind, going over as many details as I could remember until I couldn’t tell if some memories were real or if I had imagined them. Did it matter? I couldn’t tell if my tail was still attached or if Shaloh had cut it off. Maybe he had, but what experiments he would use it for, I couldn’t imagine and didn’t want to. I just wanted my tail back. When it did finally grow back in, the pain sprouting from my lower back blocked out the larger one that had been cradling me in its grip. The pain of my trail growing in was easier to bear and for a few sparse moments, I allowed myself to think that the mind-numbing pain from the pahfekton was over.

Then Shaloh entered my cell and after he put my broken hands in matching casts, injected the pahfekton once more. Pain dragged me back into its clutches and this time I couldn’t stop a scream, the sound cracking and rattling its way out of my too-dry throat. The sound of my own voice after a long period of silence was deafening as it echoed off the walls of the tiny cell. Screaming did nothing to relieve the pain.

For hours I kept screaming, off and on, wordless things that had no meaning fluctuating with the pain as it flared and subsided as it willed. And when I couldn’t scream any longer, quiet words and incoherent mumbles tumbled from me in a raspy whisper. I might have said Leja’s name, but it didn’t matter anymore. When I couldn’t make a sound any longer, I finally slipped away into sleep.

--

“Kairi.”

Leja?

“Kairi, wake up.”

A flash of my sister glaring pointedly down at me and I knew that look meant I had better have my pants on by the time it took for her to walk to her room and back or I’d have a shit-load to pay. And she walked pretty fucking fast and my pants were always nowhere to be found and sometimes under my bed or twisted in the covers when I had wriggled out of them in the night because it had gotten too—

“Kairi!”

“WHAT?” I snapped, my voice cracking through equally dry lips. I tasted blood and the metallic taste of it sent a jolt through my body as I realized that I wasn’t where I should have been. I should have been in my own bed at home on Olan, but instead I was locked in a tiny white-walled cell with a damned light that was never turned off. It was a wonder I ever slept at all. I pressed my face closer to the cold hard floor to get away from it.

“Finally awake, are we?” The apathetic male voice said above me and I heard the muffled sound of clothing shifting. “We will now start the second phase of the procedure.” The voice was closer now and I guessed that the man was crouched in front of me. I wondered if this man was the head Scholar, Shaloh, and then realized that as the head of this laboratory he couldn’t pay attention to me all the time. There had to be other ‘patients’ here right?

Guess I’m not that special after all.

I was pulled and pushed into a sitting position against the wall by two guards against the painful protestations of my body. I snarled and cursed at them, but to my utmost frustration I couldn’t shove them away or lash out, too drained from the pahfekton.

The Scholar in front of me was slender and effeminate, his lavender hair long and braided over his left shoulder. His mouth was an odd shade of red, a stark contrast against the pale peach skin. He looked at me like I was a cockroach.

“What? Never seen a real man before?” I said, smirking at him as he arranged a plastic tray indented with shallow oval dishes; each dish held two bright red pills.

“These,” the effeminate Scholar began, “are a sort of painkiller specifically made for pahfekton users.” He scooped up the first two on the far left side of the tray and held them up in a small see-through plastic cup. “They last about forty-eight hours.”

“Any side-effects, doctor?” I said mockingly, feeling my chapped lips crack further under the strain of a grin. I wondered if blood stained my teeth and pictured myself as a grinning monster, wondered if I looked frightening to him.

The Scholar gave me a dull look and continued on.

“There are a few side-effects, vomiting, nausea, and severe abdominal pain, but it happens rarely and in mild conditions.”

“You’re a robot.” I said in response and the effeminate Scholar paused in his movements for a moment to stare at me.

“A female robot.” I added and was delighted to see an angry red flush spread over the Scholar’s face as his pretty little mouth curled into a nasty snarl. Was he a monster too, just as I was with my careless grins and bloody teeth?

The Scholar grabbed my jaw and forced open my mouth, slamming the back of my head against the wall in the process. I snarled, gagging around his slender-fingered hand until it was replaced by a much bigger one, one I couldn’t struggle very well against. Damn the fucking guards; I could taste some sort of spice on this one’s thick fingers and it made my eyes water.

The Scholar stood away from me for a moment, his back turned to me and his shoulders stiff, before he strode back over and dropped the pills down my throat.

I choked on them for a bit before they finally went down, leaving a nasty sour taste behind. The guards let go of me and I sagged to the ground, suddenly feeling boneless and light. I watched the effeminate Scholar and his guards leave at a horizontal angle, the floor shuddering under my cheek when the door was slammed shut.

And then I started to giggle.

It started as a gentle tickling in my chest that gathered and grew and grew until it bubbled up my throat and forced itself out of my mouth. It hurt and I couldn’t stop it, my body shuddering as I laughed and laughed and snorted in attempts to stop my insane giggling. That’s what it was, insane, because I shouldn’t be laughing at all when my own sister had sold me into slavery and I was practically a test subject in a laboratory on Rhokha. And yet, there I was, rolling around on the floor laughing so hard that my eyes filled up with tears I hadn’t known that I still had.

When the laughing stopped and I was spent, I was as free as a netted fish; the pain was gone, but I was still locked up in this cell. I lay on my back on the floor, staring into space, not really looking at the tube-like fluorescent lights above me but rather past them. I imagined life without my sister. I imagined killing men and women without Leja’s red-haired shadow nearby and laughed, grasping at the threads of independence never realized. I would have been just as capable as she on my own and perhaps even better. I never needed her, had I? I was a full grown adult, a man, not a child. I didn’t need her, never needed her. She would be better off dead and I would be better off without her.

In the middle of my contemplations, the door creaked open. I watched Kanah soundlessly cross the floor to stand over me, a mischievous expression upon her large heart-shaped face still clinging to the fullness of younger youth.

“Time to train, boy.” She said, her smirk threatening to break into a full-out grin. I pulled myself to my feet, annoyed that my legs felt misplaced and jelly-like underneath my weight. My arms hung at my sides, weighed down by the casts encasing my hands. Kanah didn’t hide a sniff, as annoyed as she was amused to have to deal with me, I supposed. Without waiting for me she turned on her heel and walked out of the room. Cursing the weakness in my legs, I scrambled out of the room and took a left down the hall after her retreating form.

Kanah led me past cells with doors shut and cells with door wide open, their occupants asleep (or worse) or babbling incoherently to empty air. I glimpsed Vanto, Fractillian, and Dubarian prisoners and a fourth race of horned humanoid giant I couldn’t identify. Some were restrained flat against the wall by metal contraptions and jackets of pale leather, snarling like animals or giggling at nothing. There were even Rhokahn, drugged and chained with IVs in their necks and some lying too still on the cold floor to be alive.

All around us was a flurry of activity and sound. Scholars with their guards rushed back and forth, up and down the hallway, slipping in and out of the cells, most of them chattering up a storm with colleagues. A lot of them pushed three tiered metal carts rattling with pills and syringes and all manner of medical instruments, the sleeves of their lab coats splashed red, stark against the white. An occasional scream would ring out, but none of the Scholars seemed to notice even as the screams echoed continuously in the vaulted hallways.

We slipped through too many winding hallways of these cells, three floors Kanah said, until we reached one particular floor where silence had settled, impenetrable and unkind toward our intrusion. Unbothered, Kanah marched through the steel-plated hallway, her reflection distorted and marred in the closed doors and blank walls. I followed as quickly as I could, unnerved by the deathly chill creeping down my neck; it was entirely too cold here.

“Where the fuck are we going?” I shouted.

“Shut up brat. You’ll see in a second.”

“One! Two! Three!” I called out, the words echoing down the hallway where two menacing black doors waited. “Four! Five! Six! Seriously, I could do this all day!” I looked up at my blurred reflection in the ceiling

“Then that’s your prerogative, brat.” Kanah bit out from ahead of me with her back turned. I watched her stand there in front of the doors, a nervous machine of tapping feet and fidgeting, fucking stupid for an assassin. She really was stupid. I could kill her right now if I wanted, one simple snap of the neck, I could do it, I really could…if my hands weren’t broken, I amended last minute. But then I saw the short knife belted to her thigh. I could grab it with my teeth and one stab would end it all for this bitch. I stepped closer until I was a simple three quick strides from touching her bare back.

Another step.

Her right foot tapped dully against the floor, toe first, steel-enforced leather clinking and thunking simultaneously against the metal of the floor. She must be stupid, must be ignorant of what I was, of the killer I was capable of becoming when I wanted to be. The knife loomed closer and closer.

“Right,” she finally muttered to herself, stepping sharply to the right toward a pad of buttons mounted to the metal wall next to the black doors. I swore under my breath as she tapped in a number code. I almost had her!

“Why’re you standing so close, brat?” Kanah said, her eyes glaring down at me like I was a naughty child. I grinned at her.

“You almost died and it would’ve made me happy, s’all.” I said innocently. Kanah merely rolled her eyes at me and turned away. A single loud beep resounded from the pad and Kanah pressed a larger button underneath the pad. The right hand door swung inwards with a metallic click and inside was the darkest night. Where the hell were we going?

Without warning Kanah reached back, grabbed my wrist and yanked me into the yawning black. The door slammed behind us with a resounding bang.