Riley
The first experiment started at 6:00 AM.
I knew because I'd been counting. Four hundred and thirty-two minutes since the lights went out. Except the lights never went out. They stayed on, always on, that same fluorescent hum vibrating through the walls, the floor, my skull.
They came for us without warning. No announcement. No instructions. Just the door sliding open and guards filling the doorway, their armor black, their visors blank.
"Group Seven. Medical wing. Now."
Some of the kids cried. Some froze. One boy—the broad-shouldered one from across my bunk—stood up immediately, his jaw tight, his hands in fists at his sides. He didn't cry. He didn't freeze. He walked toward the door like he was walking to a fight he knew he'd lose.
I stood up too. I followed.
We walked in single file through white corridors. I counted turns. Left. Right. Straight for forty-seven paces. Left. Down a ramp. Another left. The air got colder. The white walls stayed white, but the lights changed—dimmer, flickering, like something was wrong with the power.
The medical wing had a smell. I knew it the moment we walked through the doors. Metal. Blood. Antiseptic. And underneath it all, something sweet, something that made my stomach turn even though I didn't let it show.
It smelled like the vet clinic Helena had taken me to once. When a stray dog got hit by a car and she found it on the side of the road. She'd tried to save it. I'd watched. I'd watched the vet work, watched the blood, watched the dog's eyes go from scared to empty.
It died on the table. Helena cried. I didn't.
That was the smell.
The room was large. Maybe fifty feet across. Rows of tables lined the walls—metal tables, the kind with straps. Restraints. Wrist straps, ankle straps, a wide band across the chest. The tables were stained. Clean, but stained. Some things don't wash out.
There were machines too. Things I didn't recognize. Things that hummed and clicked and glowed with lights that weren't supposed to exist. Needles. Screens. Wires.
Dr. Marlow was there. The same woman from intake, her hair still pulled tight, her white coat spotless. She stood at the center of the room with her tablet, her fingers moving across it, her eyes flicking to us as we entered.
"Assign them," she said.
The guards moved. Hands grabbed arms. I let them take me. Fighting now would be stupid. I'd learned that in foster care. You fight when it matters. You wait when it doesn't.
They strapped me to a table. The metal was cold against my back. The restraints were tight—not painful, but there was no give. I tested them once, just to know. My left wrist had maybe half an inch of movement. My right wrist less. My ankles couldn't move at all.
I stopped testing. I lay still. I breathed.
Around me, other kids were screaming. A boy two tables down was thrashing so hard the table rattled. A guard held him down while another fastened the chest strap. The boy kept screaming. Words, maybe, but I couldn't make them out. Just noise.
Rachel was three tables to my left. She wasn't screaming. She was frozen, her eyes wide, her mouth open, her body rigid like she'd already left it. I watched her for a moment. Then I looked away.
Marlow walked to the center of the room. She set her tablet down on a cart. Picked up something I couldn't see.
"Phase One: Baseline," she said. Her voice was calm. Clinical. Like she was reading a recipe. "You will undergo a series of physical and psychological calibrations. These calibrations are designed to establish your baseline metrics. Pain tolerance. Stress response. Neural adaptability."
She turned. She was holding a syringe. The needle was long. Thinner than anything I'd ever seen.
"We will begin with a neural activator. This will increase the sensitivity of your pain receptors by approximately four hundred percent. This is temporary. The effects will last approximately three hours."
Four hundred percent. I processed the number. Filed it away.
"Please do not scream," Marlow said. "It disturbs the other participants."
She walked to the first table. A girl. Twelve, maybe. The girl was already crying, her face wet, her breath coming in gasps. Marlow found the vein in her neck. The girl didn't even feel the needle. She was too far gone.
I watched the girl's face change when the activator hit. Her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened. And then she screamed.
It wasn't a normal scream. It was something else. Something that came from a place deeper than fear. The sound filled the room, bounced off the white walls, drilled into my ears. The other kids started crying, started thrashing, started screaming too, just from the sound of her.
Marlow moved to the next table. And the next. And the next.
The screaming didn't stop. It layered on itself, one voice joining another, until the room was nothing but noise.
Then she was standing over me.
I looked up at her. Her face was calm. Her eyes were pale blue. She held the syringe like a pen.
"Riley Voss," she said. "Your file notes unusually high pain tolerance. Let's see if that's accurate."
She found the vein in my neck. I didn't flinch. I'd had needles before. Vaccinations. Blood draws. Helena had always held my hand. I'd never needed it.
The fluid went in cold. I felt it spread—like ice water in my veins, moving from my neck into my chest, my arms, my legs. And then the world changed.
The lights got brighter. The metal under my back got sharper. I could feel every ridge, every seam, every imperfection in the table. I could feel the straps around my wrists, the fibers of the fabric, the pressure of each individual thread.
I could feel my heartbeat. Not hear it. Feel it. Each pulse was a wave, a pressure, a thud that moved through my whole body.
Marlow was watching my face. Waiting.
I didn't give her anything.
She smiled. That same smile from intake. The one that said she'd found something interesting.
"Begin the calibration," she said.
---
The first stimulus was electrical.
They attached wires to my temples. To my chest. To the inside of my wrists, where the skin was thin and the veins ran close to the surface. I felt the cold of the metal contacts. I felt every hair on my arms stand up.
"We're going to start at level one," a voice said. Not Marlow. Someone else. Someone I couldn't see. "Please describe the sensation."
Level one was nothing. A tingle. Like when your foot falls asleep and starts to wake up.
"Level two."
A buzz. A vibration behind my eyes. My fingers twitched. I didn't tell them to.
"Level three."
Pain. Real pain. Not sharp—deep. Like something was pulling at the inside of my bones. My jaw clenched. My hands balled into fists. But I didn't make a sound.
"Level four."
My back arched off the table. I couldn't stop it. The pain was everywhere—in my spine, in my skull, in the marrow of my bones. It felt like I was being unmade. Like someone was taking me apart piece by piece and putting me back together wrong.
I didn't scream. I bit down on the inside of my cheek and tasted blood and I didn't scream.
"Heart rate elevated but stable," the voice said. "Cortisol levels within expected range. Pain response is... minimal vocalization. Continuing."
Level five.
I don't remember level five. There was light. There was sound. There was something that might have been my own voice, but I couldn't tell. The world went white. Then black. Then white again.
When I came back, my face was wet. Tears. I hadn't even known I was crying.
"Level five completed. Holding at level four for duration."
The pain didn't stop. It settled into something constant, something I could almost ignore if I focused hard enough. I focused on my breathing. In. Out. In. Out. I counted. One. Two. Three.
To my left, Rachel was screaming. Not words. Just sound. A high, thin noise that went on and on and on. I didn't look at her. I kept counting.
---
The second stimulus was chemical.
They injected something into my IV. I felt it immediately—a heat that started in my chest and spread outward, through my arms, my legs, my fingers, my toes. My skin flushed. Sweat beaded on my forehead.
"This is a fear response activator," the voice said. "It mimics the physiological symptoms of extreme terror without the cognitive trigger. Your body will believe it is dying. Your mind will know it isn't. We want to see how long your mind can override your body."
I understood what that meant. My body was going to panic. My heart was going to race. My lungs were going to gasp. My muscles were going to shake. And I was going to have to sit inside it and watch.
The heat became cold. My hands started shaking. Then my arms. Then my whole body. I was shivering, violently, my teeth chattering against each other.
My heart was pounding. I could hear it in my ears, feel it in my throat, in my chest, in my stomach. It was too fast. Too hard. It felt like it was going to tear itself apart.
My lungs wouldn't fill. I was gasping, sucking air, but it wasn't enough. There was a weight on my chest, a pressure, something crushing me from the inside.
I knew it wasn't real. I knew it was the drug. I knew my body was lying to me.
But knowing didn't stop it.
The panic was a wave. It rose and rose and rose, and I was underneath it, and I couldn't breathe, and my heart was going to stop, and I was going to die on this table, strapped down, alone, and no one would know, no one would care—
I caught it.
I don't know how. I caught the thought like a thread, pulled it out of the noise, held it in front of me.
This isn't real.
I repeated it. Over and over. In my head. Not out loud—I couldn't get the words out, my throat was too tight, my jaw was locked. But inside, I said it. This isn't real. This isn't real. This isn't real.
The wave crashed over me. I felt it. I felt all of it. The terror. The certainty that I was dying. The knowledge that there was nothing I could do.
But underneath it, there was something else. Something cold. Something that watched.
This isn't real.
The wave passed. The shivering stopped. My heart slowed. My lungs opened.
I lay on the table, drenched in sweat, my body limp, my mind clear.
"Fascinating," the voice said.
---
The third stimulus was psychological.
They took me to another room. Smaller. Darker. A chair in the center. A screen on the wall. Marlow stood beside the screen, her tablet in her hands.
"We're going to show you images," she said. "You will watch them. You will not look away. Your reactions will be recorded."
The screen flickered on.
The first image was a body. A woman. Her face was wrong—swollen, discolored, her eyes open and empty. I recognized the signs. The virus. She'd died from it. Or she'd been killed because of it.
I looked at her face. I felt nothing.
The second image was a child. Younger than me. Eight, maybe. He was lying on a table. Not sleeping. Not resting. There was blood. Too much blood. His eyes were open too.
I looked at his face. I felt nothing.
The third image was a creature. A Stalker. Like the one Vance had shown us, but this one wasn't kneeling. It was moving. The image was blurry, taken from a distance, but I could see it clearly enough. It had been a girl once. I could tell by the shape of its shoulders, the tangle of its hair. Its face was gone—just skin stretched over bone, a mouth that opened too wide, eyes that were nothing but black.
I looked at its face.
I felt something.
Not fear. Not pity. Something else. Something I didn't have a word for.
"Interesting," Marlow said. She was watching me, not the screen. "Your heart rate didn't change on the first two. But this one..."
She looked at her tablet.
"You reacted. Not fear. Something else. What are you feeling, Riley?"
I didn't answer. Because I didn't know. And because I didn't want her to know that I didn't know.
"We'll come back to that," Marlow said.
The images continued. Bodies. Blood. Destruction. Things that should have made me sick, should have made me cry, should have made me look away.
I watched them all. I felt nothing.
Except for the Stalkers. Every time one appeared, that something came back. That unnamed thing in my chest. Not fear. Not pity. Not disgust.
Recognition.
---
They released me at 9:00 PM. Fifteen hours. I'd been on the table for fifteen hours.
My body was a ruin. My arms were bruised where they'd taken blood. My chest was raw where the electrodes had been. My head throbbed with a pain that didn't have a shape. I couldn't walk straight. I stumbled when they pulled me off the table. A guard caught me, held me up, pushed me toward the door.
The other kids were worse. Some couldn't walk at all. Guards dragged them. Some were crying, still crying, hours after it ended. Some were silent. The kind of silent that comes after something breaks.
Rachel was one of the silent ones. She walked past me without seeing me. Her eyes were open but empty. Like the dog at the vet. Like the Stalkers.
I watched her go.
I should have felt something. She was from my school. She'd smiled at me at the bus stop. She'd said hey, Riley like it was normal, like the world was normal, like we were just two kids waiting for a bus.
Now she was walking through a white corridor in a facility on an island she'd never heard of, her body broken, her mind somewhere else.
I should have felt something.
I didn't.
I walked back to the dormitory. I climbed onto my bunk. I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling and I didn't think about anything. I didn't let myself.
The scarred girl was on her bunk across from me. She was watching me. Her face was bruised—they'd done things to her too. But she was watching me with eyes that were still sharp, still aware.
"You didn't scream," she said. Her voice was rough. Hoarse. Like she'd been screaming and lost it.
I didn't answer.
"I screamed," she said. "Everyone screamed." A pause. "Except you."
I turned my head. Looked at her. She had a name. Everyone had a name. But I hadn't learned hers yet. I hadn't bothered.
"What's your name?" I asked.
She smiled. It was a thin smile. Tired. But there was something underneath it. Something that hadn't broken.
"Sasha," she said.
I nodded. Then I turned back to the ceiling.
Sasha. I'd remember that.
The lights stayed on. The room was quiet except for the sound of kids crying, kids breathing, kids trying to survive the night.
I lay on my bunk and I felt the pain in my body. The burns. The bruises. The places where they'd put needles and wires and things I didn't have names for.
I felt it all. And underneath it, I felt that cold thing. That thing that watched. That thing that had been there in the woods, in the bus, on the table.
That thing that looked at a Stalker and felt recognition.
I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know if it was strength or weakness or something else entirely.
But I knew one thing.
They were trying to break me. They were trying to break all of us. And maybe they'd succeed. Maybe everyone broke eventually.
But not today.
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