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“Fine, go away,” I say, still reeling from the force of the memory.
“You need some space, I can understand that,” Liv says, her voice brisk, her impatience with me barely contained. “When you’re ready to talk, come find us. There will be someone inside the base most of the time. There’s a canteen on the ground floor and some bedrooms - that’s a good place to look. If you can’t find anyone indoors, try outside. The exit is at the end of the long corridor. I know you don’t have any shoes right now. We’re going to look for some for you. I’ll leave them outside your door.”
I don’t respond. She waits a moment, then I hear the shuffle of her footsteps heading away from me, leaving me once more to my thoughts.
For a while, I just sit there, staring at nothing in particular, trying to process the memory of Baxter, the horrible sensation of his arm around me, the sharp pain of that needle piercing my skin. I never thought, never even considered that making me pay could mean something worse than a beating. Baxter couldn’t do his own job without me holding his hand. I would never have credited him with the imagination to come up with something like this.
Drugging me. Abducting me.
Nineteen years.
It obviously hasn’t been nineteen years, but the fact is, it could have been nineteen days. Nineteen weeks, even. How longwas I kept under before they brought me here? What might they have done to me in that time?
The jumpsuit feels suddenly abrasive against my skin. I scramble out of it, checking every inch of my arms, my legs, pulling up my top to check my stomach and breasts.
Nothing. No marks, no cuts. I feel a little raw, but nothing hurts besides my neck.
My neck. It’s still bruised. I scramble to the mirror and study it, looking at the colour. It’s the greenish-yellow of several days’ worth of healing. Days, not weeks. Definitely not months.
Still, the knowledge that anything could have happened to me during those few days burns at all my nerve endings. My skin crawls, and I want nothing more than to jump in a shower. Scrub myself clean. As if soap could wash away the violation.
No marks, I remind myself. No marks and nothing else hurts.
I take a few deep, slow breaths, trying to release all the panic, the fear. When I’m somewhere close to calm, I get dressed again. Try to pull myself together. There’s nothing I can do about what might have happened in the days I’ve lost, so there’s no point dwelling on it. I need to move forward, work on problems I can actually solve.
Like getting out of this place and getting home.
I look again at the mirror, the tarnish on the surface. The smell of dust in the air, the way the strip lights blink in and out, as if there’s not quite enough power to sustain them. A back-up generator running, probably. Perhaps that’s why the whole twenty-year time jump thing. To explain why this place is so old and disused.
All these abandoned military bases are in really remote places. One closer to civilisation would have been reused, repurposed, or otherwise demolished to make way for something else. Wherever I am, it’s a really long way from home.They don’t need to take me all the way to an alien planet to achieve that.
The panic expands again. Away from the contained civility of the world inside Mercenia’s borders, anything goes. It’s the realm of dissidents, rebels. The rule of law doesn’t apply. Getting rid of a person out here would be easy.
No, I think. No. Breathe. Be rational.
Just because it would be easy doesn’t mean it’s what they’d do. It might be the wilds out here, but that doesn’t mean the staff on this experiment have lost their humanity.
A nervous giggle flies out of my mouth.
Humanity.
They’re trying very hard to prove some of them don’t have any of that.
But even as I think about prosthetics and heel lifts and stage makeup, my mind goes back to those yellow eyes, looking at me. The wildness behind them - something untamed and raw.
Not a military sort of look. That’s why it looked so unusual. I expected control, discipline, and got something else and my brain interpreted it as alien.
That’s definitely all there is to it.
Yeah.
The fear and panic crescendo once more. Pushing them down is getting increasingly difficult.
It was just dark down in that basement. In good lighting, not still a little hungover from whatever cocktail of drugs they gave me to simulate cryostasis, I wouldn’t be so easily unsettled by them. The seams would show.
Their humanity would show.
But the only seams showing around here are my own. I feel frayed at the edges, the fear impossible to stamp out. It doesn’t matter what’s true, every scenario is awful, and the more I thinkabout it, the more possible it seems that no matter what I do, I’m not going home again.
