Hollow

The sound of the keys jingling in the lock is what jars me awake.

It only takes seconds before I'm on all fours, hands wrapped feebly around the bars of my cage, eyes raking the room for the source of the noise. The small, square window at the top of the steel door reveals a dark figure. Dingy yellow light from the hall spills around it, casting a vague shadow on the cold concrete.

With the fear automatically comes the adrenaline. I look to my left—Nudge, only six years old, is just as alert as I am. Her deep, brown eyes are impossibly wide and full of terror. She looks at me and I offer a smile that I'm sure looks more like a grimace.

"It's okay," I whisper. She doesn't react. Usually, she trusts me, but she's smart enough to know when I'm bullshitting her.

I look to my right. Next to me, Max is bruised and bloodied from morning of torturous experimentation. She's also unconscious and slumped heavily against the back corner of her cage. A long cut divides her face from brow line to chin. Even in her sleep, she's cradling one of her arms in a way that suggests the shoulder has been dislocated and then reset.

It's the worst I've ever seen her, but not a single person has come in to check on her.

"Max," I whisper. She doesn't move. "Max."

In the cage next to hers, Fang doesn't even flinch at my voice. This is bad news. When they brought Max back to Nudge and I, she was at least awake long enough to tell us what had happened to her. When they brought Fang back, he was free of obvious injuries, but he was also completely unresponsive.

This is the longest I've ever seen him unconscious.

"Fang," I try a little louder. He doesn't stir.

That's all I have time for before the door slides open and a whitecoat starts to roll a transport cart into the room.

"Time for a little experiment, AE01," he whispers at Max's lifeless form.

When we were young, the whitecoats started doing individual experiments, but only on Max. The rest of us would join for group exercises, labwork, and routine tests (running on treadmills, flying in wind tunnels, things like that). Every time she came back, she looked more ragged than before. Sometimes her cheeks were red from exertion or anger. Sometimes her eyes were haunted. Sometimes her voice was hoarse from screaming.

Sometimes she was totally silent and unreachable. So silent and unreachable that not even Fang could get her to talk.

Eventually, they started taking Fang, too. The first time they came for him, Max screamed and bellowed and demanded they leave him, that they take her, that they keep him healthy, but science needed a male case study to counteract her female one, and so Fang became it.

The rest of us have been spared. Angel, the Gasman, and Nudge because they're so young, me because we think they want to keep one of us older kids "pure" without any failed experimentation, although we can't be sure.

Max is always the first to go for pretty much any type of experimentation, but with her in this condition, there's no doubt the whitecoat will go to Fang, who looks like he might never wake up.

Not if I can help it.

"Hey," I say, but my voice cracks pathetically. I steel myself and push on because if I think too much about this, I'll chicken out. "Take me."

The whitecoat stares at me. I don't think anyone told him that we can talk. I've never seen him before—he's one of the young ones. Maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. An intern, probably.

He stops wheeling the cart in front of Fang and stares at him. Then he stares at Max.

"Hey," I repeat, more firmly this time. "I said take me."

He blinks.

Is this guy a moron?

We look at each other for a while, me mostly because I can't figure out why he won't just willingly take the mutant that's willingly agreeing to experimentation, him because he can't seem to believe a bird kid is making words rather than cawing noises. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other nervously. Definitely an intern.

Finally, Moron clears his throat. "Um, I've been given explicit instructions to only take experiment AE01 or AE02, whichever puts up less of a fight."

I laugh. It feels good—I can't remember the last time something actually funny happened. Maybe when Max drank her water so fast after a group exercise that she choked and it came out her nose.

"If you think AE01 or AE02 won't fight you to the death then you've got another thing coming."

He swallows thickly. Why he's even talking to me, I have no idea, but he's already committed to it, so there's no going back now. "I've got restraints."

"Oh, well, now, restraints! They've never tried those before—"

He produces a syringe from his pocket. "And they gave me this!"

"Oh, let me guess. Acepromazine? Xylazine? Chrlorpromazine? Midazolam? Haloperi—"

"Shut up!" the whitecoat thunders. "Shut your mouth or we'll get the Erasers in here."

I sigh dramatically. "Sure you will. Big whoop. You think I'm not used to it by now?"

There's a faint buzzing somewhere in the room, and Moron presses his hand to what must be an earpiece. His eyes dart from Max to Fang and then finally to me.

He pushes the cart forward and locks the wheels in place.

"Okay, AE03," he says. "The lab gave me the okay. You're up."

Before I have time to react, there's a noise from the cage next to me. I turn to see Max slowly rising to consciousness. Her ash-blonde hair is bloody and askew, and her eyes are unfocused.

"No," she slurs. Despite the haze she's clearly in, her face gets the same look of indignation and rage that it always does when it comes to the whitecoats. It never makes a difference, but she does it anyway. Because she's our protector. Because she's the tough one.

She shoves herself away from the cage and cries out when she jars her shoulder. One of the cuts on her neck that has started to scab over rips open again and starts to bleed.

"No!" she yells as Moron steps closer to my cage. "What are you doing? Leave him alone! LEAVE HIM ALONE!"

To my left, Nudge is totally distraught. I've never heard her make the sounds she's making—she sounds like a dying animal, screeching and sobbing and coughing and wailing.

I'm doing this to her, but it's because I have to. Max, now wide awake and out for blood, is making it a million times worse.

"Max, shut up—"

"No!" she roars at me. "No! Absolutely not, Iggy! Take me," she pleads to the whitecoat. "Please, take me—you have me, you can take me!"

"AE03 has volunteered for this experiment," Moron says.

Max's eyes flit to me and she gives me the most irate glare I've ever seen. Her face is pale, and her lips are almost white with rage.

"AE03 doesn't know what the hell he's talking about," Max spits lethally. "AE03 did not volunteer for this experiment!"

"He did," Moron says. "And it's been approved, so I will be taking—"

"Me!" Max roars. She grits her teeth and launches herself to the front of her cage, slamming against the bars with a wince. "You will be taking me! I'm the first, I'm the one you want, you are not taking him!"

"I'm ready whenever you are," I say to Moron.

As he loads my cage onto the cart, Max screams hysterically and bangs against the bars of her own cage. Next to her, I see Fang, dark, silent, and stoic, finally start to arouse. He looks concussed, but his eyes immediately lock in on Max, who has only ever acted this way once before—when he was taken that first day.

A look of immense concern takes ahold of his features. He looks at Max, then looks at me, then looks back at Max. Then comprehension takes the place of the concern.

"Iggy," he says in his deep voice. It's raspy from disuse. His eyes are narrowed and his jaw is tight—he's mad at me for doing this to Max, for doing this to Nudge, for doing this to myself.

"I'll be okay," I say to them.

Not really because I will be, but because I have to be.

When I wake up, I am blind.

Four days have passed and the shock has worn off. I am devastated, but I know I can't wallow for long—we're here to survive, to try to escape, to endure, no matter what the problem.

I'm trying to adjust to my new, dark world. My cage is still close enough to Max's that I can reach through it and touch her hands, and I do it more often than I'd like to admit. Without the context of sight, it's so difficult to understand smells, sounds; feelings, even. She is something solid, something warm, something strong—every day, I try to absorb some of it from her.

It sounds strange, but I miss looking at her. Max is like my big sister, like everyone's big sister. The Gasman and Angel are kept separately from us because they're so little, but when they're around, she's like their mother. Looking at Max, watching her braid her long, blonde hair so intricately when she gets stressed, seeing her bright brown eyes light up when she sees the kids, and, every so often, catching a glimpse of her dimples when she smiles, really smiles—it used to make me feel like I had a home, like I had a family, like I had someone who loved me.

Ever since they took my sight, I think she's been trying to find other ways to do that.

Today, they have taken Fang and Nudge for testing. Max is still pretty beaten up from her previous experiment, she tells me, so they're "cutting her a break."

A break. Hilarious.

Because Max can never just relax, she's "training me," she says. She forces me to close my eyes, to inhale deeply, to listen closely, to try to identify my surroundings. She snaps so I can test the resonance around me. She tells me to listen to her breathing so I can identify her by that alone. We develop a series of whistle signals so we can communicate without words if needed. Finally, she shoves the sleeve of her filthy jumpsuit at me.

"Ew! God, Max, you smell like—"

She cuts me off before I can say blood, that she smells like blood.

"Well, I don't exactly have access to a washing machine, Iggy," she snaps. "Suck it up. Smell past the grime and the sweat. Smell me."

I groan. It's been a long day of this. All I want to do is curl up into a ball in the corner of my cage, feel sorry for myself, and fall asleep for as long as possible. "Max, come on, I'm—"

"I am not letting you wallow, Iggy," she says sharply. "If you think for one second that I'm letting you wallow, you have another thing coming."

For some reason, this makes me snap. I see red instead of the blackness that has taken over.

"Come on, Max! I'm tired, and I'm miserable, and I'm never going to see again! What don't you understand about that? Nothing's going to make it better—nothing's going to ever be the same! I can't fight, I can't walk, I can't do anything!"

My voice echoes off the walls of the room I know so well but will never lay eyes on again. Max's breathing is heavy next to me, and I know she is fighting off tears. I have never seen her cry (and now will never see her cry), but this is as close as she gets.

"Leave me alone!" I yell anyway. "Just leave me alone!"

I'm so angry that I could punch something. I could punch Max if I could reach her. I feel myself tearing up and it makes me even angrier—I can't see, but I can still cry. What a load of shit. If they were going to blind me, the least they could've done was destroy my tear ducts, too.

"You can fight," Max says gently. Her voice is shaky and delicate. "You can walk. You can do things. You're Iggy. If they wanted to break somebody by blinding them, they picked the wrong guy."

All at once, I am completely defeated, totally spent, and absolutely over this conversation. Max will say anything to make me feel better, of that I'm entirely sure. She has no clue what I can and can't do, because she can see.

I think of my future—of whatever it might be. Will it all be spent behind these cage bars, running on a treadmill, and flying in an enclosed space somewhere hidden deep in the hills of California? Or will we break free someday? If we do, how will I possibly navigate a world as far and wide as ours without my eyes?

"What…" My voice cracks, so I clear my throat and try again. "What do they look like?"

Her silence indicates to me that she's trying to pretend like she doesn't know what I'm talking about, but Max, Fang and I have spent almost every waking minute together since I was born—I know them like the back of my hand.

"My eyes, Max," I clarify with a bit of frustration.

Another silence, thick and sad, settles over the room. I slowly count backward from ten, trying to keep my cool, trying to keep from crying, trying to keep from throwing myself at the bars of my cage and wailing on them until I break all my fingers and—

"They're still blue," Max says finally. Her voice is still thick with unshed tears. "Like the sky."

"But…?"

There's another moment of silence. Then she reaches through the bars of my cage to take my hand. We are close enough that she can pull almost my entire forearm through into her own enclosure. Her hand, small, calloused, and powerful, is impossibly gentle. Then she's placing my hands on her cheeks and there's a strange moisture that almost feels like raindrops.

They're tears. Max is crying.

"They're… hollow," she says so quietly that I can barely hear her, even with our superhearing. "Empty."

Hollow. Empty. She sounds like she wants to say more, but she doesn't.

We're quiet for a long time.

"I'm sorry, Iggy," she says. Her voice is softer than I ever remember it being and thick with regret. Max is a lot of things, but she isn't stupid: she knows that this could've been her, that this would've been her if I hadn't demanded that they take me instead.

"I didn't protect you." Her voice breaks and she fights back a sob. The sound cuts through me like glass. "I should've done something, I should've…"

She can't finish the sentence.

I feel tears well up in my own eyes, but I'm not sure if there's anything left for me to cry.

Without thinking, I lift my hand from Max's face. She's still desperately clutching it, but I don't want her to let go, so I hold on for dear life as I pull it with me back into my cage. Then I press it to my own face, reveling in the comfort she brings me, the comfort that I know she brings all of us.

A sob bursts out of me. And then another one. And then another one. Max's breathing hitches and she must move closer in her cage because half of her forearm is against mine and she's trembling and I'm shaking and crying so badly that I can barely breathe.

Usually, I try to keep things as lighthearted as possible. I try to be a source of hope for Nudge. I try to support Max and Fang. But nothing about this is positive. So for a moment, I am as black as the abyss that has taken over my world, I am as inhuman as they treat us. I am as hollow as my eyes have become.

I am blind.

"I'm so sorry," Max says again after a while, even more quietly than before. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

"It's okay," I say back.

Not really because it is, but because it has to be.

A/N: Well, this basically wrote itself. To everyone who loves My Iggy—this is clearly a bit different than the goof I usually write him as, but it's in line with the serious/emotional side that I give him. The rationale here for the absence of goofiness is that he's been imprisoned for the entirety of his life and hasn't had a chance to have actual fun yet. They've also just blinded him, so there's no way he's going to be a sarcastic, witty source of comic relief.

I can't remember if we're ever told what age they blind him at, but I decided on nine, mostly because I wanted to be able to (reasonably) make him swear. I'm pretty sure I said my first swear word at age nine, and I'd imagine these kids, who only overheard grown adult scientists and mean Erasers talk and never had anyone to scold them, would've picked up a colorful (albeit quite intelligent) vocabulary. Obviously this narrative was a bit advanced for a young, uneducated kid, but I don't really care.

I've also never written a piece in the present tense, so there may be errors here. I apologize.

Hope you like. xo