The room was dark, the only illumination coming from the flashing red lights embedded in the walls. Alarms scraped and grated at their ears, and the lost children huddled closer together, hands squeezing tight.
There were five of them in the room. One was missing.
The lights were bright and the alarms were piercingly loud, and the children were terrified. One of them was crying softly, and another wrapped her arms around his shoulders and buried her face in his chest.
The boy nearest the door noticed first. There was a crack of darkness running the length of the door, between the door and the frame. He reached out a hand, tentative and cautious, and touched it.
It swung silently open, perfectly balanced on its hinges.
The children exchanged startled glances. The door was open. If she had had the words to do so, the girl could have explained that the electricity that powered the locks had failed, due to a catastrophe deeper in the facility. She could not have explained how she knew this, either, but she did.
The other children did not know this, and they didn't need to. All they knew was this:
The door was open, the defenses down.
They could leave. It might be their only chance to escape. But...
They were missing someone.
They couldn't leave without her.
They all understood this with the silent, natural telepathy granted to a group of friends who had spent all their lives together, and also with the decidedly unnatural telepathy granted by highly illegal and secretive experimentation.
The lights in the hallway were flickering madly as they filed silently out of the room, bare feet light on the cold floor. They kept close together, moving in a tight knot. The boy who had opened the door took the lead.
There was a long smear of blood down the wall opposite them. The boy in front averted his eyes quickly. He knew that it had to have come from one of their tormentors, one of the guards who dragged them down the long hallways, but he still didn't like to see it. He tried to shepherd the others away quicker.
Every instinct screamed against it, but he lead them deeper into the innards of the building, down hallways and flights of stairs. The facility, usually so busy, was deserted, and the ragged breathing of the frightened children was the only sound audible besides the blaring of the alarms.
Still they pressed on, towards the room they all dreaded, the room where they knew their missing sister to be. The testing room.
There was a body. The boy leading the way ground to a halt, throwing one arm out to signal a stop. The body was one the boy recognized; one of the women who had come in the day before as 'observers.' The children had disliked them immediately. They had had greedy eyes and had poked and prodded at the children as though they were livestock to be bought and sold.
Those eyes weren't greedy and hungry anymore, though. They were just blank, holding a memory of awful terror. The boy couldn't bring himself to hate her anymore. He bent down and gently closed her eyelids. His fingers came away bloody.
At an unspoken signal, they moved on.
The lights were strobing now, flashing wildly as though in warning. They passed more bodies, more pools of blood congealing on the floor. They tried to step around them at first, but soon there were simply too many too avoid, and they were forced to walk through. Their bare feet left bloody footprints behind them on the rare patches of clean floor.
The air was getting colder. It happened gradually, so that the children didn't notice at first, but as they approached the testing rooms, the chill became biting. The boy in front could see his breath.
He hated the cold.
He cupped his hands in front of his chest and concentrated, screwing his eyes shut. After a tense moment, a small flame bloomed to life in his hands, lighting his face with a warm red glow and dispelling the cold, driving it back momentarily.
He held the fire in one hand and raised the other to wipe his nose, painting a bloody stripe across the back of it.
The air was full of floating somethings, tiny white motes that landed on the children's skin. Had they ever been outdoors, they would have compared them to snow.
The elevator was painted with blood, splattered across the floor, the walls, the ceiling. On the ceiling was something else as well- an unidentifiable wet patch that seemed to throb and pulse. The children watched it apprehensively for a moment, but the pull of their sister was stronger, and they boarded the elevator.
The buttons were dark, but as the red-haired girl reached out to press them, they flickered to life. She pushed the down arrow, and down they went.
It was there that they found their sister, struggling down the hall, supporting herself with one hand on the wall. She was soaked, and her face was covered with blood, spilling from her nostrils and dripping from her chin onto the floor. The expression in her eyes was one of pure relief when she saw them. As if she'd thought she'd had to escape on her own. As if she'd thought they'd ever leave her.
The boy took her hand and helped her to stand, supporting her with one arm, letting the sputtering flame in his hand warm her wet and shaking from.
It's okay. We're here now. We're here.
The strongest of the boys picked her up, and her head drooped onto his shoulder as she finally succumbed to bone-deep exhaustion.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, half-conscious. "I didn't mean to."
He squeezed her hand, comforting and understanding and caring.
They were together again, all six of them, the way it was meant to be, the way it always had been.
They were together, and all the doors were open.
The way back up was easier, because it no longer felt like they were falling deeper and deeper into a hole with something cruel and awful waiting at the bottom. Instead, they were ascending, finally leaving the place where they had been imprisoned for so long. Every step they took away from the testing rooms, the air grew warmer, and the weights on their chests fell away.
One of the surviving guards tried to stop them at the door, but they were too close to the freedom they had longed for, too high on the idea of it, to be denied now. The red haired girl flung her hand out on impulse and a jagged bolt of lighting flashed across the room, sending the guard flying like a rag doll. He hit the window behind him so hard a spiderweb of cracks ran across it.
The girl swayed on her feet, eyes drooping, blood running from both nostrils. The dark-skinned boy was at her side in an instant and caught her before she could collapse, supporting her over his shoulders.
When they stepped outside, it was raining, great buckets pouring down from the sky, washing the blood from their skin, letting them feel clean and alive for the first time in far too long. Before, their experiences with water were harsh, cold showers and the claustrophobic darkness of the bathtub. This was different. It was so, so different. It was gentle, and cool, and cleansing.
It felt like freedom on their skin.