Who knows how long it's been since they last took me from this little box? I certainly had no idea; I lacked the concept of passing time. I only got a sense of the eternal, onmarching seconds when they took me to be tested. Which had been less and less, these days.

Maybe it was because of that time that I had used my ability to half-knowingly inflict torture upon one of the men in the long white coats. It was a new ability, one only recently discovered despite my long 14 or so years in this institution, and I didn't think it could possible be so powerful. All I had wanted to do was show him how much pain they routinely put me in. My one look had him writing on the floor, clutching at his body. And so they shut me in here, as punishment, maybe. To teach me a lesson.

Now, I only saw light when they drew back the curtain. I could only look at them when they came for one of the sufferers adjacent to me, another of the mostly human creatures who never spoke going to be tested or even terminated and never seen again. They only looked at me, down their noses more often than not, in accidental glances, and occasionally superior sneers, musing about why I still had my life to call my own when there was no more use for me. Unbeknownst to them, I heard all their muttering, their whispering, with my ears, my ears that they debated operating on the way they had my eyes, so long ago. They spoke scathingly of others. Others who should be dead, but who had escaped their deaths and were running from – fighting against – fate. It made me want to scream, the curiosity, hurl the idea "What others!!!" into their brains, until their skulls burst into shards too small for them to staple, stitch, and fuse back together. But I never once did. I controlled myself, contented myself with thoughts of the others, imaginings and dreams of the others, in both wakefulness and sleep. I hoped, for their sakes, that they won against the fate that the white coats and the wolf men – 'Erasers' – so determinedly pressed on them. No one deserved that fate. Except for, apparently, this entire room of genetic mistakes. Which included me.

I knew I was to die soon. The memory was burned into my mind, as clear as anything. The one young man, his curly hair unkempt and his glasses askew, had inched fearfully toward me, holding a placard in one trembling hand. In a glance I had known what it was: my extermination date. I had seen placards like this many times before, in others' hands, placed atop another cage. Always, always, the cage's inhabitant was taken away a short time later, never to return. Instead, the empty cage was filled with some new young one, grotesquely deformed, sometimes barely breathing. And so I knew when I read the date that I was slated to die, without any idea of how much empty time I had left.

I remembered, briefly but painfully, the time it had happened to another of the children, who had been similar in genetic makeup to me. A girl, supposedly a few years younger than me, had shared a dog crate adjacent to mine. From what I had seen of her identity card, her name was Starling. The white coats had often tested us together. She had been the closest thing I had to a friend all my pitiful life. Then they had set a placard atop her crate, and I woke a while later to find her gone.

There were more like me in this room, one named Sparrow and another named Smoke. But Smoke was far too young to comprehend anything, and Sparrow's fragile mind hand begun to crack long ago.

So. Yesh. I'm kinda a lazy ass when it comes down to fanfics. But I don't mind. Um, nothing's really happened yet, but it sorta begins more in the next chapter. This is almost like a prologue. Being my first published thingy, reviews are appreciated. Thanks everyone!