Her head hurt. She remembered the pain. The pain in her legs, chest, face. The grinding pain. She remembered nothing of the night before. Or the day before. What year is it? I can't remember. It was dark. Her eyes were closed. Her fingertips felt numb. The room was so cold. It smelled of fresh linens, everything crisp and clean. She opened her eyes. Still dark. There was no difference. She couldn't see a thing. She moved her head in a nodding motion, sat up. She remembered...a party? She went to a party after getting out of a car of some kind. Something else... no. That was it. Her memories took her to the door and nowhere else. Where was she lying? A bed in her room? A couch in a friend's house? She moved her legs off of whatever it was, let her bare feet touch the floor. It was cold, too. She shivered at its touch. She tried to stand, but her legs collapsed under her weight, and she fell back on what she assumed was a bed. She felt weak, light-headed. She put her feet back on the cushion, tried to warm them. And now she noticed her mouth was dry. Dehydration, maybe. Drugs can cause dehydration. Anesthetics? She checked her neck and arms for any needle marks, and sure enough, she found one. Immediately she came to the conclusion that she'd been drugged.

But, she didn't panic, as most girls would. Almost instinctively, she was calm. Level-headed. Whoever did this would probably want money in return for my life, she thought. Ransom. But to who? She didn't have any family. Or did she? Where are they now, when I'm locked in this dark room? Who are they? And then a sudden, terrifying realization kicked in. Who am I? She must have a name. She couldn't remember anything...

Lights flipped on. They were so bright they blinded her. Her headache was worse now. She winced and shielded her eyes. After a few seconds, her eyes adjusted to the light. She could see now. She loved that. Through her eyes, she saw a plain room. No paintings. Bland-looking stainless steel furniture, and not much of it at that. No distinguishable attributes. An architect would say the room looked like a white box with grid lines running throughout the walls and floors. And they wouldn't be wrong. She looked around, bewildered by this bizarre looking room. She saw a water fountain next to the desk in the corner. Only then did she realize how thirsty she was. Her feet touched the floor again, and she tried standing. Surprisingly, she gained a bit of a wobbly stance and used the bed for support. She was standing. But walking was another task entirely, and it may prove to be difficult.

She moved her right foot, almost fell on the floor, and she quickly moved it back. Was walking ever this hard? She moved her foot again and tried to compensate for the movement. Balance, again. Slowly, she moved her left foot and placed it beside the right. Standing again. Baby steps. She did this until she reached the fountain. She'd fallen on the way, but she got back up and hugged the wall so it would make things easier. She drank her fill and then drank some more. The water was warm. Ish. She washed her face. For some reason, she half expected there to be a mirror in front of the fountain. Like if she'd seen it before. There wasn't one, of course. She looked back to the bed. It seemed far away, now that she'd practically crawled over here. Where in the world was she? She could be in Mexico. Human trafficking was common there. She imagined a dark-skinned man come in the room, toyed with the idea of it.

She realized again how cold it was. The water on her face was no longer warm. The bed had somehow kept her cozy, despite the fact that she wasn't under any blankets. She looked around the room once more. There was a door to the left of the bed. How had she not noticed it before? It was so big. She examined it and took it as a sign from God to get the Hell out of there. She walked towards the door, but when she got there she noticed there was no doorknob. She looked to the sides of the door, and she saw a keypad. Great. A locked door with a coded password. She could definitely just walk out of this place. She stepped towards the keypad, played with it by entering random numbers, laughed at the futility of it. She was stuck here until her captor(s) said otherwise. She walked back to her bed, sat down. She looked around yet again. Something, in particular, caught her eye. There is a mirror in this room. She strode towards the mirror, stood in front of it. She saw her reflection. Blonde hair that fell to just below her neck, hazel blue eyes, a freckled face. An hourglass frame with a Caucasian skin tone. She was a pretty sight. She moved her raggy hair out of the way and revealed the needle mark on her neck. It was red and swollen. It looked recent. Her head still hurt. It felt like someone was pounding her skull with a hammer. She saw what she was wearing. A white colored jumpsuit? If she'd been kidnapped, why did they change what she was wearing? And to this of all things? She began to doubt her conclusion. Something else was going on here. And she felt it was something worse than mere ransom.

A high-pitched tone played loudly on the hidden speakers in the walls. It startled her, and she whipped her gaze around the room. There was no one else here. What made that sound? The tone played again. Louder this time. She covered her ears. It played once more, louder still. It began to sting her ears, and she winced until the tone ended. Her head hurt so badly she thought she'd faint. Then it stopped, but the pain persisted. She didn't move her hands from her ears until the throbbing in her cranium had subsided slightly, enough that every sound didn't make it worse.

"Welcome to your new home, Citizen."

It was an old, hoarse thing. Like a sound, you would hear from an old man on his deathbed. The voice echoed in the room.

"New home? What the hell are you talking about? Who are you?" She demanded coarsely. It hurt to speak. She realized that now. Her own voice was dry and scratchy, no better or no worse than the man who was speaking to her.

"My identity is none of your concern, Prospekt member 18."

Prospekt? Is that what this place is? She struggled to spell the word in her mind.

"Where am I?" asked the girl, but she didn't expect a direct answer.

"In the recent weeks, the government had announced that an underground bunker was being formed and six people were to be selected for test trials. This is where you are. Your amnesia is only temporary. A side-effect to the drugs you were given when you entered the bunker. In a period of six weeks, your memory should be restored."

But it hadn't. Her memory was as blank as it had been that day.

The months that followed pertained little. When she wasn't sleeping, she was mostly bored out of her mind. P18 had learned the name of the voice in the walls. 'The Warden', is what he demanded to be called. P18 felt it appropriate to give him a gender because, well, he had none. And a male seemed fitting. The Warden had told her, when she woke up in the bunker, that she was a test subject for God knew what. She didn't believe everything he told her, and rightfully so. There was one major event, one that terrified her every time it came, and it came every month. Cleaning Day. Yes indeed.

The day would start off normal. She would be sitting on her bed, counting the lines in the walls, keeping time, or doing whatever she did to keep herself occupied. Then the door to her room-excuse me, cell- would slide open. The first time she thought it was her way out. As her eyes met with the thing standing in the doorway, she knew immediately that she was wrong. She knew also that something very bad was going to happen very soon. It was tall, humanoid, pale. It vaguely reminded her of a corpse that had been badly starved before death. Its limbs were ridiculously oversized, and its bones bulged underneath the skin. Its hands, disgustingly rotted looking, were coarse, and even from where she was sitting she could see how cold they must have been. Its legs just below the knee had been replaced with some kind of metal rod, and there were to spherical objects where its feet should have been. But of course, it was standing on them, so they were its feet. All of these things, dreadful as they may seem, dimmed in comparison to the creature's face. Stricken with fear, she would slowly move her gaze toward its head, expecting to see large teeth and crimson eyes that pierced her soul. She stopped at its head. She tried to scream, but only a small groan escaped her lips. It had no eyes. No mouth, nor any ears. Nor a nose. Its face was just... blank. She took her gaze back down to its hands. It was holding a syringe. For me, she thought wearily, that syringe is for me. A little bit of a sedative, maybe? Or perhaps it's a neurotoxin that will trigger pain reactions and muscle spasms? I don't know. And she didn't. As if in response to this, the creature moved forward. But by then she had fainted.

When she came into consciousness, something she had not entirely wanted, reality began to form back into normality. The creature, whatever in God's name it had been, had gone. As the fear of that thing left her mind, she noticed she felt different. Her vision was blurred. She was dehydrated, again. She tried to move her legs and noticed how hard it was to move. Her limbs felt as if they created with each movement she made. Luckily, though, her head was just fine. When her vision cleared, she sat up on her bed. Her legs felt like jelly. So it was a sedative. She let her bare feet (they never gave her shoes. Maybe they didn't find much use for them since the floor was always clean) touch the floor, and it's cold surface sent chills that radiated throughout her body. She inhaled sharply, through her nose. The air smelled clean, just like it had when she woke up the first time. That morning she had desperately wanted a bath, and now she smelled like a newborn. She turned to the bed sheets, smelled them. Fresh linens. She did the same with her clothes. Clean. She looked towards the door with a faint hope of escape, but as her gaze met the closed door that hopes faded into nonexistence, as she knew it would. They came in and cleaned the place up, is that it? That syringe was supposed to knock me out, but I guess they didn't even have to use it, huh? She let herself laugh at that. She laughed so hard her stomach had begun to tickle itself, and tears rolled down her pale cheeks.

When she had finished, she lay back down on the bed, closed her eyes. She tried to remember what had happened after that creature came. She couldn't remember the creature, what it had looked like, how it approached her. But she knew it had been in the room. She knew, among many things she wished she did not know, that it had been so terrifying she had fainted. In a way, it was a mercy. She was silently grateful for the loss of memory. She thought, for a moment, that the loss of memory had kept her sane.

And with that thought, she drifted into the darkness of sleep. When she would awake from the alarm, she would find that it was the best sleep she had ever had. A dreamless sleep. The next day she got up when the alarm blared, washed her face, and drank from the fountain. She had decided, in her sleep, that she would not let herself think of that creature. If it came again, she would close her eyes, and let the sedative take her away. She thought it would be best.