Two hours later, after paperwork was signed, instructions given to one of the guards, and a badge handed to him, Treville was making his way to lab four, where a six year old was sitting on a cold bench swinging his feet to a common rhythm. The boy watched him intently as he sat down next to him. Ninon, if he remembered correctly, was nowhere in sight.
"Hey." Treville greeted, blinking a moment when that buzz came back to him—the one he'd felt before Aramis had used him as a tree in the hallway.
The boy looked away, seemingly determined to ignore him. Sighing, he leaned his head against the wall, frowning at the various equipment in the room. Surely all of this wasn't needed? There were machinery he'd never seen before and none of it looked fun. It was no wonder Aramis had such an aversion to this place.
"Do you even know what half of this does?"
The boy shrugged, breaking his rhythm for a different one.
"Is Ninon here?"
Another shrug. He must still be sore over his promise made earlier. Although to be fair, the boy agreed not because of him. Treville could care less if the boy made his appointments on time.
"She's supposed to be testing me too, you know." Treville heaved an over the top sigh. "They heard I let you off and now I'm going to get poked too."
"Not my fault." Aramis answered simply.
"No, I suppose it isn't." Treville let a silence overcome them for a while. Aramis was either the chatty type or the quiet type and it would be much easier to figure him out after he knew which.
"Why are they testing you?"
Chatty it was.
"They think I'm special too. I hate to disappoint them, but I don't think I am."
Aramis was quiet for a moment. "Frederick didn't think he was special either, but he started talking funny."
"Frederick… that your friend?"
"Was." Aramis shrugged. "Don't know now."
"He started talking funny? Why?"
"I let him. He was tugging at me and I let him—" Aramis snapped his mouth shut.
"Let him what?"
Aramis shook his head. "Mom says I shouldn't talk about it. It's gonna get us in trouble and we're already in big trouble."
"Why are you in trouble?"
Aramis stopped swinging his feet. "I don't want to talk about it."
"Alright."
Better to let it go and hope the door opens again later. After all, not many secrets are kept by a six year old. They sat for another fifteen minutes in silence and Treville was beginning to think he may have misjudged Aramis as the chatty type. The glass door slid open—fashioned similarly to a science fiction movie he'd seen not too long ago. A beautiful woman walked in—long blonde hair swept back into a low ponytail, curled at the end in a couple of big ringlets down to her lower back—with a purple clipboard in hand.
Her nails, painted nude to create an illusion of longer fingers, tapped the back of the clipboard to a rhythm Treville was sure he'd heard somewhere, but failed to recognize it. A popular song, perhaps, on the radio. She smiled at the two of them warmly, bright red lips complimenting white, straight teeth.
"Alright Aramis, almost done now. I know your mom is waiting for you, so I'll try to make this quick, okay?"Aramis nodded back to her and she turned Treville, an eyebrow quirked upward in playful curiosity. "You, however, are going to be here a while. Treville, is it?"
"Yes."
Tucking in her lab coat as she sat down on a stool-type chair, she rolled quickly over to a computer. A minute of her quiet typing and Aramis squirming on the bench impatiently and then she was rolling a short distance back over to them, a couple of syringes in hand. She placed them on her lap, the white a stark contrast against the black of her pencil skirt. She held out one hand, the other picking out a specific syringe filled with fluid.
Whimpering in agitation, Aramis held out his arm, already littered with small band-aids.
Ninon chuckled a moment, shaking her head. "Sorry, Aramis, these aren't for you. I'm just waiting on the results of the scan and you're good to go. Treville, your arm please."
Aramis dropped his arm quickly, smirking up at Treville as if he'd just won the lottery. Treville sighed heavily, frowning as he rolled up the sleeve of his white button up. She took hold of his arm, pushing the needle into the meat of his forearm. He hissed at the pain, quietly glaring at the doctor who pulled it back and took another in hand. She depressed three more before she was finished.
"May I ask what, exactly, you just pushed into my blood stream?"
"You needed boosters for your immunizations." She answered smoothly. "We can't have any dangers to Aramis here, despite having been immunized himself for everything in the book."
"While I'm here, I need to talk to you about something."
She gathered the used syringes into her hands, mindful of the points with practiced ease. "What kind of something?"
With a swift push, she seemed to gracefully glide in her swivel stool across the linoleum floor of the lab, depositing the syringes into a bin, snapping a pair of gloves on quickly, grabbing yet another syringe, this one quite more intimidating than the others, and rolling back.
Glancing over to Aramis, content as can be next to him, Treville studied him a moment. "I've been experiencing a strange sensation. It's a… well I suppose a sort of… buzzing."
Aramis snapped at attention next to him. Ninon frowned, moving forward and placing cold latex covered hands against his throat, feeling for something, Treville assumed.
"A buzzing… like a ringing in your ears?"
"No. Not in my ears—in my head." Treville swallowed instinctually as she prodded and stroked the sensitive area, rubbing small circles here or there. "It's hard to describe."
"Sorry, but please do your best. In a program like this we can't have anything wrong. It could disrupt everyth—"
"Is he going to be the new one?" Aramis interrupted, back straight and eyes narrow, hands fisted in his shorts. "I don't want a new one."
Ninon paused, pulling away from Treville and swiveling slightly to face Aramis, reaching out and pulling his hands into her. "Okay, I wasn't supposed to say anything, but it's because you're my favorite that I'm going to let you in on a grown up secret."
Aramis nodded.
"This guy here, Treville, he's somebody we've been looking for. You know you've been seeing a lot of new people lately, right? Well, hopefully, he's the very last. I know you didn't like the other people, but this guy is okay, right?"
Aramis shook his head and Treville looked away awkwardly, trying to piece together what was being said.
"Aw, come on, now. Director Limon told me you prefer him over Herman."
"Herman is mean. He hates me."
"Well to be fair, you weren't very nice to Herman either." Ninon gave a small smile. "I'm going to poke him just as much as I poke you, how about that? Director Limon even invited your mom to come see you tonight because he thinks if you can become friends with Treville, maybe we can figure out how you made your friend talk funny. And do you know what happens if we can do that?"
"I can go home?" Aramis asked hopefully, voice small.
"Maybe. But maybe if you can't, your mom can live here with you. That would be really nice, wouldn't it?"
"I miss her." Aramis admitted quietly.
Ninon's face scrunched, pained and remorseful. "I know. That's why we are working so hard."
"How did you know," Treville asked slowly, "that I was going to be the "new one"?"
Aramis looked at him and blinked. "The buzzing. Every new one gets the buzzing."
Ninon looked at the both of them. "You never told me about that, Aramis."
Aramis shrugged. "It's only for a second. Sometimes the new ones don't say it but I can tell they feel it. They always start to pull after."
"Pull," Treville repeated, "you said that before too."
Ninon's thin eyebrows furrowed. "What kind of pull, Aramis?"
Aramis shrugged again, growing shy. "I'm not supposed to say. Mom said I shouldn't talk about it."
"But you remember that your mom brought you here so you'd be safe, right? We need to know so we can figure this out." Ninon pushed back, grabbing her clipboard before swiveling back forward. She pulled off her gloves with soft snaps and tossed them to the floor to better grip her pen. After a moment of scribbling, she nodded back to Aramis. "Can you please tell me about the pulling?"
Aramis was hesitant, tense in every muscle of his little six year old body. "I don't want mom to be mad."
"We'll tell her we made you, okay? I'll tell her right away. She knows we're here to help keep both of you safe and I really want her to be able to live with you again, okay? I promise I'm going to do everything I can to make that happen."
Looking down at his small fists curled back into the fabric of his shorts, Aramis nodded. "It's like a pull on my insides. Frederick did it the first time."
Patiently, the two of them waited for him to go on.
"I thought I was sick because it felt the buzzing, but the nurse said I wasn't. And then I felt it again and Frederick was looking funny. He was looking at me and I didn't like it so I told him to stop. He stopped and so we played tag but it happened again and Frederick asked me why I was pushing him. But I was far away. That's when he started talking funny."
Aramis's fists tightened, fingers turning pale under the pressure. Treville shifted uncomfortably next to him, unsure if he was supposed to offer any sort of comfort. He didn't have much experience with children and it wasn't even his kid. He didn't know this kid hardly at all but it was as if the kid was telling some deep, dark secret.
"It was funny, at first. But then I started to feel sick and the pulling was happening and I didn't like it so I prayed for it to stop. That's when it happened."
"What happened?" Ninon prompted quietly, near a whisper.
"I didn't mean to hurt him and it hurt me too." Aramis explained desperately, exactly how a child his age would before admitting to a naughty deed and awaiting to be punished. "But there was a string coming out of me and it was scary so I cut it with my fingers."
"A string?" Ninon scribbled frantically. "What was it made out of?"
"Light." Aramis answered sullenly. "So it was easy to cut it with my hands. I didn't know it was going to hurt."
"A string of light." Treville shook his head. "What have I gotten myself into?"
"It's true!" Aramis huffed, standing up to face him, expression rapidly changing from timid to anger. "You're the stupid new one who hasn't pulled yet! You can't see it if you don't pull!"
"Pull? What am I supposed to pull? What does that even mean?"
Aramis seemed to deflate. "I don't know. I don't know how you do it; I just know not to let you pull the string out."
"Aramis, what do you mean when you say he hasn't pulled yet?" Ninon asked, leaning in close to them.
With a shrug, he turned away from Treville. "They always pull at me. I don't like it and so I don't let them pull."
"Does it hurt? When they pull at you?"
The boy scrunched his face, almost confused at the question. "I don't like it."
"But does it hurt you?"
"No." Aramis bit out quietly, "It doesn't hurt but I don't want them pulling at me."
"What happens if you do let them pull at you?"
There was a heavy silence that overtook Lab Four for a moment before a loud beep send Aramis heading for what Treville deduced was a printer. Grabbing the many papers, he started for the glass door, which slid open with a quiet hiss. Ninon sighed, watching the boy leave without a word of protest. Treville studied the woman for a moment.
"What did any of that mean?"
The blonde doctor turned to him, glancing over her notes on that vibrant purple clipboard.
"To be honest, I'm not absolutely sure, but I think he just described in his own words the process for sourcing an Inheritor." Ninon heaved another sigh, pushing back in her swivel stool once more to the back of the lab. "I've got to let the director know he's on his way."
It was several moments of the doctor relaying information quietly into the phone before she swiveled back to him. To be honest, Treville was already tired of the damn stool. The rolling was really starting to grate on his nerves, and after having what seemed to be a nonsensical argument with the boy he'd been trying to befriend, his patience was beginning to run thin.
"Alright, let's get started. We've got far less tests than Aramis usually has, but nonetheless, it's quite a few. We'll start with blood and work our way up from there, alright?"
"How long is this going to take?"
"Longer than you want." She deadpanned.
"That kid's mom—why don't you ask her all of these questions?"
"She knows as much as the rest of us." She grabbed his arm, wrapping some sort of rubber around it before swiping him with alcohol.
"Perhaps a little more, but she's as normal as they come. You, however, are not so normal."
"Why are the two of them separated?" The agitation was bleeding into voice and he tried not to wince as the needle sank into his skin. He watched for a moment as his blood was being drawn before following up with his question. "Are you just using her as incentive to cooperate?"
"Far from it." Ninon answered sharply, withdrawing the needle. She seemed to realize she'd forgotten to put on gloves, swiveling back to grab another pair. "It's as much for her protection as his. In every Source we've come across, it was someone close to them who ends up draining them into nothing."
"You said she's normal."
"We have a formula for finding Inheritors genetically, but there are still some that bleed through. Not every Inheritor has a genetic marking. Trust me, we're doing all we can to reunite that boy with his mother. It's just not safe until we can determine how you tick. What makes an Inheritor? What makes a Source? Why can you do things and why can they allow you to do things? Where does this power come from? What side effects does it have on the user? On the provider?"
"I get your point." Treville turned his hands up in resignation. "Just run the tests. I have no energy for this tonight."
"You know," Ninon grabbed one of his hands, holding it for a moment until Treville met her eyes, "this is your life now. This isn't going away and it's too late to back out now. Whether it's with Aramis or another Source, you're just as much a part of this program as I am. Just remember that we all have a common goal, alright? We're trying to figure this out so little boys like Aramis aren't dead on a playground somewhere because a little Inheritor girl figures out she can make fireworks."
"Something tells me it's far more than just that."
