"Figures," she said, getting angrier each second, rising and pacing the cell. Alec stayed seated, tight-lipped. "So we're in an iron cage. We're gonna die in here and you're telling me this whole thing was something you dreamed up in your twisted, cruel mind. You built it." It almost sounded like a question, but he knew what she was after.
"Don't think the irony's lost on me." He didn't look at her.
"Why did you do it?"
"Not like I had a choice, Max. I was maybe twelve years old. I had mission parameters, things I had to include in my design: light and air control, accessibility. I was to create a place for prisoners of war – a place that would break them. A place so void of everything a prisoner might want that they would say or do anything at the thought of freedom."
"Oh, so you built their own personal Manticore." Max folded her arms. She paused, eyes drifting toward the ceiling in some wasted attempt. "What does that mean? What's going to happen? Lay it out for me, soldier." Her voice was so heavy with emphasis that he couldn't help think she would find a way to draw blood using only her words.
Alec shifted, looking up into her angry eyes. Hateful, even. She may as well have said I hate your guts. "As you can see, there is no natural light. Kinda like in casinos. Since we were both sedated, we have no timeframe for how long we've really been in here and as time goes on, we won't be able to tell what time of day it is. For most people, a couple of days in that type of environment will be disorienting and they will, on their own, end up sleep-deprived and dehydrated."
"Then how do you know it's been about a day?"
Alec gave a strange look before revealing, "Considering the amount of beer I drank at Crash, it would have taken only a few hours to work through my system."
Max nodded. "Okay, then what?"
"The lights will cut out, leaving us in the dark. For you and me that won't really be a problem though – enhanced vision. It was meant to disorient an ordinary, raise the paranoia factor."
The lights flickered again as if Alec mentioning them had jostled them toward the ultimate goal of dying out.
Max scoffed. She could hardly believe her ears. Her blood was pumping, sending bursts of angry fire up her body. It must have appeared in her eyes, because he swallowed hard before he continued.
"There will be a timed burst of bright lights mixed with heaving pounding sounds."
"How long will that last?"
"I don't know, it's random. I had engineered it to create a random sequence so that when asked, the guards could honestly disavow any knowledge of how much longer it would last."
"You released them from liability?" For some reason, Max found this particularly malicious, and her face contorted into one of surprising sympathy for the hypothetical prisoner. "You let them believe they weren't responsible for being a part of what Manticore was doing? How could you do that?" Max cut into him with her icy stare. Alec looked away.
"My design still offered the basic necessities, Max. It involved human contact – guards, people who dropped off water and food – just enough to survive. We're not gonna get that, Max. White left us in here. He left us in here to die. This was not intended to be a death-chamber."
Max finally sat down on her cot and looked to Alec. He sighed heavily. I never wanted this, he thought.
Finally, he continued. "Either during or shortly after the light and sound show, they'll start pumping in hot air, then cold air – again, at random. There's a chemical compound in it that absorbs into the blood and will short-cut the brain's normal functions."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning you might start to hallucinate, auditory and visual. I did not build extraneous sounds or images into the program, so anything else you see and hear besides me and whatever's in here, it'll all be in your mind."
The few lights flickered again, Alec and Max looked at one another, each memorizing the last look they'd see with full light before the lights died out. Max, for the first time since he'd known her, looked scared. Her deep, coffee colored eyes were big with surprise. No, not yet, they both thought independently. Alec's hazel eyes portrayed an apologetic stare. There was no way he could ever make up for what was about to happen. She would hold it against him forever. If we make it out of here, I'll be lucky if she ever talks to me again.
The bright white of the filament surged and died out like a slow supernova. They were in darkness now. Each transgenic inadvertently enhanced their vision, sharpening and focusing what they were seeing. Everything was duller than it had just been. The lightless room was barely in focus. They couldn't really see anything beyond shapes. If they got close enough, they would be able to see one another's facial expressions, but for now they were shapes and objects in a room.
"Did you at any point ever think that maybe you shouldn't have followed these orders?" Max judged.
Alec stood up and stormed toward her. He stood close to her and stared into Max's darkened eyes. "Did you think it was all tea and crumpets, and 'thank-you-have-a-good-day' and 'oh, don't worry about those 09ers, they're of no use to us now and we can just go on with our lives and training like they never jumped the fence'? Did you?"
Max looked away. She hadn't really thought about all that. She had thought only about her own life and how to survive outside. But why was what happened to everyone she left behind in '09 suddenly her responsibility? And hadn't she come back and freed them all? Except, did they want to be free? Did they even have the desire to know what the outside world was about?
She wished he wouldn't, because he had made his point, but he continued anyway. "No, Max, they sent us all to Psy-Ops, and left those of us who were twinned in there for six months, turning us inside out mentally, physically, you name it, they did it. They altered what they thought had been a perfect combination of DNA to effectively breed out the inkling, the need for freedom, the questions; they increased security around the fences, which no longer looked like the ones you and your siblings used to escape.
"For at least five years after your escape, they attempted to live-adjust people's DNA. Zack's twin was prodded, sliced, pulled, stabbed, shocked and experimented on until he died from the overload. Did you hear fragments of his screams out there in the real world, Max, while you were busy surviving, boiling your pots of water for baths, running around hiding from Lydecker? Did you hear their insides being ripped apart while you were delivering someone's package? Did you hear their minds being subverted and hear the electricity as they attempted to shock everyone out of the impulse while you were secretly meeting up with Logan for his top-secret Eyes Only missions? Did you smell the burning skin of those who didn't make it while you drank pre-pulse wine, candlelit during a brownout?"
He was really laying into her. He had held onto this so long he wasn't sure when it would stop and wasn't able to stop himself from continuing. He hated the look she had on her face, but it was dark and the words kept coming, as if they had taken on a mind of their own and felt that only in utter darkness would they be able to infuse her with the terror he had experienced.
"Our healing properties healed our scars, Max, but not our memories. Even Psy-Ops couldn't erase the things they did to all of us in the name of science, in the name of their playing God, in the name of what you and your brothers and your sisters left in your wake. You probably didn't even realize that they stopped the experiments of the twelve of you who escaped. Stopped, Max. They murdered the future embryos of your unit."
Alec paused, staring into her with a shrewd sharpness that cut into her like a barbed and poisoned quill, digging deeper and unable to be yanked out without damage. "But I was lucky, and more than that, I was smart."
Alec walked to the other side of the cell and sat on the mound of dirt. Max's eyes had started to tear up. She turned so he wouldn't see, even though she didn't think he could from that far away and in the black shadows. She didn't want him to see the pity she felt for all of those left behind, the empathy at knowing what it felt like to want to be free, even if it meant making an undeniably outlandish sacrifice by going out into the world without someone to support you – the drive to succeed on your own. She didn't want him to see that she didn't regret it. She didn't want him to see that his words had scraped against her heart. Worst of all, maybe she tried to turn away from herself, the person he thought she was. But she couldn't.
She gathered herself and made sure even the slightest chance of a wobbly voice would not come out as she said, "What's going to happen?"
Alec, watching the way her back moved irregular to the normal human breathing pattern, knew he had brought her to tears. He hadn't meant to. It was displaced – it wasn't her fault. Hell, without her, no one would be out here. But he couldn't bring himself to apologize. And now she was asking about what kind of fucked up mind would make this torture chamber, and what type of fucked up things were about to happen. He sighed, realizing exactly how she must feel about him. To her, he was heartless and merciless; he was a machine, a soldier, a killer. Because to her, if you handed the gangster the gun, you were just as culpable. To her, he didn't have the capacity to love. It hurt.
"Without water and food and the right air, we'll die. Because we're us, we'll last longer than a human, but not that much longer."
He hated admitting this whole thing, that there was a darkness to him she hadn't known. He had never meant to show her or let on that he was different before her escape. He hadn't known any better.
He heard a couple of sobs and closed his eyes in shame.
