"Hey, Black, are you going to eat that?"
Black stared vacantly at the semi-opaque pile of oat cereal in the small metal bowl. In the cold air of the yard, steam rolled off of what passed as her dinner, despite the fact that it was only marginally warm. If it went long enough without being eaten, it would harden into a solid, impenetrable mound.
She knew she ought to eat it, from a purely physiological standpoint. She hadn't eaten dinner the night before, nor breakfast that morning, and even before that she'd been eating only one or two mouthfuls for days. Her stomach cramped, and waves of nausea washed over her as the acids in her digestive tract roiled and splashed uselessly, searching for something, anything to break down into useful nutrients. She didn't care.
Under the table, where she had sat every morning and evening for the past week, her short, brittle, coal-black fingernails worked themselves into a familiar gap in one of the rivets. The stout bolts were supposed to be welded securely to the underside of the table, but whoever had manufactured the piece had been negligent in the labor, and roughly one in every twenty had been missed. Even then, the rivets were flush to the metal within fractions of a millimeter, forcing her to work at them every day with fingers that blistered and bled from the abuse.
With her free hand, Black pushed the bowl across the table to Jeremiah, who greedily wrapped his claws around it and lowered his head over the lukewarm gruel. His tongue, long and purple and inhumanly articulated, snaked out between his pale, scaly lips and began to scoop up the cereal into his maw. The inhibitor collar around his neck jangled to the bobbing of his head as he chewed and swallowed. When he had first arrived, the collar had fit snugly around the young mutant's neck. Now, he had become thin enough that it hung loose and heavy, a dark ring clearly visible in his reptilian flesh where it had been rubbed raw day and night before finally healing over in a necklace of inflamed scar tissue.
Black absently tugged on her own collar. She was small and skinny enough naturally that the slow course of her emaciation could not be so easily tracked, but she didn't need the collar to know the obvious; She was starving. In the privacy of her cell, when she stripped off her jumpsuit to sleep at night, she could count the ribs poking out from her tar-colored torso. Her breasts, only just beginning to form on her pubescent body when she had first arrived, had disappeared entirely as her metabolism consumed the fat deposits in her body, leaving her looking more like a pre-teen boy than ever before.
The bolt in the underside of the table let out a infinitesimal squeak as her prying finally loosened it. Her eyes widened for half an instant as her heightened state of anxiety allowed her to believe that the whisper of a sound had been loud enough for everyone in the yard to hear, but of course it had not. Invigorated by her progress, she redoubled her efforts, pushing her broken thumbnail under the lip of the rivet and working it until it began to twist freely between her fingers. She could feel the tips of her digits begin to bleed, but she did not show pain on her face, nor did she worry about hiding the small wounds from the guards; Her black blood didn't show up on her similarly-hued skin.
Jeremiah finished eating her ration and pushed the bowl back towards her.
"Thanks," he smiled, his thin, purple tongue flicking out between his lips. Without another word, he stood up from the steel bench and walked away, pulling up the collar of his orange coveralls to shield himself from the bite of cold in the air, though she knew as well as he did that it wouldn't help. The standard issue prison-style clothing was next to useless at warding off a chill.
"Prick," Black muttered. Her mastery of english was not complete, but she had learned more than her share of curses since coming to the internment camp. The boy was still in denial, thinking that if he could beg and pilfer and make nice and finish other people's meals, that there was some chance he might escape with his health at least partially intact. Nobody escaped.
Judging by their interaction, and the way Black let him take her food, an outsider might guess that she and the reptilian boy were friends. They would be wrong. She had taken a dislike to the mutant almost immediately. He had the skulk and swagger of an opportunist, and while she was certain she was not the only one who saw it, she had a particular distaste for his ilk. He was two-faced and sly, and while she could sympathize with his desire to be seen under favorable light by the larger inmates and the guards alike, she could not abide by it. He would throw her or anyone else under a bus the first chance he got if it meant a pat on the head from the interment camp's administrators.
No, Jeremiah was not her friend. She had no friends in the yard, or the majority of the camp if she did not count Behemoth. Normally, she would not have even allowed Jeremiah to linger in her presence, but the pitiful meal sitting in front of her had been too tempting, and she needed to rid herself of it. Simply throwing it out or refusing it from the food cart was not an option. Wasting rations was an offense that the guards rarely tolerated, usually expressing their consternation with their long, flexible metal canes that were part whip, and part club. Much as her body screamed at her in protest, she would not eat.
With a final squeak of metal against metal, the rivet popped free of its housing and fell into her palm under the table. Despite her hand being mostly out of sight, she pressed the small chunk of steel behind her thumb, effectively hiding it from a casual glance. She would not have needed to worry if she had the full use of her mutant powers, which would have allowed her to sap the color out of the piece of hardware until it was so black that it blended with her skin, but the inhibitor collar made that impossible.
Another hot, curdling wave of nausea crept into her stomach, crawled up her throat, and met her tongue in the form of a watery, anemic bile that she had to force back down with all of the effort that she could muster. Standing from the table, she could feel her joints, sharp and bony, the muscles thin and stringy, shaking from even that small task. She moved slowly, deliberately, wasting as little energy as possible.
A bell rang in the far corner of the yard, marking the end of meal time for her group. In near perfect unison, every pair of eyes, mutant or human, drifted towards the steel double doors as the metal bars that held them secure slid back into recesses in the wall.
Just in time.
Steeling herself, Black cupped the small rivet in her hand and, feinting a yawn, tossed it into her mouth. It had a harsh, sour, dirty taste that she had become accustomed to. Orienting the object carefully with her tongue, she tilted her head and let it fall to the back of her throat. The maneuver came to her with an ease of something practiced many times, which it was.
It was not so much a matter of trying to swallow. She had made that mistake in her first attempts. Instead, she concentrated on opening her esophagus as much as possible, overcoming her reflex action that would have forced her to gag, and letting the weight of the object work its way further and further down. Really, the hardest part was holding her breath long enough for the rivet to pass the point in her throat where her air passage was no longer blocked.
Finally, it was done, and she felt the chunk of metal plop into her stomach, the weight noticeable in her rail-thin body. For a moment, her digestive system was fooled by the object, mistaking it for food, and she felt her intestines churn, starting the futile process of trying to break down the piece of hardware, but before long her empty, hollow nausea returned.
The mutants in the yard began to move towards the gate, barely a whisper of life between any of them as beings as colorful and varied as one could possibly imagine proceeded with an identical dead-eyed shuffle, inhibitor collars jingling, the small indicator lights glowing. One man, whom Black had come to know simply as Marcus, stood at least three feet higher than all the others, with a face more closely resembling a hammerhead shark than a human. Even still, he could not have looked more pacified, or more defeated. The large mutant, who could have taken strides yards long, practically tiptoed at the same pace as those surrounding him, his eyes never leaving his feet. Black picked up her bowl and joined the group.
They began to coalesce into something resembling a queue as guards emerged from the open gate. A pair leveled heavy repulsor rifles at the crowd that hummed and crackled as the men charged the weapons. A third guard carried what looked like a large pistol, but was as far from a weapon as could be. He approached the mutant closest to him, an unassuming woman with a tangle of blonde, greasy hair knotted on top of her head, and leveled the hand-held device at her throat. A faint, green light pulsed from the muzzle of the pistol, capturing in its ray the woman's inhibitor collar. The device pinged gently, and the guard read the information it relayed to his personal heads up display. It also functioned as a scanner of sorts, and would beep loudly if any sizable, inorganic mass that was not the collar was detected. Hence Black's need to swallow the rivet.
"Name," the guard with the scanner said. It was not a request, but a demand.
The woman mumbled something so quiet that Black could not hear. It did not matter. None of their names mattered to anyone except the man with the device in his hand. Even then, he only used their names as a rather rudimentary checkpoint to be certain that no two mutants had discovered a way to trade collars. Black was very sure that such a thing had never happened, given the simplistic nature of the failsafe, but she imagined it was in place purely to let mutants know that they had thought of that too. Satisfied, the man next inspected to woman's bowl, motioned for her to deposit it in a bin near the gate, and waved the next mutant forward.
As the mutants pressed in, and bodies taller than her own moved forward, Black's view became obscured by a wall of orange, dirty jumpsuits that shifted back and forth slowly as though their owner's feet had been manacled together. Minutes passed, and she could make no accurate determination of how close she actually was to the end of the queue. Finally, the herd thinned in front of her and it was her turn.
At thirteen, Black was not the youngest of the mutants in the interment camp, but she was of a very small and special group of individuals that had been among the last on the planet to be born before every human and mutant on the planet who had the X-gene had been totally sterilized by the Terminus virus. Ninety percent of the time, this fact was not made much of, but during the checkpoints, when every mutant was made to step forward in the view of the others, a general hush fell over the crowd. Black knew what they were looking at: Living, breathing proof of the demise of mutantkind. In a world where mutant babies no longer existed, she was simultaneously revered and shunned, a constant reminder of the species' impending extinction. She would have been very surprised to find a single mutant on the planet younger than five years old.
"Name," the guard said, his instrument washing her face and neck in green light. Black felt her collar vibrate lightly in response and the identifying pistol chimed.
Perhaps it was because she had not eaten in over a day, and even before then, her diet had consisted mainly of unidentifiable piles of colorless slop, but for a moment, the question resonated dully inside of Black's skull, and, confoundingly, no corresponding answer presented itself.
What is my name?
She knew that 'Black' was the wrong answer. 'Black' was the name her fellow inmates had given her, after her nearly unbreakable silence had forced them to bestow their own moniker upon her. Even with the collar, her skin, eyes, hair, teeth, and mouth were all the same flat, colorless shade that appeared to the human eye as black. In reality, her flesh emitted no color wavelength at all, but she was certainly not going to take the time to explain that to anyone here.
"Name," the guard said again, with an urgent anger in his voice. With his free hand, he loosened the cane that hung at his hip.
Black bit her lip as she tried hard to think, but the pertinent information would simply not be jarred loose. It was not the first time her memory had started to fizzle since she had begun her voluntary hunger strike, but forgetting her name, even temporarily? She knew that was bad. She had known it at breakfast, but that seemed such an impossibly long time ago.
The answer came suddenly, and in a form Black had not expected. It was a memory. A horrible memory. Perhaps the worst that Black had acquired thus far in her short life.
The space beneath her small bed, unlike many children her age, had been Black's refuge. It was the place where the shadows were the most dense and unyielding in her small bedroom. When she curled her skinny frame into the tiny gap, her black skin sucked in what little remaining light there was, rendering the immediate area impossibly cloaked in a thick, unnatural darkness. Whenever she'd had a nightmare, under the bed was the first place her mother had looked, reaching in until Black grasped her mother's smooth, pale hand with her small, black digits.
That night though, what had driven her from beneath her covers was a nightmare of an entirely different variety.
Despite her youth, Black had possessed a keen understanding of the world's hostile attitude towards mutants, mostly due to her parents. They had been immigrants from Russia, and a sharp disdain for overwrought governmental authority had been passed down to them, distilled through the retelling of their relatives, from the days of the Iron Curtain and the former brutal regime of the Soviet Union. When their daughter's white skin and blonde hair had begun to transform to the shade of freshly-lain blacktop before she was more than a decade old, they had jumped into the fray of human-mutant tension with a grim enthusiasm.
Things had already been bad when Black had been born, but before her mutation had manifested itself, the ongoing war on mutantkind was little more than background noise in a life that had mainly consisted of pre-school and children's books and her mother and father's kind smiles and warm, loving embraces. After, her family had become wrapped up in news broadcasts and unofficial reports circulating the news nets of mutants imprisoned in unknown locations, of robotic mutant-hunting machines, of terrorist attacks in all corners of the globe.
At first, Black's parents had defiantly insisted that she go about her young life as though nothing had changed. She attended public school to the tune of dirty looks and outright threats from other students, and occasionally the teachers themselves. It was not until a black cat, gutted and beheaded, had been left on their doorstep that Black's mother had decided to withdraw her and see about her education from home.
Black did not remember the first time her parents had left the house at night to participate in marches and protests organized to express the opinion of the tiny minority of the public that were still sympathetic to the pro-mutant cause, but she knew now that it had probably been the factor that had, in the end, led to their death and her own incarceration. Her parents had refused to register their daughter with the office of mutant affairs in accordance with the mutant registration act. It was now common knowledge that law enforcement agencies had used the protests and marches as a means of generating lists of potential mutants in hiding or humans who harbored mutants illegally. It had only been a matter of time before Black's parents had fallen under their attention.
Things would have been easier if Black had been gifted with a mutant power that could be discreet, could be easily hidden. When the agents from the office of mutant affairs had woken the household from sleep with loud, insistent rapping on their front door, her father might have simply allowed them inside. "No sir, no mutants here. Just my wife and I and our lovely normal human daughter." As it was, he had known that the moment they saw Black, she would be tagged and carted off 'for her own safety.'
In the official report, the agents would state that Black's father had answered the door with a pistol in hand, which he had attempted to use to drive the agents off. There were many things that Black could not recall about her earliest years with perfect clarity, but one thing she knew for certain was that her father did not own a pistol. The report would also state that Black's mother had attempted to barricade herself in Black's room. In truth, she had never even made it that far.
The gunshots had driven Black, terrified and sobbing, under her bed, into her private refuge where she had hidden from her darkest dreams. It was from that darkness that she could make out her mother's feet as they shakily made their way into her room. As soon as she had passed the threshold, she had collapsed to the floor, her eyes staring intently at the dark place under the small bed where she knew her daughter would be. Black had seen the red spot in her mother's stomach as it grew, soaking into the fabric of her nightgown, growing shiny as it saturated the material and began to pool on the floor.
Her mother gasped once, twice, and reached a blood-stained hand toward her. She could not speak, but as the life began to leave her eyes, her mouth contorted and formed one word.
"Vascha," Black muttered, shuddering slightly as the memory faded, "Vascha Aleksandrov."
The guard nodded and gazed slightly upward at numbers and figures that were being projected via computer onto the visor of his helmet.
"Your collar reads that you're still losing weight, Aleksandrov," he observed, "You eating?"
Black lifted her empty bowl for him to inspect.
"I'm increasing your caloric intake," he said, "But if I find out you've been trading your rations, I'll tan your black hide."
Black shrugged vaguely. She knew better than to take this as a sign of compassion. Technically, mutants were not allowed to die in internment camps. Officially, these camps, scattered through all fifty states, were rehabilitation and research centers, where the government promised the mutants were kept in seclusion merely for the safety of the public, and would be released as soon as a more permanent means of power inhibition was discovered. It was a lie of course, and mutants died on a regular basis, though it was true that guards did exercise restraint in the case of mutants who had powers deemed scientifically valuable. But the memory of prison camps filled with innocent Japanese immigrants and citizens was still too fresh in the mind of the American public to tolerate anything less, even if it was only the thinnest of veils over an ugly truth. When mutant corpses were carted away in black bags, it was due to 'old age' or 'accidental overdoses of prescription drugs' or 'escape attempts,' never random, brutal beatings, starvation, torture, or suicide.
Black tossed the bowl into the bin with the others and began to proceed through the corridor leading to the cell block, the cold of the concrete piercing her bare feet like hundreds of tiny knives.
"You guys should really do some maintenance on those tables. Things are falling apart around here."
Black recognized the voice, but did not turn around, and did not break stride. That would have attracted attention, which was exactly why Jeremiah had said it. How he knew about the bolt she had stolen, she could not guess. It must have been some mutant ability that was not affected by his collar. His hearing or sight, maybe, or some other aspect of his mutant physiology that could not be switched off by the device around his neck. All that mattered was that she did not react to his words.
She knew why he did it. It was the same reason he stalked about the yard, trying to swoop in on leftovers going uneaten. He was trying to curry favor with the guards because he believed there was still a chance he might leave the camp someday, while at the same time masking his accusation well enough that no inmate within earshot would ever suppose that Jeremiah was betraying a fellow mutant.
Black wanted to turn around, run back, and pummel the reptilian mutant within an inch of his life. Even in her mind's eye she could see his greedy, self-centered smirk. She had never liked him in the year or so since he had arrived, but he had become less subtle in his attempts to get on the good side of his captors. But she fought the rage down, allowing her nausea to return in its place. She did some calculations in her head. If the guards did indeed make a guess as to Jeremiah's hidden meaning within his words, they would still wait until the yard was totally empty to check the tables. Even then, it would take them at least a few minutes to discover the absent bolts, if they found them missing at all. Then they would review surveillance footage for the past several days, looking for any mutants that had occupied that specific seat at the table with anything resembling regularity. It was only then that they would come for her. She had at least a couple hours.
She hadn't thought to execute her plan so soon, but the half-inch bolt she carried in her stomach was the last she would need. It was time.
The main causeway of the cell block was not like the vids she had seen on her parents' television that had documented and showcased human prisons. It was not a boisterous, loud place, buzzing with life and chatter of swaggering, cocky inmates. The five stories of identical, repeating gray metal doors were dead quiet. Nothing moved, as though the structure was composed of stacked caskets rather than prison cells. Black made her way to a set of stairs and climbed to the second floor, turned right, and proceeded to her own cell. She ignored the half dozen guards she passed on her way, and they her. She barely stood higher than their belts, was as black and skinny as the iron railings that lined the catwalks, and warranted very little of their attention.
Most mutants in the camp considered it particularly unlucky to be housed on the second floor, and at first, Black had agreed. On the far end of the block, indeed, immediately adjacent to her own cell, were a dozen larger cells, with doors that were huge and heavy and rarely opened, if they opened at all. There were kept the powerhouses, the Omegas, or whatever word you chose for particularly strong, particularly dangerous mutants whose impressive abilities were only handicapped by inhibitor fields, not completely turned off. At all hours, these 'special' occupants of the camp could be heard screeching, clawing, and pounding on the walls of their metal boxes. More than once, Black had awoken to the sensation of concrete chips raining down from her ceiling as some Omega raged within his or her cell with such ferocity that the very foundation of the building shuddered. It was not known exactly what was done with the Omegas, but every so often, one of them would leave their cell and never come back. It was rumored that they were being cryogenically frozen and placed in some kind of storage.
Black's own door was directly beside one such Omega's cell, as it happened. And while for the first few months of her incarceration, she had fallen asleep to the sound of massive wails, grunts, and screams, now she was glad to see the heavy, unyielding door that contained the mutant who had become her only friend in this place. She considered it nothing short of genuine good fortune that she shared a wall with the giant man who terrified the guards. On the door itself, stenciled characters had been hastily applied to spell out a series of numbers and letters, forming 'Behemoth – 435222.'
Behemoth had a real name, of course. Or at least he used to. The fact was that most of the Omegas were only referred to by nicknames or their assigned numbers. It made them easier to remember in the event of an emergency. And easier to dehumanize in the eyes of the guards.
Black entered her own cell and heard the chime of the motion detector, which slid the door shut behind her and illuminated the small space that was her prison and her home. She felt sympathetic to mutants larger than herself if this room was the standard size throughout the camp. It was just wide enough that she could touch both walls with her palms resting flat against their surface, and when she lay on her barely cushioned metal slab that passed as a cot, there was not much space left between her feet and the door itself. A larger person would have to curl up their legs just to lay down.
Immediately, Black made her way to the small sink and toilet combination unit affixed to the floor at the far end of her cell and leaned her face over the metal basin. When she had first begun to plan this, she had trained herself to vomit on command by pressing her fingers down the back of her tongue until she retched. Now, she needed only tense of specific set of muscles in her throat and abdomen, and the contents of her stomach came rushing up. Of course, the only thing that her stomach contained was a small chunk of dull steel. It hurt coming up, but not nearly so bad, she thought, as the first one had been. She caught the bolt before it could clatter loudly against the sink, and turned on the tap, running it under the room-temperature water until the pale yellow slime from her stomach was washed down the drain.
Black wiped her mouth and went to her bed. Reaching into a small hole in the foam pad that served as a mattress, she produced two more bolts of identical size and shape. It was not a particularly clever or ingenious hiding spot, and even the most cursory of searches would reveal her secret stash, but cell tosses within the large camp were only done once every two weeks in rotation, and it had only been twelve days since she had begun collecting.
Next, she began producing items from her better, more permanent hiding places. Wrapped tightly in a coil near the very bottom of the leg of her cot, a length of thin, black wire, so fine it could barely be seen. From the underside of her toilet seat, a dozen sheets of white paper, cut into squares the size of a book of matches. Lastly, she pried a tiny, black nub of pencil graphite from where she had worked it painfully beneath the nail of her big toe.
A low chime sounded throughout the cell block, and the lights dimmed to a level reminiscent of dusk, if they had ever been allowed outside to see the day ending over the horizon. It was the signal that lights out would begin soon. As it was, Black had not seen a sunrise or a sunset since she had been brought to the camp. How long had it been? Three, maybe four years?
Black settled on the floor, her back leaning against the wall she shared with Behemoth, and pounded lightly on the concrete with her small fist four times. At once, she felt woozy from even that minimal effort, her hunger biting hard in her abdomen, above the navel. With her depleted strength, she was not sure that the giant of a mutant next door could hear, but a few moments later, she felt the low, measured beat of the man rapping his own wall with a fist the size of a watermelon.
In truth, Black had never seen Behemoth's face. She did not even know his real name. In her years spent as his neighbor in her cell, he had only been released half a dozen times, and then all she'd seen through the tiny window in her door was a massive, gray shadow that moved laboriously, each step causing her own floor to tremble under the weight. She only knew just how big his hands were because of a dent Behemoth had made in the metal floor of the walkway nearly two years ago when he'd lost his temper and crushed a guard beneath his fist. For that transgression, Behemoth had been tortured for days, but not killed. Omega mutants were considered the most valuable to human scientists, or so Black was told.
Initially, Behemoth had frightened her. When she had first beheld the massive door that sat next to her own on the day she'd first arrived, her heart had leapt into her throat. In those days, he took every opportunity to batter the interior of his cell, screaming at the top of his lungs like an animal possessed, throwing himself against the door whenever a guard walked by his tiny window. It had taken a year for Black to work up the courage to ask him to stop. It hadn't been easy acquiring the paper, the wire, or the pencil graphite, but when she had finally amassed her materials, she had sent her first message to the monster of a man.
If her arms had been thicker, and if her limbs did not blend so well with the darkness, even with the majority of her powers deactivated, it would not have worked. As it was, when the lights went out, she had attached a slip of paper to the wire, worked her small hand and forearm out of the slit in her door that passed as a window, and began to spin the short length of wire like a lasso between her fingers. In those days, it had taken the majority of the night before she finally managed to arc the slip of paper on the end of her line into Behemoth's window. When she'd finally done it, her heart stood still for what seemed like minutes as she waited for the Omega mutant to respond.
The note had read: "Hello. My name is Black. I'm the girl who lives next to you. I can't sleep when you're so loud." It was almost comically simplistic, but back then Black had been limited both by writing space and a slightly stunted English vocabulary. She had never intended to recruit him into the sort of plot she had hatched now. She had simply wanted to sleep through an entire night.
When she had finally felt a gentle tug on the wire, she drew it back into her cell and settled on her cot, looking at the small piece of paper that had become heavily creased in the hands of the huge mutant. She had not known what to expect in reply; Behemoth had no writing utensil of his own. The answer came soon enough though. A series of measured thumps resonated through her wall. They continued until Black finally pounded her own tiny fist against the concrete and then held her ear to it. What came next startled her.
"Sooorrrr-yyyyyyyy..." the voice was so deep that it was less of a sound and more of a rattling in her bones.
From that night on, Behemoth had been quiet as a mouse at night. Though they never saw each other, they had become friends over the years, or as close to friends as they could be without ever being able to have a decent conversation. There were nights when Black would spend hours writing notes in painfully small text on her tiny scraps of paper, and though she was certain that Behemoth read every one of them, his answers could only come in the form of thumps on her wall, or simple, one or two word answers. From what she could tell, with his mutant super-strength sapped by his collar, but his body still at massive, inhuman proportions, Behemoth's heart and lungs struggled to meet the needs of his musculature, making uttering more than a few words an exhaustive task.
Upon feeling his reply against her wall, Black gathered up her first scrap of paper and scrawled one word on its surface with the small chunk of graphite: Tonight.
She had gone over her plan with him at length several times, so there was no doubt that he would know what she was talking about, but there was still the question of whether or not he would cooperate. Thinking on this, Black added "Now or never" onto the note. It was true enough. If Behemoth didn't help her, her contraband would almost certainly be discovered in less than an hour or so, and she would likely be moved. And being situated next to Behemoth was the only thing that made her plot work.
There was another chime, and the lights died completely, leaving the entire block in darkness, which did not at all affect Black's ability to see; One of the perks of her mutation that endured even with the collar. She stood, attaching the slip of paper to the wire with deft hands, and pushed her arm out of the small window. She twirled it once, twice, and let the note sail in an arc, slipping into Behemoth's window on the first attempt.
He tugged once on the wire to let her know he'd read it, but just as quickly rapped on the concrete wall they shared. Black put her ear to the surface.
"Nnnnooooo..." came his massive, exhausted-sounding voice that seemed to creep through the wall and into her ear, "Nnnnooooo waaayyy ooouuut..."
Black sighed, but she had been prepared for this. Behemoth saw himself as something of a protector to her, despite never actually being allowed in her presence. He had never liked her plan, and told her as much, but she was not certain that he would not attempt the same thing if he could.
Black wrote another note. "Please," it said, "I don't want to die in this cell." It was not an exaggeration. Behemoth knew about her hunger strike, and knew her well enough to expect that she would continue it whether he helped or not. It was the basest form of manipulation, but the urgency of her plan sidestepped anything more subtle. She attached the note to the wire and fished it into his window.
There was no reply this time, and Black took that as an affirmative response. She set to her work. Making three loops in the wire, she securely fastened the three bolts to the length in a cluster at one end, pulling it as tight as she could. She held the knot of metal in front of her, and tentatively swung it back and forth on the wire. It looked like it would hold.
Pushing arm out of the metal slit in her door once again, she began to carefully unspool the wire with the bolts knotted at the end. She was especially careful not to let the small hunks of metal graze against the other side of her door as they swayed back and forth. The cell block was almost totally quiet tonight, and the slightest noise would be noticed.
Holding her breath, Black swung of wire.
After years of expertly fishing notes through Behemoth's window, she had expected to be able to get the bolts through in one try. The weight of the pieces of metal, it seemed, had been too radically different from slip of paper, and her eyes widened as her package missed its mark by a full four inches and clanged loudly against Behemoth's door.
Black felt her face flush, felt her whole body go rigid. If any guard had heard the noise, she would know it in less than ten seconds. Nevertheless, almost a full minute of silence had passed before she finally allowed herself to exhale. Calming her nerves, she began swinging the bundle of wire and bolts once again. This time, the package arced perfectly, slipping into Behemoth's window slit at the very apex of the swing, falling into his cell with little more than a whisper. Black sighed in a gush of relief.
Now all she had to do was wait.
When it came to the dense, padded, electromagnetically-reinforced steel walls of his cell, Behemoth's sapped strength could not persevere. Each Omega cell had been specifically designed with their inhabitants in mind, with properties and failsafes that could counteract seemingly any combination of mutant gifts, from telepaths to teleporters. With the small rivets that Black had given him, however, Behemoth had more than enough strength to bend and twist the metal in his hands.
There was a light tug on her end of the wire, and she slowly began pulling the line in, careful not to let the mass on the end scrape her door as she did.
Even knowing full well what would be on the other end of the line, she was still impressed. From the three small rivets, Behemoth had squeezed and pressed and shaped them into one singular piece of steel. In this case, a blade. It was not a proper knife, really. When she fit it into her fist, there was only about two inches of actual cutting surface that protruded between her thumb and forefinger, but that was okay. She had planned on the weapon being small. The edge itself was better than she could have hoped. She ran her finger along it to test its sharpness, and knew that if she pressed any harder, it would slice her flesh open. She was not at all familiar with bladed weapons, but it seemed like this one would serve her purposes.
There was a tremor in her wall, and Black pressed her ear to the concrete to listen. At first, what she heard did not make much sense. It was like the rhythmic pounding that Behemoth usually made with his fist, but this was steadier, quieter, and sounded vaguely distant. It took another minute for Black to understand what it was; The giant Omega mutant was weeping.
Black frowned and put her small palm against the wall. While they could not hold actual conversations, they had worked out a system for the rudimentary communication. One knock for 'yes,' two for 'no,' three for 'thank you,' four for hello and goodbye and so on. She balled her fist and beat the wall three times.
"Thanks, B," she whispered, knowing full well that her tiny voice would not carry through the wall the way his did.
In response, Behemoth rapped on his wall four times, apparently too exhausted from his sobbing to speak.
Black frowned and felt a lump in her throat that seemed to tighten painfully with every second. If she could have ended the big mutant's suffering as well, she would have. As it was, she was only marginally certain of her plan working, and she knew that Behemoth understood as well as anyone that, when offered an opportunity to escape from the camp, you took it.
Of course, she could have simply slit her wrists with her new blade, or continue starving herself until her heart gave out, but that was not enough. Infuriatingly, the camp's medical teams were truly gifted at saving the lives of attempted suicide victims, keeping from the more desperate inmates the freedom of a permanent oblivion. Of the dozens of suicides that had been attempted on her block alone, only one or two had been successful. If she wanted to check out of the interment camp for good, she would have to give them a reason to let her die. The most obvious way to do that was to take a few of them with her. The memory of her mother's face as she bled out onto the carpet of her bedroom wouldn't allow for anything less. She was not foolish enough to think that she could take on any of the guards, but their armor and their canes, but they were not her target.
Moving quickly now, Black cut the end of a sleeve from her orange jumpsuit and wrapped the sharp blade of the newly-fashioned shiv up in the material. Satisfied that it could not easily cut through the layers of cloth, she unzipped her coveralls and shoved the makeshift knife down the front of her white, prison-issue underwear. Zipping herself back up, she took a moment to shift back and forth, making sure that she did not feel the bite of metal anywhere in the skin of her thighs and groin.
She gathered up her sheets of paper, her wire, and the nub of graphite and put them in the toilet and flushed, watching them disappear in a swirl of water. Then she turned on the tap of her sink and, taking a deep breath, put her mouth completely over the spigot and began to drink.
With almost no food in the past week, and none at all in the past two days, her body was dangerously low on electrolytes and nutrients. She was not intimately familiar with the concept of water intoxication, but her father had warned her of it ever since she had been a child. In her youth, Black had tended to lose fluids quickly through sweating whenever she played sports with her peers, and she had made a habit of guzzling water to compensate. It was her father who had started insisting that she eat large amounts of oranges during her athletics, or consume sugary sports drinks, rather than relying solely on water for rehydration. Too much water and no enough electrolytes, he said, would lead to overhydration.
It was no easy task to rouse the medical teams that the internment camp employed after lights out. Cries for help or threats of suicide were almost always ignored, because the inhibitor collars had another purpose; In addition to suppressing mutant powers, they also acted as constant monitoring devices that kept track of each mutant's pulse and breathing patterns. Simply knocking herself out would not do the trick. She had to come as close to killing herself as she could, had to be a medically serious as possible, while still being easily resuscitated.
That was the plan, anyway.
After only two minutes of chugging the lukewarm water, her stomach began to ache, this time from being over-full rather than being painfully empty. Still, she pressed on, swallowing mouthful after mouthful of liquid until she could feel her stomach bulge beneath her ribs.
After five minutes, and a growing pain and soreness in her stomach and the surrounding muscles, a bolt of lightening seemed to crack her skull in half, and for a moment she began to vomit up what was probably close to a gallon of water. She contracted to muscles in her throat and abdomen and forced herself to hold in the liquid. Her head and neck and shoulders ached, her right hand began to shake, and her vision became hazy, as though a fog had fallen over her tiny cell. Black put her face under the faucet and continued to drink.
She knew she was playing a dangerous game. Despite its normally benign nature, water could be as harmful as any other solution when consumed in too high a dose in too short a time. If the medical teams could not read the signs and diagnose her quickly, there was a very real chance that she would slip into a coma and die. Not that it would be a bad thing, or even contrary to what she wanted. Black had had quite enough of the whole thing. Still, there was a place in her brain that still insisted on some attempt at vengeance, as small and insignificant a gesture as it might be. Someone, anyone, had to pay.
After seven minutes, she lost all control over her ability to swallow any more water. Sputtering, she fell to the floor on her back, her stomach bloated with more liquid than it could bear. Finally, all the muscular control in the world could not stop her body from doing what was required, and a veritable fountain of water came rocketing out of her throat, going up her nose, down her windpipe, in her eyes, choking her, blinding her. Every muscle ached, her legs spasmed and twitched erratically, and her entire body felt as though it had been dipped in battery acid.
Black was vaguely aware of an alarm somewhere as her consciousness began to fade, and it was only after several seconds that she realized that it was coming from the collar around her neck.
I hope they don't handcuff me to the gurney, she thought idly, I'll be screwed if they do.
The first thing Black did as her brain crawled its way back from the murky haze of unconsciousness was flex and move her wrists from side to side. She let out a sigh of relief to find them unshackled.
Well, that's one thing that's gone according to plan.
Around her she took in the sights, smells, and sounds of an infirmary. There was the steady beeping of what she could only assume was her own heartbeat, the heavy scent of disinfectants and chemical cleansing agents. What little she could see was obscured by the throbbing in her skull that clouded her vision.
A bright light passed back and forth over her dark, pupil-less eyes, and Black winced them closed. She tried to say something in protest, but found her mouth covered by an oxygen mask. She had an urge to bat the light away, but stopped herself. Her hands were unbound for now, but she was certain that the guards who were surely watching over her would take any excuse to rectify that, even if she was little more than a child.
Stay focused, she reminded herself, Make sure they didn't find the shiv.
"I think she's coming around," Black heard a woman's voice observe, what seemed like a very long distance away.
She tilted her head slightly and looked down at her prone form. She was still wearing her coveralls. They hand been unfastened to her waist and opened to expose her stomach and breastbone, but they had not been removed, which stood to reason that they had not searched her very thoroughly. Again, her young age and diminutive size was working to her advantage. The guards had probably nearly had a heart attack when word came that a mutant from the second floor of B-block was being admitted to the infirmary, only to breathe a sigh of relief when they learned that it was a small, non-Omega level mutant who was not yet old enough to call herself a woman.
She felt a hand on her cheek, disarmingly reassuring and kind, with fingers that gently stroked her flesh.
"It's okay, sweetie. Can you tell me your name? Do you know where you are?"
Black pushed her head to one side. She meant to shrug off the hand on her face, but her muscles did not respond quickly enough, and whoever's hand it was took her movements as encouragement, and only stroked her cheek all the more. It was infuriating.
"I have some questions for her if you're finished," another voice said, this one male, stern, and authoritative.
"I still have some tests to run," the first voice said, "If you'll just give us another half hour or so."
Black heard the second voice, a guard she had guessed, mutter something unintelligible. She tried to use the opportunity to move her hand, intending to subtly check if her weapon was still nestled between her thighs. Her body was still too weak and senseless for her to tell otherwise. Again, her movements were misinterpreted, and she felt a hand grip hers, giving it a reassuring squeeze.
"Are you awake, young lady? Can you hear me?"
Her vision was finally clearing enough that she could see more than shapeless blur in front of her, and the owner of the voice finally had a face, hovering just inches above Black's head. She was middle-aged, with shoulder-length, mousy brown hair gathered in a loose ponytail and the base of her neck. She had a face that was both kind and weathered, as though a career in caring for dangerous mutants had caused her to age more quickly than her genetics had originally dictated. Her identification that she wore pinned to her shirt names her as a Doctor Susan Bailey.
I'll never get to the shiv if she keeps fawning over me.
"Water," she said, perhaps with a touch more fragility than she actually felt.
Doctor Bailey frowned and touched the top of Black's head again. "I'm sorry dear, you managed to give yourself water poisoning. I can't give you any liquids for at least another couple of hours. We had to pump your stomach. You're lucky to be alive."
So much for that.
Maybe the answer was not getting her away, but getting her closer.
Black lifted her head and, with clearing vision, managed her first real assessment of the room she occupied. It was larger than she had expected, but maybe that was simply because she had spent the last few years living inside rooms that were criminally small. Every surface from the floor to the ceiling to the machines that whirred and hummed around her seemed to be made of some kind of dull, white plastic, and were spotlessly clean. In two corners, guards stood at relaxed attention. She guessed which had been the one to speak to Doctor Bailey moments ago by the impatient look he wore on his face. They were each about ten paces away.
"Sweetheart?" Doctor Bailey asked, "Do you remember what you were doing in your cell?"
It had been a long time since Black had needed to fake tears. It was a skill she had learned when she first arrived at the internment camp to find herself protection under more righteous, parentally-minded inmates from the guards and the mutant bullies in her block. It came back to her easily enough, and she felt her neck and face muscles tense into a pained grimace. Tears welled up and began streaming down her cheeks, and she let out a shuddering, stuttered breath.
"Oh, honey," Doctor Bailey cooed, and moved to embrace Black's prone form.
"I'd stay back if I were you, Doctor," the stern-faced guard admonished.
Doctor Bailey made a sweeping gesture with her hand as though to shoo the guard away and wrapped Black up in her arms. Black was small enough that, in the Doctor's embrace, her white lab coat draping over her, she was effectively hidden from the view of the men.
"She's just a girl," Doctor Bailey scolded, "And she has her collar on. I swear, you could all learn a few lessons in compassion."
Black fished one hand down the front of her coveralls, into the elastic band of her underwear. There was the shiv, just as she'd left it. She pulled the cloth covering from the blade and palmed the small tool in her fist. Holding the shiv concealed in one hand, she reached up and returned the Doctor's embrace, still forcing manufactured sobs out of her throat.
"It's alright, sweetie," Doctor Bailey whispered, "You're okay."
"Doctor," the stern-faced guard said, "Step away from her."
"I told you to back off and let me work!"
"Doctor, she has something in her hand! Step back!"
Now or never.
Black sprung, using every last reserve of strength to leap off of the examination table. Tubes and wires and medical tape tore away from her body as she bounded over Doctor Bailey, wrapping her legs around the woman's waist and both arms around her neck, pressing the blade to the flesh over her throat.
"Back!" Black shouted, her voice thick with sedatives and her native Russian accent, "Get back! Get away from me!"
She had never been trained in taking a hostage beyond what she had seen in vids, and she very nearly dropped the knife in her shaking hand. She tightened her grip on the hunk of sharpened metal and gritted her teeth.
The two guards had drawn their repulsor pistols and had taken a few steps forward, but she could see the hesitation in their eyes. Black was nearly completely hidden behind Doctor Bailey's body. The Doctor herself had stiffened, apparently gobsmacked by the sudden shift in the situation. She held her arms out to her sides, not moving, like someone who had suddenly found themselves face to face with a wild animal in the forest.
Black pressed the blade down harder and Doctor Bailey shuddered, whimpering as her bottom lip began to shake. She knew she ought to cut the woman's throat right then and there. That was the plan, wasn't it? But something stopped her. The guards exchanged glances, and each took one full step backward, but did not lower their pistols. After a long pause, one of the men, the one who had spoken earlier, and was apparently the more senior of the two, finally sighed and holstered his weapon. The other guard did not follow suit, but did lower the sights of his pistol by a few inches until he was pointing at the floor, still tense and prepared to fire.
Shoot me, damn you.
"So that's what you used the rivets for," the first guard said, "Clever."
"Get her off!" Doctor Bailey pleaded, "She's going to kill me!"
The guard pursed his lips contemplatively. "No, I don't think she is."
In response, Black let out a guttural sound that was supposed to be a growl, but sounded more like a hissing cat. Her hands were shaking badly, and her teeth had begun to chatter.
Why can't I just do it?
"If she was going to kill you, she would have done it already," the guard said, taking a step forward, "That was the plan, wasn't it? You're not trying to escape. You're trying to get us to shoot you. The problem is that you're scared."
He took another step forward.
"I've met killers in this place, girl. You're not a killer. You're just a kid," he continued, "You're not going to kill that woman any more than I'm going to kill you. So how about you put the shiv down and we forget about this whole unpleasant episode? No harm, no foul?"
It was a lie, and a bad one at that. There was no way Black was avoiding a rigorous bout of torture disguised as medical research for her transgression. The only conceivable way out was death. It was the only course of action that made sense to her anymore. Nevertheless, her weak, shaking fingers, almost numb with exhaustion, loosened their grip on the blade. A part of her knew that the man must be right. She wasn't a killer after all, and the idea of dying did scare her, more than she would have imagined.
I don't want to die.
The realization shocked her, and she felt her eyes begin with swell and sting with real tears. She was just a small, scared little girl again, and it simultaneously disgusted and relieved her.
Black let the shiv fall, watching it clatter dully on the spotless white floor.
Faster than she could react, the guard leapt forward, pulled her hands away from Doctor Bailey's throat, and twisted her body, throwing her painfully to the ground. Black barely registered the impact as her cheek smacked into the floor with a sharp slapping noise. She felt his full weight on her small frame as he bent her arms behind her back.
Weak. You were too weak. Too weak to save yourself.
"Next time I tell you to do something, you fucking do it!" the guard was shouting at Doctor Bailey as he wrenched Black's shoulders painfully. Then turning to his comrade he said, "Give me those restraints."
That was the closest you'll ever come to freedom. And you blew it. You couldn't even kill a human. They didn't share your hesitation when they killed you mother and father. Stupid and weak.
Black closed, her eyes, squeezing out the tears of fear and pain and frustration, and tried to retreat to the dark corners in her mind.
She would never, ever escape.
There was a shudder that resonated through the floor, so slight that Black was not even sure she'd felt it at all. For a second, she believed she had imagined it, but not a moment later, another, deeper shockwave ran through the building, this one strong enough for the doctor and two guards to register. Over their heads, the large halogen light flickered slightly.
There was a long pause before Doctor Bailey spoke.
"What..." she began, stopping and licking her lips before starting again, "What was-"
She was cut off by the wailing of an alarm and the flashing of a red light by the doorway, but neither mechanism had warned them in time for what came next: There was a deafening noise of screeching metal, and far wall of the infirmary seemed to disintegrate, pulverized by some colossal force on the other side, crushing steel and plastic and drywall indiscriminately.
It was not an explosion; The force would have driven them back. It looked almost as though the wall was being shredded by some unseen creature. Still Black could not see the source of the destruction through the haze of dust that had already blanketed the room in thick clouds. The explosions came afterward.
There was a sound, high pitched and cacophonous, and out of the dust and darkness on the other side of the destroyed wall, three glowing orbs flew through the air. They were bright, so much so that Black had to close her eyes as they travelled towards their targets, accompanied by a long whine like... fireworks?
The globes struck the doctor and two guards full in the chest, exploding with a pulse of energy and sending the three sprawling backward. Black's ears rang with the impact.
Somewhere far in the distance, she could feel the shudder of another impact. Then another. Then another. With each tremor, she could hear more alarms in the corridors. Something or someone was attacking the internment camp. An escape attempt, maybe? One more effective than her own?
Black heard the sound of boots stepping into the room, and instinctively, she scooted on her hands and knees under the gurney. Through the clearing dust she could see two pairs of feet.
"All clear. You must be getting' old, Wolvie. There's no one else in here," one voice said, a woman, "Movin' on. We've only got fifteen minutes, tops, before they can form a response."
"There is someone else," another voice replied, this one terse and deep, "I can smell her."
Without knowing why, Black held her breath, as though not breathing could keep her hidden. Nearby, she could see her shiv where it had fallen to the ground. She reached out and picked it up, as quietly as she could.
With no warning, the smaller pair of feet walked over to the table, pivoted, and their owner bent down. Black withdrew quickly to the other side, not knowing what to expect, but found herself surprised to see the rather attractive face of a middle-aged Asian woman staring at her. She had a countenance that was slightly weather and marked in one or two places with thin, feint scars, but it was not unkind, with crow's feet and laugh lines around her eyes and mouth that were on their way to becoming very pronounced. Her attire, from what Black could see, was militaristic, with plates of armor on her chest and shoulders, but there was a slimness to the design that the uniforms of the camp's guards did not share. Over her chest was an insignia: A black circle with and 'X' drawn through it, over a field of red. The woman smiled, chewing a wad of gum loudly.
"She's here," the woman said to her companion, then reached under the table, "My name's Jubilee. Come on out. It's okay."
Maybe it was fear. Maybe it was confusion. Maybe it was the fact that the camp had made her inherently distrustful of anyone, especially those to tried to help her. Maybe it was a combination of all of those things, but rather than take the woman's hand, Vascha gripped the shiv in her fist and lashed out clumsily, doing her best to look fearsome, and knowing she was probably failing. She missed the woman's flesh by a good foot and a half.
Still, the Asian woman frowned and jerked her hand back. She looked up at her unseen companion and shrugged.
"She's got a knife."
Black heard a low, growling noise and the sound of heavy footfalls muffled slightly by the thick soles of combat boots.
"We don't have time for this," she heard the male voice grunt.
The table Black had retreated under gave a start as it was lifted completely off the ground and tossed to one side. Black let out a yelp of surprise and looked up.
He was shorter than most men she had ever encountered, but he was still taller than her or his partner who had named herself Jubilee. His hair and short beard were a deep black, salted with grey on his cheeks and temples. He wore a bandana low over his brow, but that seemed to do very little to tame his locks, which swept backwards on his head like a matted animal pelt. He wore a uniform similar to Jubilee's, with less armor and arms exposed from the bicep to the wrist, revealing bulging, corded muscle beneath tanned skin and coarse body hair. His face was hard, as though made of old, aged leather, with eyes that seemed almost perpetually covered in a shadow formed by his pronounced, low-set brow.
"Can you stand?" he asked, his gaze like the beam of a laser.
Black could form no response, and stared at the man stupidly.
"Logan, look at her," Jubilee said in a hushed tone, "She looks like a skeleton. I'd be surprised if she could walk three feet."
The man, Logan, sighed and walked towards her, reaching out to her with one hand.
Panic gripped Black once again, and she closed her eyes and again lashed out with her makeshift blade, not paying attention to where she stabbed the air with it. She was shocked when she felt her arm meet resistance, and looked up.
The shiv had struck the man in the center of his gloved hand, but had not penetrated more than a few millimeters past the tip. At first, Black rationalized that his gloves must have been armored, but no, she saw drops of blood begin to slide down her lumpy, crude weapon onto her own fingers. She looked at the man, a wave of terror rushing up her spine.
Remarkably, he looked only mildly irritated as he plucked the shiv out of her hand and looked at it, pulling the tip out of the meat of his hand. He regarded Black for a moment, smiled, and tossed the small knife back to her. Black caught it clumsily in both hands.
"Keep it. You might need it."
Black looked at the man named Logan, looked at the Asian woman named Jubilee, then down at the makeshift weapon in her hands.
"Spasibo," she said, and then switching to English, "Are you here to get me out?"
Jubilee tapped her head in a strange sort of salute and, smiling, said, "The cavalry is here."
"Russian," Logan observed, "Colossus is gonna be thrilled."
Black put one foot under her, and then the other, and shakily rose to her feet. Jubilee moved forward to steady her, but Logan put a hand on the woman's shoulder, gently stopping her.
"Can you walk yourself out of here?" he asked, "Or do you need to be carried?"
"I can walk," Black muttered. These people, whoever they were, were obviously in a hurry. She didn't want to give them any cause to leave her behind. Pity was a rare commodity, one she rarely saw in her own life, and she wasn't about to expect any now.
She took a step forward, felt the strength leave her leg below the knee, and felt herself begin to fall. She threw her arms out, trying to latch onto something to regain her balance. Instead, something latched onto her. A hand, with a grip like an iron vice, but still careful not to squeeze her arm too hard, snatched her up by the arm near her elbow, steadying her. Black looked up and saw Logan's face.
"She's too weak," he said, "She won't make it."
Black felt her stomach drop. He was going to leave her. Through sheer, blind luck, she had happened upon the only chance of real escape that she would ever get, and she was going to be left behind, because her terrible plan had made it necessary to starve herself to the point of being near death. She knew what these two people might be thinking; She was too weak to be worth saving.
To her shock, Logan put an arm behind her waist, lifted her off her feet, and heaved her into his arms. He hefted her body as though she weighed no more than a few pounds. He looked down at her.
"Got a name, kid?"
"Black. I mean... Vascha. Vascha Aleksandrov."
"Well, 'Black'," Logan said, "We're gonna get you out of here. I want you to close your eyes and hold onto me, okay?"
Overwhelmed by the night's events, unable to even fully process what was going on around her, weak from exertion and starvation and water poisoning, Black did not need to be told twice. She grabbed portions of Logan's armor in her small fists and held on tight, closing her eyes and burying her face into his chest. Tears of pain and joy streamed down her face.
"I want to go home," she whispered, just before slipping into unconsciousness. For the first time, she realized that she had no idea where that might have been.
She hoped that Behemoth would make it out with her.