That was a close one.

If it wasn't for Brat, we'd probably have all gotten killed.

Oh, don't give him credit for that stunt. He just got lucky; it could just as easily have made things worse.

Luck is part of staying alive.

So is common sense.

Admit it. He's growing on you.

Nothing lasts. I don't want to get attached. Not to anything.

Not even to Shade?

No.

Not even to me?

That's different.


A feeling of mental vertigo, as if she were perpetually teetering on a ledge, ready to fall into an endless abyss of thoughts, ideas, and memories. Voices. Emotions that were not her own spontaneously taking hold. So many voices. Losing her own thoughts in the din of possibilities just out of her grasp, so intent on remembering what she had never known that she forgot what she had been thinking. And the never-ending voices.

Ninde had endured it for two months, and she was beginning to think that she was going insane. She had a constant, splitting headache, and she couldn't seem to concentrate for more than a few minutes without becoming distracted. Lessons had become like torture. She had to constantly remind herself to stay on task, or her mind would wander into the void until she was brought back to Earth by an electric shock.

Meals were her only respite, where she could focus on trying to block out the noise without fearing punishment for her inattention. She ignored her food. She had no appetite anyway.

"Here," said Sola, handing Ninde her vitamin pill, "If you're not going to eat anything, at least swallow this." Ninde stared at the capsule, wondering if the effort of taking it would be worth getting Sola to stop talking. Even the voice of her best friend had become too much of a distraction to bear.

"Okay," she muttered, downing the pill with a mouthful of gray water. The water hit her stomach like bricks, and her migraine quickly turned to nausea. She curled back up into what had become her usual position: back hunched, her hands holding her throbbing head.

"I know you won't tell me what's wrong," said Sola, her face showing more worry than ever, "Because I've been asking you for weeks. But whatever it is, you can't stop eating. You must have lost five kilos in the last month and a half, and I didn't think you had that much to lose. If you don't get your weight back up by the next weigh-in, they're going to start force-feeding you."

The thought was enough to make Ninde pick up her spoon and eat a few mouthfuls of the slop in her tray. Surprisingly, she began to feel a little better. She hadn't noticed how famished she was. She managed to pick her eyes up and look around the room in time to see another class of girls entering the cafeteria, lining up to get their lunch.

But the sight of them, it seemed, brought on a fresh wave of that awful sensation, which immediately translated into a worsening of her migraine. She dropped her spoon and put her head back in her hands with a little moan.

"Are you okay?" Sola asked, but her voice seemed far away. Ninde felt like she wasn't even attached to her own body anymore; the call of the nagging voices had drawn her out of her own head. She floated, suspended, her weakened body barely holding her. The noise was deafening.

She was aware of Sola talking to her and tapping her shoulder, but she couldn't hear her at all over the other, insubstantial voices. This must be what going crazy feels like, she decided, Or dying. Maybe I'm dying. But if she was dying, it sure was taking a long time.

Starbursts flashed behind Ninde's eyelids as she pressed her hands against her face. "Be quiet. Be quiet," she begged, but even her own voice was lost in the confusion. She cracked her eyes open, but all she could see were people. People all around her, and Sola's hand waving in front of her face.

But there was an empty spot in the room by the door, where a single Myrmidon sentry stood. Still feeling dreamily separated from her body, she found her mind following her eyes to the doorway. And there, miraculously, it was quieter. There was only one voice there, and it was clearer and steadier than any of the others she could hear. While other voices were loud and flitted from place to place, this one was simple and sure. It was less like a conversation than a recording.

She focused on that one voice, that simple thought, and suddenly all the other voices fell away easily. She almost gasped at the relief she felt. Her head felt clearer in an instant, and the pain began to subside. For once, it was quiet. As long as she focused only on that one voice.

But she still couldn't hear it properly. It was indistinct and muddled, like a radio tuned just a little off the station. She had to concentrate. She had to find out what it was saying. She knew somehow that it was the key to the riddle that was slowly killing her.

Involuntarily, in an action so natural that she barely realized what she was doing, she brought her knuckle to her mouth.

…ow no one to leave. Maintain order. Remain stationed at the door. Await further instructions. Allow no one to leave. Maintain order. Remain stationed at the door. Hail Silver Sun! Await…

Ninde's knuckle dropped from her mouth in shock, and the voice suddenly ceased.

"Holy shit," she said quietly.

"Oh my God!" said Sola, "Are you back? Can you hear me?"

Ninde turned to look at her friend and was surprised to see tears streaming down her face. "I think I'm okay," she said, still disoriented.

"What the fuck is the matter with you?" Sola managed to shriek and whisper at the same time, "I thought you'd had some kind of psychotic break. Or that you'd actually managed to starve yourself to death and you were going into shock or something. You were just staring like someone had popped your brain out of your skull. I swear, Ninde, if this was a joke I'm never going to speak to you again…"

"HA!" said Ninde, a little too loud. Sola abruptly stopped talking and watched Ninde as if she had confirmed that her friend had lost her mind. But Ninde had had a revelation. "The voices," she said, fascinated, "Are other people's thoughts. I'm hearing people's thoughts!" The idea sounded insane, but Ninde knew it to be true. And as soon as she understood the source of the voices, it suddenly became easy to block them out. She put everyone else's thoughts back in their own heads, and it was blessedly quiet once more. Ninde was alone in her mind, and, undistracted for once, that mind was working faster than it ever had before.

"You're hearing voices?" said Sola, "I knew it; you're losing it. Listen, you've got to keep it together. If they hear you talking like this they'll think your brain is defective. You won't even go to the Meat Factory. They'll just use you for dissection practice."

Ninde grabbed her friend by the shoulders and gave her a huge, slightly deranged smile. "I'm not crazy," she insisted, "Believe me. I feel great. And I can totally read minds."

But before she could convince Sola, a whistle sounded and it was time to go to their next lesson. After months of feeling like her brain was working against her, Ninde was deliriously happy to have her sharp mind back. She breezed through the lesson so easily that Sola looked over at her with hope in her eyes, as if there was a chance that everything were back to normal.

The next time they got a chance to talk was in bed, after lights-out. The beds were so close together that if Ninde rolled to the left and Sola to the right, they were almost nose-to-nose.

"Do you feel better now?" Sola asked warily.

"I feel fine," said Ninde.

"So no more voices?"

"Well," said Ninde, "They weren't really voices in the first place. They were thoughts that I was listening in on."

"Right," said Sola, her doubt written all over her face, "Ninde, do you realize how you sound? People don't just learn to read minds. That doesn't happen."

"I know," said Ninde, "I don't know how it happened. But I know what I heard. I could read the guard's thoughts. I heard him thinking about his orders."

"And what were his orders?" Sola asked, humoring her.

"Uh, to make sure no one left the dining hall or made any trouble," said Ninde, "Also to wait for more orders."

Sola sighed. "Well, that's obvious," she said.

"You think I'm making it up?" Ninde pouted.

"No, I…" Sola cut herself off, but Ninde could guess what she was about to say.

"You think I'm insane," she said, "That my mind's playing tricks on me. But I'll show you. Think of something. Anything. I'll tell you what it is."

Sola actually looked interested for a moment when she said, "Fine. I'm thinking of something… now."

Ninde brought her knuckle to her mouth and concentrated. Just as she had locked away the voices before, now she called Sola's out. It was as if the rows of heads in the room were an array of boxes, and all she had to do was choose the right one and open it.

An abyss. Static. Fear. Images: Ninde as a toddler chewing nervously on her knuckle, a flash of green behind razor wire, Sola naked and disemboweled on a stainless steel table, a bird, a tangle of limbs and blood seeping into the sand... They came too fast to register, and the noise was back, the noise...

"AGH!" Ninde shouted, making every girl in the room flinch. The headache was back for an excruciating moment, and she suddenly understood why the last two months had been such torture. If the Myrmidon's mind had been a straight hallway, a human mind was a labyrinth. It was hard enough navigating one's own mind; add another to the mix and it was chaos. It felt like falling down a flight of stairs if the risers shouted at you and the walls were covered in abstract art.

"What's the matter?" said Sola.

"I don't think I can read human minds," said Ninde weakly, "It was really confusing."

"Take a guess," Sola demanded.

"It sounded like you were worried that I'd try to escape and get myself killed."

"I worry about that every second of every day," Sola sighed. She looked unconvinced.

"I saw something," said Ninde, carefully, "Ashie and her friends on the day they made a run for it, four years ago. When the Myrmidons caught them…"

The pale greenish color that Sola's face had turned was enough to shut Ninde up. "That was low," Sola hissed, "That was low, bringing that up. Using what happened to her to try to get me to believe you…"

"That's not…" Ninde protested.

"I don't want to hear it," said Sola, turning over, "You can't read minds. Just try to act like a normal person."

But Ninde knew that she wasn't normal. She drifted off to sleep, reminding herself that she knew what she knew, even if no one else believed her.


EDIT 6/3/10: Hmmm. I tried to do a stream-of-consciousness thing when Ninde tried to read Sola's mind, with three lines of no spaces. I didn't notice at the time that it had somehow made the HTML go wonky, so only a piece of it showed up in the posted chapter. I couldn't get it to work so I replaced it with a more grammatically correct description.

Am working on the next chapter, but the pacing is giving me trouble and I'm having difficulty finding time to write.