And here's the third chapter! As always, thanks to my incredible beta, Infinite Rhapsody.
Speaking of which, go check out the story I'm helping her write, Junk Mail. …And the rest of all her amazing stories.
Anyways, enjoy!
CHAPTER THREE
I shut away the questions Adrian had raised, shut off everything as I lifted my stupid skinny Ugly arm and inserted the interface card that I still held into the slot in front of me. The light by the slot flashed as I wrapped myself in a cloud of indecision and unfeeling, shivering, hugging my stomach tightly.
"State your name and place your eye in front of the retina scanner," chirped the idiotic, electronic, unknowing groundcar computer.
"Victoria Clarke," I whispered hoarsely. I put my eye to the scanner to allow it to take my reading. It flashed when it was done.
"Subject is on her way to the hospital for routine Surge modifications. Correct?"
"Yes," I murmured. What would happen if I said no? Would the car listen and ask me to give it another route, or would it ignore me and make its way to Anise City Hospital anyway? Probably the latter. As far as I knew, the Government wouldn't give me the option of staying unSurged all my life.
Not like I wanted to, anyway.
"Please sit down and buckle up. We shall be departing shortly." The screen darkened as I sat down on the old couch and fastened the clunky, choking shoulder belt around myself. My eyes traveled involuntarily to the hatch on the ceiling. Amidst the gray, dull metal there was a small strip of blue cloth. I unbuckled and stood to look more closely just as the groundcar began to move.
I fell back down onto the couch—for the third time that day—with a harsh bump as the momentum of the groundcar knocked me off balance. I had such great aim this time—I fell right on top of my schoolbag. Canvas, sharp zipper, and hard materials combined to create a very painful situation for my knees, which had taken the brunt of the fall.
What a great time to forget that groundcars go from zero to sixty in three seconds. Good going, Victoria! I strapped the seatbelt across my chest quickly and massaged my poor knees. They were taking a lot of damage that day.
"Please remain seated while the groundcar is in motion," chided the computer, a bit too late.
I gave a noncommittal grunt, rifling through my schoolbag to make sure that my handheld computer was undamaged. It was, thankfully. The handheld was my one source of entertainment and knowledge. I had learned to hack the dorm systems with it and discovered a failsafe, easy method for scrambling warden bot programming (there's nothing like watching a bot do the Macarena). I'd used it to work ahead in math class and to send messages to my friends. I'd used it to download e-books and to develop my own holo program.
If it had broken, I would have had to save up hundreds of credits with my meager Government allowance to pay for a new one—which would have taken quite a while, during which I would have to use a public terminal to communicate and surf the nets. I wiped the screen with my sleeve and replaced the handheld in my bag carefully.
I watched through the windows as the grimy buildings of the Ugly district zoomed past in various states of disrepair. The buildings were all gray and depressing, even in the hot sunlight. Their small windows were covered in dirt, and most still had blackout curtains and infrared signal maskers attached from recent air raids.
As we progressed towards the center of the city, where the Surge district and the Hospital were located, the state of the buildings declined. A few lots were bare, evidence of the horrors of the Bohrian laser ray.
The laser ray destroyed all matter, except for human bone. Victims vaporized immediately, their blood steaming and their brains boiling in their skulls as the walls crumbled to nothing around them. All that was left where the ray had hit were gruesome, charred skeletons. The ray had been developed by the Alliance, my country, but the Eurasian Empire, our chief enemy, had stolen the plans and used it almost weekly to attack our cites.
At least, that's what the Government said.
Finally, we burst from the Average district to the central part of the city at eighty miles per hour. It took the car just a short while driving through palm tree-adorned streets and Government entertainment centers to reach Anise City Hospital. A great, imposing white building, it had a nearly empty parking lot and a lone doctor standing outside the large, double-door main entryway.
I was leaning so far forward that the seatbelt was cutting harshly into my skin, and when the groundcar stopped, I snapped back so hard I thought my spine had broken. Rubbing my back painfully, I grabbed my bag and stepped out into the bright sunshine. The door of the car shut automatically behind me as I walked across the long asphalt parking lot towards the white-clad doctor.
As I neared the doctor, I noticed she—it was a she—looked very different from other Surged.
Her shining, fire-colored hair was cropped short as a boy's, spiky and disheveled. She stood gracefully, but sort of on edge, like she was on the verge of shifting into a crouch. But whereas Pretties I had seen before looked innocent and sweet and made you want to do anything for them, she cast an aurora of fear that made it seem more probable that she got things done through sheer terror.
She looked up from her handheld as I approached.
"Oh, Victoria. There you are." She smiled kindly and shook my hand.
I let it flop, too shocked to do much else.
Her voice was a high, clear soprano, but it seemed sharp somehow, cutting and piercing like a keen-edge knife. Her teeth, showing through her grin, were small and pearly white but pointed like a cat's. Her eyes were huge and angled, kind of like a wolf's eyes, except for the fact that they were silver. When I say silver, I don't mean a silver like cute jewelry—I mean a hard, reflective, unforgiving, bright clear silver like a frigid mountain stream. They were slit-pupiled, and as I stared, something seemed to change, some wiring inside seemed to show as the doctor's smile faded. The doctor's skin was as pale as mine. Her lips, hiding those frightening teeth, were full and a bright scarlet. Her aquiline nose was sharp and angular between her silver, slanted eyes.
For odd reason, I thought once again of that boy in the car —Adrian. The two were as opposite as could get.
"Victoria?" The doctor's eyes were concerned, if cold, liquid silver could ever be called concerned. "Are you all right?"
"Yes. Pleased to meet you, Doctor," I mumbled, startled out of my revere.
"Oh, I'm not a doctor," said the woman, her crimson lips curling momentarily. "I'm a scientist. You don't think we have doctors do this kind of surgery, do you?"
"Th—this kind?" Please tell me she did not mean what I thought she did. Please. Please. Please.
"Come on, Victoria," said the woman impatiently. The sharpness that was hiding inside her smooth voice became unmasked, grinding across my nerves. "You're intelligent. We picked you for that. Keep up, girl."
She did mean it. Oh no. Oh no. "Y-yes, ma'am."
"You may call me Turner. The full name is Jordan Turner, but I won't have my subordinates call me by my first name. I don't like business being so informal."
"Yes, Turner," I said, regaining strength in my voice. So this was a Special. So this was me in four hours.
Adrian had been right. Oh, God.
"Let me tell you a little about being a Special," said Turner, switching subjects rapidly, eerily catching my train of thought.
"You keep your own hours. You are incredibly strong, super fast, and require minimal sleep. You can do whatever you like when you are not on a mission. You will have superheightened senses. You can see the world through infrared, with map overlays, with X-ray, with all sorts of clear, high-tech views. You carry a handheld in your bag, no? You won't need to lug one of those around any more. You'll have one inside you—all the computer power, all the storage, all the equipment, in a small implant. You can view the screen just by closing your eyes. Of course, you'll have to shut that computer down sometimes, just like you do with your handheld, and then you will go into a sleep-like state, but that only lasts a few minutes, so don't worry about that. Your bones will be replaced with titanium rods for strength, your muscles augmented and sheathed in suborbital netting."
Turner paused for breath, and I inhaled too. She had been firing such disjointed, terrifying information at such a rate that I now felt out of breath.
"You will be part of one of four units—A, B, C, and D—made up of ten people each, including a captain. The captains answer to me. We'll be making you a captain, just experimentally, of course."
You? I asked myself in alarm. She was talking as if I had no choice, as if me being a Special was already given.
Snapping back from my thoughts, I heard the rest of what she was saying.
"If you can't handle the responsibility of being a captain, let alone just a normal Special, well, we have other uses for you."
I shivered.
"But I hope you won't wash out, Victoria. I have great plans for you. You're different from other girls your age. Your brainpower is that of a Special's already. You're a very special girl, Victoria."
Was it just me, or did she sound like Adrian had earlier?
"Well, I'm not going to bore you with all these details just now. Come on, let's go inside." Turner set off gracefully—and quickly—towards the building. I had to jog to keep up with her on my shorter legs. She noticed this and pursed her lips.
"We'll have to do some proportion readjustments. But that's all right. Hurry up, now."
Hurry up to what? To my doom?
The halls of the Hospital were industrial gray and sterile. Bright, fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling; the floor was covered in impeccably clean linoleum that Turner leapt easily across, not accounting for my slower speed.
She turned sharply down a corridor to the right and came to a standard auto titanium door. She stepped up to the retina scanner (of course, everything at the Hospital had to be top security) and waited while it flashed her frightening silver eyes. When the print had registered, the doors opened without a sound. Turner stepped aside.
"After you."
"Thanks," I muttered, not sure whether I really meant it.
Entering the room, I looked around. I was in a generic operation room, with an ordinary gurney and a table of equipment nearby. The equipment was what turned my stomach—metal rods; huge, foot-long scalpels; big chunks of computer chips and wires; strange, black clamps.
Wait a second, I thought. This was all going to fast. I hadn't even agreed that I wanted to be a Special yet.
Would those scalpels be used on me? Would that electronic junk fit inside my body? Were those clamps going to be used to make "proportion readjustments"? My mind was a whirl of anxiety and fear.
I walked silently over to the gurney and the doctor followed, padding lightly in her strange way. I stroked the bed, wondering how on earth I had managed to get myself into this mess.
"Well, get on," urged Turner, while pushing me bodily onto the gurney with painful strength. "Do you want to finish the operation today or in a week?"
"Sorry," I apologized quietly. Get on? Now? But—
I lay obediently—for once in my life—on the gurney with its sterile covering. I vaguely remembered something I had learned long ago and heard myself saying, as if from far away, "Don't I need to, um, change into a hospital gown or anything?"
Turner grinned, an eerie, wicked grin. "No, you're fine."
I hid my surprise, turning to face the equipment table. No—that was too scary. I looked instead at the tiled ceiling. There was a leak in the corner of the room. A Special? Me? I hadn't even entertained this thought until that green-eyed boy had brought it up. Now it seemed it was actually going to happen.
"Ready?" asked Turner, pulling the table over with blinding speed. She picked up a gas mask from the frightening array, connected it to a tank of some anesthetic.
I was going to be turned into, as Adrian put it, a despicable robot who murdered for a living. I couldn't do anything about it. I was doomed to become a Special, to become the dark shadow of the city, to become the stuff of ghost stories. I was going to have who-knows-what implanted into my brain and body.
Wait.
Adrian had said I could tell them no.
Pssh, I told myself. Like Turner will listen now that she's got all this set up. I can't do anything and that's that.
But I could try. My last stand, my last resort, my last comfort and the pink gas mask inched closer towards my face, attached, blew anesthetic into my body.
"Mmm…" I choked out, trying hard as I could to speak. "Don't…change me…"
The world fell into night, but I could not see the stars.
* * *
Sooo, love it? Hate it? Do tell.
And now to reply to my amazing reviewers:
Paramore Fanatic: haha, couldn't help :P Glad you liked the story!
Infinite Rhapsody: Well, of course you would say that. Lol, Twilight rocks. Can't imagine why you don't think so.
Lorelai Rosado: your reviews made my day! I'm so happy you enjoyed the story so much! Sorry, the chapters will take a few days each, but I do promise it will be a pretty long story.
-Aelyra