This chapter is dedicated to MusicBooksNoReality (of Wattpad) because she's adorable and she's really nice. Also if you like Hetalia check out her stories, they have AWESOME story lines/plots
Consciousness bid me hello again whilst I was being oh so unceremoniously dragged by my arms down a hall. I licked my lips in an attempt to purge the metallic taste from my mouth, and was surprised to find blood trickling its way down my chin. My head throbbed and my skull felt hot under my hair, and my body was undergoing aches that I had been accustomed to once upon a time. I tried to pick up my feet, but I ended up tripping myself for a few moments before I managed to be able to walk on my own. The two guards who had been dragging me tightened their grips on my arms, and I tried to yank away. I heard the click and hum again, and froze when I seen another stun gun through the corner of my eye.
"Don't struggle ." The man behind the gun grunted.
I turned and met his eyes. His eyes were so dark I couldn't tell his iris from his pupil, and glittered coldly. "Let me go!" I hissed, knowing how futile the words were.
The men scoffed. "Please."
With that, the fourth man, whom I hadn't even seen due to the fact that he walked behind me, jabbed me in the back to try and silence me. That was the moment I decided to throw caution to the wind and made their lives as hard as I could. I wriggled in their grip, dragged my feet on the ground, yanked myself to and fro, and at one point I tried to elbow one of them again. They had steely patience, I'd give them that. They steered me around a corner, and I was presented with another hallway dotted with doors and windows again.
"Who do we put her with?" The man digging his fingertips into the soft flesh of my inner bicep grunted.
"Whitey. She probably won't maul her," the other answered. "Wouldn't want anything to happen to that pretty face." He added with a sneer.
I bit back a comment of my own. Their manhandling was bringing back memories of how I was treated when I lived back in San Francisco. Once I regained my confidence back with the help of the apes who inhabited my home, I swore that I would never let anyone walk over me again. Not without a fight. Now a fire was starting to spark, urging me to fight back against this confinement. But my brain knew that it was ultimately a bad idea. But that stubborn streak from my teen years just wouldn't uproot itself from my spirit.
One guard unlocked and rushed into a room, a second following after him. I heard them bark an order or two, and felt my breath hitch. Were they putting me in a cell with another patient? The sneering man's words from a moment ago came back to me, and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
Shit.
"Alright!" One of the men called, and it cued the two restraining me to usher me in the room. In no way did I go without a struggle.
My heels dug into the ground, and squealed irksomely as the older males overpowered me in the brute strength department. Once inside the room, I was smothered against a wall, which, let me tell you, pissed me off like no other. I fought to shake my way out, but the man only pushed his body harder against my back, trying to squish my into stillness. The guards spoke to one another for a moment, planning their timing so they could exit the room at the same time without incident. In a rush of wind, the weight smashing me to the cold, white wall, was gone and the door slammed loudly.
The lack of support (no matter how unpleasant it had been) caused me to drop down to my knees, and I immediately whirled around and pressed my back against the wall. My oddball irises scanned the room, searching for whatever was in here with me, and for a moment I thought it was empty. But then, in the opposite corner of the room, was what looked like a girl. She blended in with the white paint perfectly, her hair was whiter than snow, her skin looking almost too pale to wrap around flowing blood.
She was an albino.
But she was also an experiment.
I had no clue what she might be capable of, so caution kicked itself into gear in my head, and I reached to my sides. But my hips were vacant of holsters, my daggers gone. With a sucked in breath, I checked for my bow and quiver, and found them missing as well. Shit. They must have frisked me when I was unconscious. The thought made me shudder. When I was in the middle of devising a plan to protect myself should the lab subject attack, (which consisted of nothing but curling up into a ball and playing dead) the girl decided to speak first.
"W-who are you?" Her voice was meek and tentative, and it was that frail tone that caused me to re-examine her position.
Her hair was long and uncut, lengthy bangs swept to the side of her face in a mostly futile attempt to keep it out of her eyes. She wore a crumpled white long sleeve and some thin looking eggshell colored shorts, both of which blended in with her snowy complexion. She sat on the floor, knees pulled up to her chest, like I was doing. She wore a confused, slightly frightened looking pout. Even her pale pink lips looked like they were dusted with frost.
Nothing about her screamed 'danger' as much as her whole demeanor projected 'fragile'
I blinked, expecting to find some sort of mutation aside from her pigment. But she was showing no signs of a short fuse or animalistic territorial tendencies, at least not yet. Her timidness did nothing to ease the nervousness flowing throughout my bloodstream. But, judging by the thin cot in the corner of the room, I knew I was most likely in her personal living space, and if I were in her position I would sure as hell would want to know who this strange person was.
"I-I'm Rain." I breathed. Lingering adrenaline was still coursing lethargically through my system, causing the slight stutter. "Who are you?"
The girl shook her head. "I-I-..." She swallowed. "I'm...seven."
Her obvious fear of my unknown-ness pulled at my heartstrings, and a sympathetic frown tugged at my lips. But I didn't understand what she was trying to say. "You're seven years old?"
She didn't look seven, if anything, she looked anywhere from fifteen to eighteen, but I could have been wrong. I wondered if maybe her brain was altered, maybe a procedure went a little wrong, but then the girl shook her head. "N-no name. Just seven."
Then it clicked. "You...only have a number? No one named you?"
She shook her head, her knees shifting as she tried to sink deeper into herself. It was then I realized how much she reminded me of my old self. It was for that reason that I held back pity, I hadn't wanted it back then, and I didn't think she would be fond of it either. In her scrunched up position, I couldn't see any obvious physical modifications, so I decided to just stop looking.
"Why are you in here?" She said, her voice trembling so much it was very nearly a whimper.
My third realization of this conversation was that I was still donned in a security guard's attire, and that this whole thing was probably extremely peculiar to her. So that left me with a predicament. Did I tell her the truth or just some off the top of my head lie? What if there were microphones and listening devices wired into the room? I couldn't risk it, though a good part of me felt bad for lying to her. I hated lying.
"Well, I don't know what your point of view was at the time," I said, trying my best at humor during this emotionally frazzled fiasco. "But I was very rudely ushered in and locked inside this room. They can expect a very unsatisfactory Yelp review."
Not my best material, but cut me some slack, I'm stressed out. The girl, I'll call her Seven, didn't laugh. I wouldn't either, to be honest.
"Did you get in trouble?" Seven asked. Her slightly louder tone suggested she was starting to realize I meant her no harm.
"You could definitely say that." I sighed.
I glanced out the window, but was a bit surprised to see it a reflection of the wall in the glass. A two-way mirror. I didn't like that at all. I was stuck in here with an unknown experiment in a room that probably had visual and audio recording devices and I had no way of knowing if my team even knew I was gone yet.
Wait a moment...!
I reached up, resting my elbow on my knee to make it look like I was only holding the side of my head in a hand. My fingers probed my hair, and I was ecstatic to feel the com. device still cupping the shell of my ear. I pressed the button and spoke. "Can anyone hear me?"
A loud crackle sounded in my ear, and for one hopeful moment, I expected an answer, but then the device started screeching and I flinched, tearing it off my ear as the painful pinging dug into my brain. I held the little communicator in my palm, looking down at it before pressing the button again, silencing it. The shots from the stun guns must have frazzled the circuits. I sighed, frustrated. How are Blue Eyes and Dad going to find me?
"Who are you talking to?" Seven piped up again.
"No one." I sighed.
"You're not really a guard, are you?"
I looked at her, fighting the urge to bite my lip as I contemplated my next words. She'd figured that part out, no use in lying about it now. So I shook my head. "No, I'm not."
"You're a subject." She said it more as a statement than a question.
"What makes you think that?" I asked, quirking my head at her tone.
"Your eyes." She murmured. "Only subjects have ocular anomalies."
I blinked at Seven's vocabulary choice, and supposed it was either a term she had heard a scientist use, or she was a smart cookie in her own way. My tongue ran along the inside of my teeth as I pondered it for a moment longer before dropping it. My odd eyes scanned her again, and I still couldn't see any reason for her to be here. She seemed like a soft spoken little teenager. The only out of the norm thing I could sense from her was her albinism.
"Why are you here?" I spoke softly.
"What?"
"Why are you in this place? There's nothing wrong with you. Not that I see." I added with a shrug.
Seven seemed stunned, as though she wasn't expecting those to be my next words. I hoped it wasn't because I told her she was normal. She seemed to be, at least from what I had seen. I quirked my head again, softly this time, when she held her stunned silence. I was just about to retract my question when she seemed to snap out of it, though she hesitated a few moments more before answering me.
"I-...I can...see things with my voice..." She trailed off again, awaiting my response.
My brows raised in bewilderment. "What do you mean?"
"Um..." She fidgeted a little, obviously uncomfortable. "C-can I try something?"
Now I was the uncomfortable one. She was about to show me what made her of interest to these mentally twisted seeming scientists. I thought back to some of the things I had seen on the security feed, those frightening to say the least experiments and tests were more than enough the chill the toughest, most stone-hearted people to the bone. But I had opened my mouth and gotten myself into this, now I was going to shut my mouth and see it through. Besides, the girl didn't seem the least bit malicious. So, tentatively, I nodded my head.
The girl breathed in a deep breath, as if trying to inhale self-medicated reassurance before getting up and walking across the room. She was incredibly thin. Seven sat down in front of me, and the close proximity gave me a better view of her features. From across the room, I thought her eyes were blue, but now, I could see that they weren't blue at all. They were purple, lavender to be exact. Her words from a few minutes ago came back to me.
Only subjects have ocular anomalies.
I pushed it to the back of my mind, seeing Seven was preparing to speak again. "Cover my eyes with your hand." She said, her voice soft.
I raised a brow, hoping for a little insight to her strange request. When she realized what I was silently asking, she said, "it's so you don't think I'm peeking. After you cover my eyes, I want you to hold up some fingers with your other hand and I'll tell you how many."
"Um...okay." I hesitantly complied, reaching out slowly in case she decided to reconsider. But when she held her tongue, I placed my palm gently over her closed lids. I made sure to keep my fingers pressed tightly together, eliminating the chance of leaving space for her to peek out of. With my other hand, I held my index and middle fingers, as well as my thumb.
"Are you holding up a number?" She asked.
"Yes."
Seven's jaw quivered only slightly, and her lips suddenly parted into a small 'O' shape. I didn't hear anything emit from her lips, but a moment later, she spoke again.
"Three."
"How'd you know that?" I gaped, pulling my hand away from her face to study my palm. Had I left any crevices between my fingers open? No, I couldn't have, I was careful to make sure I didn't. My eyes snapped up to meet her light hued irises.
"I told you," she shrugged, looking down at her lap before shuffling back a little to put some more space between us. "My voice."
"I didn't hear anything." I said.
"Well, it's quiet." She tucked her chin into her chest, showing even more prominently that she was a very shy person.
"How do know what something looks like with just your voice?" I asked, stumped.
"I see it in here." She looked up and tapped the middle of her forehead. "Three dimensional."
My brow rose again, an idea forming. "Like-like as in... You see echoes?"
They way she nodded managed to qualify as both vigorous and muted at the same time. Then it hit me. Echolocation. Leah had said that there were many human-animal hybrids here, maybe the nameless Seven was one of those hybrids. Maybe she was part dolphin or something? Her albinism made me think more along the line of bat. Another feature of hers suddenly came to notice in our closer proximity. Her ears were rounded, but they tapered ever so slightly to a more concave shape than what was normal. Definitely bat, I thought.
"You echolocate?" I said, hoping for some sort of confirmation to my theory.
This time around she nodded slowly, almost hesitantly. "They've used that word before."
"That's amazing..." I didn't get time to say anything else, for a click sounded and four guards rushed in, different ones than from the last. I barely had enough time to inhale before they rushed both of us in pairs. They pulled Seven to her feet and quickly pinned her face flat against the wall, the whole time the pale girl stayed silent and let herself be pinned. The other two treated me just the same, the difference was that I was in no way quiet. I made my dislike of this treatment well known, and I turned my head to give a piercing and irate glare to the man in the lab coat who walked in after the pairs of repressors.
"Hello," he said, his accent brisk and distinctly familiar. "My name is Dr. Aldo Zaius. And who, might I ask, are you?"
I held my silence, scanning the man up and down. Something about him struck a bell, and it didn't take me long to come up for a reason. I had the most persistent, annoying of little voices in the back of my head shouting at me through a bullhorn that this man in front of me was Graham's father. The thing that didn't add up, was the name difference. Graham's surname was Casey, but then why did I see such a resemblance in the brunette head of hair (though graying and starting to thin a bit), the curve of his nose, the way the accents were so similar the only reason I could find to explain would be that they were of the same region of Great Britain, maybe even the same household.
There was always the possibility that Graham went by his other parent's surname. It wasn't unheard of, and I hadn't seen Graham speaking in the fondest of manners about his father. So now I was in a pickle. Did I act like I had never heard of his son if it came up? He had to of known Graham was gone, it was a two day trip to get here, (if one made good time) so Graham will have been gone for four days now. None of the three mentioned any alibis for their absences. Liam's I could see going unnoticed for a few days, maybe, but Graham and Leah? Two top notch scientists?
My thought train was rudely interrupted by the older Brit.
"Not feeling very chatty, Cathy?" He said, "take her to my personal exam room. We'll see exactly who she is, and then we'll work on how she managed to get out." He said to the guards.
I bit back the urge to scoff openly at his terrible attempt at word play. The two assholes pinning me to the wall pulled me forward, and one clapped a pair of cold, thick metal cuffs around my wrists, making no attempts to be gentle. I hissed through my teeth as the metal cut into my wrists. Though my hands were now bound in front off me, the men kept a firm, bruising grip on my arms, roughly ushering me through the door. I threw a glance over my shoulder at the albino girl, but she was still being held down against the wall. Once I was on my way down the hall, I heard the pair who had been restraining Seven quickly exit the room and slam the door.
I kept my head down, beginning to recite prayers in my head, revolving between English and Cherokee as I walked. Another thought filtered in as I was promptly herded down the winding, painfully sterile smelling hallways. God I hoped my family were okay.