White night, one night I left you; one time, one time I knew you
Now I draw lines through; through you, can't help but hate you

Yeah, I'm coming out of my cave to find truth
Yeah, I'm summing up my time in my young youth
And I'm picking up the pace of the thrill,
I'm listening to the emptiness I feel

ELEVEN

I woke to the sound of hyperventilating.

There had been a voice murmuring, but it had gone silent as soon as the panting started. It was incredibly confusing. Even more so when I realized it was me hyperventilating.

I clamped both hands over my mouth, scuffling backwards until my back hit the wall. I knew I was in that same room—cement, huge door, iron loops in the walls—but I was completely disoriented by the total absence of light. There had been voices, I knew there had been voices, and I struggled to put together why I was here and who I was with.

"Max," came Fang's voice through the darkness. The way the breath whooshed out of him suggested he'd been holding it. "You're okay," he said, as if trying to convince me.

Under different circumstances, I probably would've snorted at his word choice, but I was still too discombobulated.

"Are you hurt?" he asked quietly, urgently.

"Where are you? How long was I out?" I asked, slowing my breathing with great effort. I rubbed a hand over my forehead, trying to force away the pounding headache that I'd woken up with. I tested each of my joints, satisfied to confirm that nothing was broken or knocked out of place.

"Few hours, I think. Over here."

I followed the sound of his voice, scooting along the wall and feeling blindly in front of me. My cool fingers bumped into his thigh, grazing over something soft and silky in his lap.

"What—?"

"Gazzy," he murmured. One of his hands reached out to grab mine while the other continued to smooth over the Gasman's hair. "Sleeping. They brought him in an hour or so ago."

Every single part of me, however fractured deep down by how absolutely fucked up my life was, yearned to gather Gazzy into my arms and crush him as hard as humanly possible to my chest. But something in Fang's voice was off.

He knew me so well, I didn't even need to ask. "He's fine. Just tired. They…" he sighed, taking the hand that had been in Gazzy's hair and dragging it through his own. He sighed heavily.

"What?"

"They did surgery on him," Fang said. "Exploratory laparotomy."

I blanched and drew in a quick breath. His hand squeezed mine. I could picture his eyes, how intense they must be, all dilated pupils and controlled rage.

"They did one of those on me, early on," I muttered, my hand fluttering to my abdomen. The scar was still there—white and faded, but long and thick, right down the center of my abdomen from just below my ribcage to a few inches below my navel. I remembered the pain I'd felt the first few days afterwards as my muscles healed, the dull tug of the stitches with every single movement I made.

"They already know what our insides look like. They saw mine. Why would they do one on him?"

The hand that had taken mine rose to cup my face. Leaning into his warmness helped my panic subside a couple of notches. "I guess he tried to throw them off back at the house with his… trademark. They must've taken him into surgery right after they finished with me in the hospital wing. He overheard them saying he had scar tissue in his small intestine from earlier experiments at the School. They think that's what caused his digestive issues."

"Adhesions," I breathed. "Lysis of adhesions. They did one of those on me too. My shoulder. I had scarring in the muscles, from the gunshot in Arizona." My free hand moved from my abdomen to the fleshy area over my scapula. There was a scar there, too, I knew.

"He dropped you, earlier," Fang said. "You went down like a ton of bricks."

"It's called the baroreceptor reflex. When you put pressure on both carotid arteries at once..." I gestured vaguely in the air. "One of his favorite tricks. Would've been good to know back during Eraser fights, huh?"

Fang had switched his hold on my cheek for my hand again, and he guided it to rest over what I assumed was a large gauze pad on the Gasman's stomach. I could feel the ridges of sutures underneath and the warmth of healing tissues. His stomach rose and fell with his peaceful breathing.

I drew my hand back and Fang smoothed Gazzy's shirt back down.

Fang brushed his shoulder against mine, and I lolled my head to rest on it. "I heard talking," I said. "Before."

My head bobbed as he shrugged. "I was talking to him."

"He's asleep."

"I'm aware," Fang said. "But it took him a while to get there. He was terrified, in a lot of pain. I started running my hands through his hair, like you used to when he was little."

I closed my eyes against the blackness, letting the severity of the situation roll over me. Gazzy had just undergone major surgery, subjecting him to about a thousand potential complications. Fang had been shot in the abdomen.

And I was back with my captor.

Fang must've sensed the change in the air, because he rolled his shoulder a bit against my cheek. "We're going to get out of here," he said.

We stayed like that, Fang leaning back against the wall heavily, my head on his shoulder and the Gasman's head in his lap. After a long while, Fang's breathing evened out—he must've been exhausted, having dealt with me the past few nights, having been shot, looking out for Gazzy… it was alarming, actually, how little sleep he'd probably gotten.

I was wide awake, though; I hardly ever slept here. The rush of water through the pipes above us started, eerie and distant. I leaned a bit further into Fang.

Mallory had come to the house around three o'clock when he'd taken us. Then I'd woken up in this room alone for an entirely undetermined number of hours. Fang had been taken in, we'd talked briefly, Mallory had come in, and then I'd been out again for a few hours.

Add in the fact that I had no idea how long it'd taken Mallory to get us here in the first place—because I had no freaking clue where this place was—it was impossible to figure out how long we'd been here. Three days? Less than one?

I thought about Iggy in his lavender scrubs, finding Cara dead in her apartment and then coming home to find his house in what must've been shambles, then realizing the Gasman wasn't home from school, going to get Nudge and Angel and recognizing the danger that they were in. That we were in, being here.

They would search for us, I knew for a fact. Every fiber of my being was confident that they had immediately started brainstorming and scouring for leads.

But how would they even know where to start?

My head throbbed worse. I focused on Fang's near-silent inhales and exhales, centering myself in the rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathed.

After what must've been a couple of hours of an endless cycle of panicking and forcing myself to calm down, there was a rustling noise to my left; a low groan revealed that the Gasman was awake.

"Hey," I said lowly, and I felt the air around us shift as he startled. "Just me."

He groaned again. I heard more shuffling and realized he was crawling from Fang to me. With a sigh, he dumped his head in my lap.

I shoved a hand in his thick, curly hair, gently scratching his scalp. I felt him relax a bit.

"I won't let them touch you," he said fiercely, and my heart swelled with pride.

"Max?" he said after a moment of silence, sounding so much like the four-year-old that I'd rocked to sleep every night for a year after Jeb busted us out of the School. In the darkness, I imagined his blue-sky eyes, wide with fear and pain and stunted bravery. Fourteen years old and he'd seen enough for several lifetimes.

"It hurts," he whimpered, voice small.

I heard Fang adjust the slightest bit and realized he'd probably woken up when Gazzy shifted from his lap to mine. He didn't move, didn't give any indication that he'd heard the break in the tough exterior the Gasman had developed at a young age for the sake of his sister, for the sake of all of us.

"I know, sweetie," I whispered. My heart broke into a million pieces for him. Fang's fingers ghosted over my elbow as if to say, I'm here. "I know."

At some point, I fell asleep like that.

What woke me up initially was the overhead light. Before I had time to blink the sleep out of my eyes and get into a defensive position, the door was sliding open, then shut, and a Taser was in my face. One of the soldiers from earlier—the one I'd recognized—stood over me, his features impassive.

"Follow me," he said.

"But, mom," I whined, "five more minutes?"

He gritted his teeth and adjusted his finger against the Taser, but seemed to change his mind at the last second, pointing it toward where Fang had shuffled himself in front of the Gasman.

"Come on," I snarled, totally bluffing. "You think I think he can't take a Taser?"

The soldier, instead, shoved Fang back with his superstrength and grabbed the Gasman from his spot huddled against the wall. He dragged Gazzy out of Fang's reach and held the Taser close to his chest.

Gazzy was paler than I'd ever seen him, eyes huge and shining like full moons against the dark circles beneath them. "Okay," I submitted. Fang looked positively rabid next to me, struggling against his ankle cuff again. "Okay, leave them alone, okay."

Fang immediately protested. "Max—"

The soldier grabbed one of my hands roughly, snapping a pair of handcuffs around my wrists before leading me from the room. I knew, to Fang, it was unlike me to go without a fight to the death. But I also knew this superhuman could break me in half like a popsicle stick with one hand tied behind his back.

"Max!" Fang called, and I looked over my shoulder.

The door slid shut, leaving Fang's tortured face burning against the back of my eyelids.

Charlie—I'd finally remembered his name—led me down the long hall, holding my cuffed hands behind me as he marched me toward some torturous unknown.

When we passed the rec room, I stole a glance in—a few of the soldiers were sparring. A young girl I'd never seen before was up against one in the far corner. She looked unpracticed and scared, and he wasn't going easy on her.

The dirty blonde ringlets that bounced around her face in addition to her long, slim figure reminded me so much of Angel, it was almost physically painful. She couldn't have been older than seven, but there she was, getting the stuffing kicked out of her by a man four times her size.

"Let me guess, you guys offered her candy?"

The soldier looked down at me and followed my line of sight just as we passed the doorframe. His lips were in a tight line.

"Having kindergarteners fight for you? That's getting pretty low," I commented.

He shoved me forward a bit but didn't say anything.

We reached the end of the hallway and he guided me into the medical wing, a horrible succession of rooms I'd come to associate with anesthesia and scar tissue. My whole body locked up with tension as the smell hit me, bleach and sterile fields and surgical scrubs.

Against my better judgment, I started fighting the handcuffs and Charlie's cold hands. Gruffly, he shoved me onto an exam table, wrestling me onto my back and strapping a leather restraint over my chest. He cinched it tightly and the breath whooshed out of me.

This was when the panic started setting in again—being in this place was bad enough, but being so tightly strapped in and unable to move forced my breaths to come more quickly. Spots littered the corners of my vision—I couldn't budge under the bite of the leather—

"They just want an ultrasound," Charlie said so quietly under his breath that I thought I might've imagined it. The sideways look he gave me confirmed that it was him who'd said it.

"Yeah, well, tell them they can bite me," I spat.

A man in powder blue scrubs approached me, a mask over his face and thick gloves on his hands. He didn't say anything—they never did, in this room—as he pulled up the hem of my long sleeve. I squirmed underneath him, all too familiar with the sensation of a stranger tugging at my clothes.

Over the mask, his eyes portrayed some sort of sympathy. I'd noticed quite a few of these medical techs give me looks like that. Then do something, I used to scream at them. You don't have to be here. You don't have to do this.

I stopped when I realized that maybe they did.

He smeared some of the ultrasound jelly over my abdomen and pressed the probe to me, reading something on a screen that I couldn't see. I knew what he was looking for. I wasn't stupid, and they'd done it enough times over my four years here that I was well aware of what was happening.

Not going to find anything, I wanted to say. Wasting your time. I wondered if I was supposed to be mourning, if I was supposed to feel sad. I didn't feel anything.

After several minutes of me hyperventilating and the med tech pushing low on my belly with the wand, he jotted a couple of notes down on a chart, wiped my abdomen clean, gave me one last pitying look, and walked away.

I was left belly-up on the exam table, still handcuffed at the wrists and ratcheted down by leather restraints over my chest and legs. Trying to slow my breathing, I started counting the tiles in the ceiling, thinking about the thousands of ways I'd dropped the ball on this.

I should've never gone home, for one. I should've gotten so far away from anywhere that could've been traced back to me—traced to any of the flock—and lived in solidarity for the rest of my miserable, mutant life.

Looking back on that night, I really hadn't even planned on going back to the house; my body sort of went on an autopilot and took me there. With the detached state I'd been in, it wouldn't really have been possible for me to go elsewhere.

There was a slam. I craned my neck up from the table, jarred from my reverie, and sought the source.

Mallory was hovering over me with one hand clasped around my neck before I'd even registered that he was the one who'd slammed the door open. "What did you do?" he seethed. His eyes were fiery with a deep, powerful hatred. I could barely hear him over the rushing of blood in my ears.

I was still tied to the table and my hands were still cuffed, but I couldn't breathe—I could feel my trachea struggling for air, narrow and bruised, under his giant hand. I thrashed this way and that—spots freckled my vision—

"Sir," came a low voice from behind him. Suddenly, the pressure on my throat was gone. I choked in a painful breath, wheezing as oxygen flooded my lungs.

"Charlie," grunted Mallory. "You can see yourself out, I'm sure."

Charlie shifted on his feet, eyes darting from my squirming form gulping for air to Mallory's murderous body language. "I don't want you to do anything you might regret," he said quietly.

Mallory scoffed and took a step toward Charlie. Mallory was built tall and tough, but Charlie might've had an inch or so on him. To his credit, he didn't cower before the sturdier man. "There's a reason I'm second in command here," said Mallory.

Charlie didn't miss a beat. "We're all aware. But she isn't your punching bag."

I couldn't help it—my jaw dropped open. In four years of dealing with this place and fourteen total of dealing with captivity and mad scientists, not one had ever stuck up for me besides Jeb.

Mallory picked up the chart the medic had written on and shoved it in Charlie's face, teeth bared like an angry dog. "Did you see this? The boss has been trying to breed her for years. Years. In vitro failed dozens of times. She finally conceives naturally—carries my child—and is out of my sight for a few days and this is what she comes back with."

"It's ridiculous that you'd ever assume she was pregnant in the first place," said Charlie, shrugging off the chart. "Boss already figured out that it wasn't possible—the anatomy is too—"

"I found the nurse who treated her and... convinced her to give me some information." Mallory wore a crooked grin as the words slinked out from between his lips.

I jerked against the restraints. "Whatever she said was a lie," I said, trying to keep a note of panic from bleeding into my voice. "She told you what you wanted to hear. She knew you were going to kill her."

Mallory turned and smiled that horrible incandescent-light smile straight at me. "I don't think so. I can be very persuasive when I need information."

A million possibilities of what he could've done to this innocent woman shot through my brain so fast that I almost vomited right there. "You're sick," I forced out, my voice just barely higher than a whisper. "You are twisted, and sick, and sad."

Mallory snorted and nodded at Charlie, who started uncinching the ties holding me to the table. "So tame. I remember when you first got here, you were this firecracker. What happened?"

He was taunting me, and I knew it. Of course I wasn't like how I'd been at first. Initially, this was just another stint of captivity—I knew I'd get free eventually. The flock would find me, or somebody would slip up, or something.

Slowly but surely, that sense of optimism drained from me as I realized that, no, I was not going to be found, and, no, nobody was going to slip up. I still tried to maintain that fire that made me who I was, but it got to a point where I barely had enough energy to blink enough times to keep my eyes from falling out.

Charlie silently led me out of the room and back down the long hallway. When we passed the rec room, I saw that young girl again—this time she was curled on the mat, not moving. I jerked against his hold and he startled long enough for me to sprint into the room, cuffed hands trailing behind my back.

I threw myself to my knees next to her. Her eyes popped open, a beautiful chestnut brown that reminded me so much of Nudge. A bruise was beginning to shadow on her right cheek, and there was a large gash over the bridge of her nose. She was beautiful.

"Don't give up," I said hurriedly. Charlie was tearing toward me, and a couple of other soldiers on the far end of the rec room had noticed that I'd busted free of him. "Whatever you do, don't give up—we will get out of here."

Charlie roared up behind me and forced me to my feet, dragging me away from where the girl lay on the mat. Her eyes followed us. I saw them settle on Charlie with a look I couldn't quite decipher.

"Un-fucking-believable," I seethed when we were back in the hallway. I rolled my shoulders and tried to meet Charlie's eyes with my own. "That little girl is left alone, beaten to shit, and you can just walk on by?"

We reached the big metal door to the cement room. Charlie unclipped my handcuffs and spun me by the shoulders—

—And looked down at me with that same pair of beautiful chestnut brown eyes.

I sucked in a sharp breath and stumbled back into the door. He slid it open, his cold exterior melting to something much more tortured underneath.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Fang rocket to his feet, moving as far toward the door as his chain would allow. "Max—"

"Her name is Allie," said Charlie, and the door slid shut in my face.

Song: "White Night" by Hayden Calnin

I realize it was an absurdly long wait. Lost a patient at work unexpectedly and am burning out hard at my job. I work in an ICU, so death isn't exactly a stranger to me, but sometimes you lose a favorite that really looked like they would make a full recovery, and it's tough. Even tougher when you're the one doing CPR trying to bring them back.

More relevantly, I got SO stuck about 2000 words into this chapter. I have several later chapters written completely and am so happy with them, but am having tough time with this little stretch. Bear with me, beautiful people.