Chapter Eleven: Rip.

"Jakarel Zenzi," the man said. She looked at him sharply and he smiled slightly when he had succeeded in getting her attention.

"You may call me General Zenzi," she said as he opened his mouth to repeat whatever absurd question he had just asked her. "Since you insist on being formal, that is the title you may use to address me."

"Are you a general, Jakarel?" The man asked. "One of Khan's generals, maybe?"

Jakarel looked away again, finding something in the precise way the room had been constructed so it lacked actual corners to show she didn't care for the game anymore. The man shifted. He was frustrated with her lack of cooperation, she could tell. It amused her to think she was winning the game. As long as the eerily logical man didn't return she knew she could win.

"General Zenzi," the man said finally. He sounded reluctant to address her by any title at all rather than her name. "Answer the question. Were you one of Khan's generals?"

"I am one of his generals, yes," Jakarel replied promptly. She did not look away from the speck on the wall. "What is with the use of the past tense, doctor? We both know Khan is still alive and that I still live to serve him."

He looked to his companion, a female scientist, and Jakarel found herself following that glance from the corner of her eye.

Doctor Marla Givers, she thought. The woman had the nerve to introduce herself as though she were Jakarel's equal before the Augment was brought to the second interrogation sequence. She was some sort of psychiatrist. Jakarel didn't care for her.

"Doctor Givers here will be performing some standard tests to show us the limits of your abilities, Jakarel," the man said. He was all business again with addressing her by her given name. "You will cooperate with the assessment."

"One day," Jakarel said, looking at the two humans again, "I will have the opportunity to rip open your stomachs and tear your guts right out of your pathetic little bodies for everything you are going to do to my people." Her voice could never be as intimidating as Khan's. She didn't know if she had managed to cow the man or not, for he soon left, but she could see the woman was unsure of herself now. Jakarel smiled, nice and slow, and moved as though to rise.

"You hurt me and you'll die here, alone," Marla said. "They'll dissect you like the animal you think we are, categorise all your organs and put them into little jars, and then they will figure out what makes you special and use it against your sisters in the other rooms. Then what?"

"If I die, I die to serve them." Jakarel's response was automatic. "Why do humans die for other humans?"

"This isn't a question about why you'll be dying, Miss Zenzi, but of what you would accomplish after you've killed me and then died yourself. How does that serve your people?"

Jakarel remained silent, glaring daggers at the human woman that dared address her as though she were still a girl. She could imagine how she would kill the human using the table and the cuffs they kept her restrained with. She could see how the girl would die, her polite sense of superiority with her, and how her body would be a shield when the humans came in and began to shoot at her with their little 'phasers'.

In another life, she might have liked the woman, but here in this observation room and under the woman's scrutiny; she hated her entirely and would have liked to just rip her apart as she had said.

She recognised where she was when she woke up and her mouth turned up in a crude smile at the thought she was imprisoned in that same hole she had grown up in. For certain it was a mockery that they had left the building standing and the underground in shape even after burning the contents on the aboveground floors. Her room was as bare as it was when she had slept in it although it was a dusty and grimy with the smoke that must have swept through it.

Jakarel was not a nolstalgic woman and so the sight of her former home did nothing to stir her heart in any way but in anger as she sat up.

He was sitting there smiling at her like that cat in the Wonderland book, grinning in a way that would have made her skin crawl if she were a lesser woman.

"Good morning, Jakarel," he said in the cheeriest voice Jakarel had truly ever heard. She blinked at the sound, finding the pitch irritating, and clenched her hands. She wanted to lunge across the room and tear his lower jaw out of his face but it was the hesitation to harm others like her that kept her still, at least as long as they were alone. She would have no qualms with killing him if he called for anyone to help him with her.

"Aidan, hello," she replied, her voice soft and low and throbbing with the emotions she did not physically express aside from her rage. "I guess you haven't come home to us after all, have you?"

Aidan's steely gaze glittered with malevolence and she smiled at having already dug in a barb into a wound he hadn't yet healed.

"Do you know why I have you here, Janssen?" Aidan asked, digging his own barb into her in the form of her name. She didn't react but for the increasing anger swelling in her stomach that threatened to explode forth from her.

"You are using me against Khan," she replied. "Or, at least, you are going to try to use me to affect Khan in whatever way the loss of your mate affected you. That is my value."

"No, actually," Aidan replied. "I've been hearing you carry a child, Jakarel."

Jakarel tightened her hands, ready to snap now.

"I want that child."

They had her go through their horrible physical and mental exams to compare her functions with the functions of her sisters and Khan, the only Augments they had ever been able to observe in their waking moments. Jakarel enjoyed the excersise but longed to see Aislin and Gertrude again. She suspected the humans to be keeping them separated so they didn't plot, which made sense to her. She would have kept them all separated too if it were her keeping Augments as prisoners.

Marla was there to assess her every day, taking notes on her mental processing and the way she responded to various stimulation. There were other doctors that observed her as well, from men and women to strange beings she had no name for. The sight of these aliens was most interesting to her because during the years of her natural life she had never once believed there was life beyond Earth. How could there be when there was an abundance on Earth already? As far as she understood none of her kind believed in the presence of extraterrestrial life. It was a short sight on their behalf.

She spoke to these creatures more than she spoke to the humans, her innate curiosity getting the better of her as she asked them probing questions to get the bare facts of the many species she saw. She learned that the cold people that could make an Augment frustrated were Vulcans and that their homeworld Vulcan had been destroyed which was what inevitably prompted the humans from Starfleet to seek out weapons and to eventually find the Botany.

Jakarel wished they had just let them drift in their sleep.

"You can talk to me about what is bothering you, Miss Jakarel," Marla was saying to her on one of the days she found herself too dispassionate to train or read, even though the reading material provided was outstanding and provided more than enough information about the new world to understand that space flight, warp engines, and time travel were possible. She was surprised by the care the humans keeping her a captive had provided her with so much to do in her free time. She almost always felt like she was betraying her people whenever she remembered she was living a life none of them ever had, however reluctantly, while they slept unaware of their own danger.

Burgundy eyes rose from the picture the Augment was trying to understand. It was placed back on the table and the tablet it was projected on returned to the home screen once it registered that she was no longer touching it. She looked at the human, disdain colouring her expression.

"You are trying to worm yourself into my affections in the hope that I will display trust in you and therefore confide my secrets and past to you. Stop it. Do not presume that I will be so kind as to tell you to stop the next time you ask me a question, woman." Jakarel's words were biting.

She disliked dealing with Givers, finding the optimism and kindness from the woman to be incredibly frustrating. She trusted the face the doctor presented to her even less than she trusted the hospitality she innately believed to be false and misleading. She had lost too much that she had placed in humans to continue to trust to their feeble words.

Her problem stemmed mainly from the fact that Marla always seemed so genuine, like she actually cared. It did not make Jakarel more likely to want to confide in her, though. After all, she wasn't somebody like them.

Hurry.

Jakarel looked away from the woman, choosing to ignore the advances Givers attempted as she thought.