Chapter 24

He kept a close watch on the two English-speakers as they worked. Scribbling on papers with their writing sticks… They'd allowed him to stay in a corner, to which he hadn't hesitated to take advantage of, but he hated it when they so much as looked at him. Part of him hated that they weren't doing anything to him. It reminded him of how Sam and Tucker acted towards him and he didn't want these two associated with the only two good English-speakers he'd ever had the honor of coming across.

While it was true that Sam had left him here all night— And oh…oohhhh the night was so awful… If only Sam knew… They had dragged the thick part of Sam's bed down here in their facility where he was expected to sleep on it. He tried to. He'd gotten on it and laid down. They covered him with a blanket of doom, gave him a pillow of despair, and left him there literally all night long. It was awful. He didn't even want to blink let alone sleep, and morning came so agonizingly slowly. He realized he hadn't slept for one second last night. When he first met Sam his body didn't give him the choice to stay awake for long. But she had left him alone. She had let him do his own thing and never bothered to make him sleep anywhere or do anything weird or uncomfortable. He hated sleeping on these things. She only tried to get him sleep on it once and after seeing how much he preferred a corner, she never tried to make him sleep on it again. She did make him have a blanket and pillow though, that was her compromise. It had taken a while but he finally pieced together why she'd done that.

But these two… They would only let him stay in a corner for their own convenience. This way he couldn't escape again…even though he technically never escaped the first time. He was backed against a wall—what could he possibly do?

He just hoped that his body wouldn't betray him this time. It had already taken enough chances with Sam and Tucker.

"Jack, is he still over there?" the woman asked.

The man, on the opposite end of the room, glanced at him. "Yup, hasn't moved. Still."

The woman swirled around a purple liquid in a glass tube.

"Didn't Sam say we had to leave him alone?" she said, examining the liquid.

The man shrugged and grabbed a…well…it was… It was almost like… He'd never seen one before. He only knew it had an orange bulky body with a handle, a black cord, and some pointy metal thing sticking out of it. It was loud.

"Should I just add more saline or should that be administered separately? I mean…it might dilute the serum too much."

"Keep it separate just in case."

"But what if it's too concentrated?"

"If it's too diluted it won't work."

"But if it's too concentrated it might work too well."

The loud, shrill sound came from that…the thing with the metal point. He was just waiting for himself to go deaf with that stupid thing around.

"You almost done over there, honey?" the woman asked once the sound stopped.

"I think so," the man answered. "I've never worked with something so tiny before. How about you?"

"I'm starting to think I should add isoflurane… I might have to start all over…"

"What about the sevoflurane?"

"I'm not sure if that would be compatible with ectoplasm…" she mumbled.

"I suppose it wouldn't hurt to try isoflurane then. We used it a lot when we…you know…"

She sighed. "Makes me wonder all the more if we should use it again… We vowed never to go back to that kind of work, I just… Is this still considered the same thing? Are we really going back to that?"

The man held up some kind of small metal object—looked like a pair of curvy scissors really—and used a light stick to thoroughly look it over.

"I'm not really sure."

"We're using the exact same chemicals, Jack, what if we're doing the wrong thing? AGAIN?! He's alive, we can't make the same mistakes we did before."

"And we won't."

"I mean…h-he's the only survivor of Project Level Up, if anybody else finds out about this they'll kill him. He'll be ruined if we do this."

The woman sniffled and wiped away a stray tear. As if her kind had feelings.

"And if we don't he'll live the rest of his life like a guinea pig. I don't know about you but I think I'd rather be a ruined experiment than live…like him."

"I don't want to be responsible for the death of another child, Jack. How many did we already kill? How many children did we sacrifice for a FAILED PROJECT?!"

"We already talked about this, Maddie," the man borderline growled.

"We said we—"

"It's done," the man interrupted. "Now add the isoflurane and we can get started."

He snipped the air with the tiny scissors and inhaled. He could tell the man was either crying or about to cry. Both of these evil creatures deserved to feel horrible… He honestly hoped they did. He wanted them to break down so Sam would take him back with her. She would see them as unfit and he could go back. He could sleep in his corner and enjoy the familiarity of her room, right down to the scent. Right down to his real pillow and his real blanket on her carpet. Not this gray tile they used…

And worse…they spoke Esperanto. They spoke his language. He'd come to assume by now that Outside English-speakers who knew nothing about Esperanto were guaranteed to be safer and trustworthier.

Sam would come back though. Yes, she brought him here. Yes, she left him here. But Sam always left and when she did, she always came back. She did that almost every day. She would be gone for hours…so why would this be any exception? She was a fellow English-speaker, they wouldn't dare harm her…so he assumed. They all had the common ground of being English-speakers and honestly from what he'd observed in the past, English-speakers didn't really do anything to other English-speakers. It was practically a rule, so Sam was safe, which meant she would come get him and he would also be safe. And he would be with her again, which meant he would also be with Tucker again.

The man and woman remained quiet for what felt like hours. A clock in the room ticked away but he couldn't bring himself to take his eyes away from the English-speakers to look for it. He wanted to though—he wanted to make sure he knew where every last thing that made a sound was at in this terrible place. Even if it was something as simple and harmless as a clock, he wanted to be absolutely certain of its whereabouts…and more so, that it was in fact a clock and not something that ticked down to his death.

The man, at some point, had fluidly moved from his own projects to help the woman with hers. The once purplish liquid had now turned almost completely clear, with little more than a bluish tint to suggest it wasn't water. Or perhaps it was clear and he was trying too hard to find a difference between a safe substance and an unknown concoction.

He finally heard a door slam from somewhere up the stairs, outside of this room. Something repeatedly pounded on the ground and it nearly echoed. Then the door to the room opened. There was Sam, with Tucker by her side, coming to take him back. He jumped up and ran to them.

"Woah, woah, hey, what is that stuff?!" Tucker barked. "What have you been doing?!"

Sam, upon seeing the liquid in the woman's small glass container, decided to look him over. She honestly did seem like she was searching for something but he couldn't say what.

"He's good," Sam announced once she was done. "No marks anywhere."

She let her backpack slide off her shoulders and drop onto the floor.

"You okay?" she asked him.

Tucker swung his backpack against hers. Her backpack fell forward and from one of its pockets, a few of his books spilled out. She went over to pick them up.

"Thanks for ruining the surprise, Tucker…" she grumbled.

"He can read?" the woman asked.

Tucker shrugged. "Sort of. It's hard to explain. Mind telling us what you're doing with all these beakers and chemicals that you happened to have after we left last night?"

The woman drew out a syringe from a drawer under the desk she was currently working on.

"I said we might be able to help him talk again," she said as she stuck the needle through a sealant on the container, turned it upside down, and began sucking the liquid up. "This is a special kind of anesthetic that should keep him asleep while we remove the metal strip in his throat. We've been working on it all day."

Tucker narrowed his eyes. "So you're getting ready to do surgery on him?"

The woman concentrated on how much liquid she was sucking up and the man moved farther away to fish out a small plastic bag filled with what looked like water.

"More like a surgical procedure," the woman said as the man hooked the bag onto a tall, thin metal pole with wheels. "Not actual surgery though. This is much less invasive."

"Then why put him under? Why not just numb him, take it out, and be done?"

The woman pulled the needle out, flicked the barrel, and squirted a tiny bit of fluid.

"Because," she answered, "he doesn't trust us. He probably won't sit still long enough for the metal to be completely removed and if he struggles at all we could slice one of the vocal folds and he would have to have real surgery to repair it. All in all I don't want to risk damaging his throat any more than I have to. Taking the metal out will be painful enough, the last thing I want is to make him suffer longer."

The man wheeled the pole over to her and she attached a slim tube to the underside of the bag.

"And you were planning to do this without asking us first?" Sam growled.

"Yes," the man said. "We said we would help and we're trying to."

"It's very important we get him to talk again," the woman added. "He can tell us what happened. We need to gather as much information as possible in whatever time we have left. If anyone comes for him, we can take this to the Supreme Court armed with facts and evidence. They can't be tried for the same case twice so we'll need to win the first time. God knows they'll find another way around the system if we don't…"

"You said you might be able to help him," Sam said. "If you do this to him and he still can't talk afterwards, does that mean he'll suffer for nothing?"

"Unfortunately yes," the man replied as he went through a different door.

"Sam, Tucker, I understand you're worried. I can see you've grown very close to him and I know you've taken care of him all this time with no other help. I get that, I really do." The woman sighed. "But my husband and I know what needs to be done. It's not just about feeding him or bathing him, whatever else. Daniel needs to learn how to be a human being, like you two. Like us, like my daughter… Remember when I said he was probably taken from his mother and raised carefully?"

Both Sam and Tucker warily nodded their heads.

"In order to survive Project Level Up—even if it was for a few seconds or a few minutes—he would've had to be physically prepared for it. His body would've had to be able to sustain what is essentially a poison, along with many other poisons. These people knew the dangers of Project Level Up and took a lot of risks. That's why he can heal so quickly. The poisons would've damaged his body so much that if he wasn't able to recover within maybe an hour or so, he would've died. Perhaps he won't ever talk again but his body is made to handle much worse than this. I'm not worried about how well he can heal. That cut on his leg is already gone."

The two of them whipped their heads around to look at his leg.

"There was a cut there?" Tucker asked.

The woman nodded as the man brought back some kind of strange white bed on wheels. A monitor was towed behind him. Attached to that monitor were two wires with flat white circles at the ends.

"Why are there never any scars?" Sam asked the woman. "It's not the first time he's been hurt. His wounds are usually gone the next day."

The woman helped position the original metal pole with the fluid-filled bag beside the upper part of the bed. The man did something to the wheels on the bed so it wouldn't move around.

"Well," she said, "like I said, his body is quick to heal from any damage it takes. Even a stab wound can't kill him. It stands to reason that there would be no scarring when you can blow off pretty much anything. Now, this isn't to say he's invincible or immortal. If he was hit by a car, for instance, and his heart or brain took enough trauma, he would die. Another scenario would be bleeding out. If one of his wounds doesn't heal in time and his body doesn't have time to replenish the blood, he'll bleed to death. Illness and age are mysteries. He may never get old, he may never get sick—we never had the opportunity to find that out…too many children died before we could have that answer."

"Why children? Why not adults? Volunteers?"

The woman finished positioning the bag pole and turned to Sam.

"Even from babyhood, children are so much more resilient than adults. Their bodies can change. They can be taught obedience much more easily. In Daniel's case, and those before him, he was taught a language unique to those who worked with him and was intentionally isolated from English, and probably any other language. The idea was to keep him from questioning their motives."

"What do you mean?"

"It means he only ever knew what they wanted him to know. He never had the chance to think about what they were talking about in English, a language more commonly used among superiors. He was given orders in an exclusive language and therefore he knew nothing but those orders. He didn't even know what to question. This enabled everyone who knew it to keep him under control."

"I still don't understand…" Sam said. "Daniel is by far the most gentle person I've ever met, why would anyone ever go to extremes to control him? All I have to do is tell him something and he'll do it."

The woman walked up to her and put a hand on her shoulder.

"Sam, please understand, Daniel isn't as gentle as you think. By nature he's not a violent person. He was taught to be subservient. He was made to fight enemies much stronger than humanity could ever handle. How could a gentle person ever fight like that?"

"He tried to protect me back at my house."

The woman sighed. "Because you being human is a catalyst for his aggression. He was made to protect humanity and seeing a human in danger activated something inside that isn't in any other human. When the threat was gone, he returned to normal, right?"

Sam nodded.

"He returned to normal only because you—the human—were no longer in danger and therefore he had no more need to fight," the woman continued. "You just didn't see it because he was unable to fight with his rings."

The man motioned for him to come over. He did as the man asked but wondered why Sam or Tucker wasn't stepping in at this point. This wasn't how things were supposed to go. Perhaps they just needed a little more time to understand that these monsters didn't have the intention of taking care of him, not like Sam and Tucker did.

He couldn't bring himself to cooperate and get on the bed without Sam or Tucker's instruction. His eyes hopped back and forth between the two, awaiting the signal to either get on the bed or come towards them. They wouldn't ever let something happen to him…they would call him back, take him to her home, where he belonged…with her…

But instead Sam reluctantly nodded and looked over at the weird bed.

A/N

My brain feels like it's just...slowly melting. In studying I have found out that I was missing some assignments soooo guess who got to catch up on those! Today I was like so beat, I went in my room, logged onto my computer, typed out that last sentence, and screw any revisions, y'all have waited long enough. Sorry about the delay, the assignments were my fault, I should've been keeping up.

And thanks to everyone for being so patient and understanding, you have no idea how much I appreciate that! "Devil's Deal" (soon to be retitled "Deal" and perhaps have a description update) will be updated next since half the chapter has already been written out for a while now.