Zane was close to breaking.
His feet ached, his legs throbbed, and his lungs burned from running for so long on the modified treadmill. To make matters worse, one of the whitecoats standing nearby, a man who thought of himself as Neil, held a strange device that looked like a remote control but with a long, thin stick-like part sticking out of one end. Every time Zane tried to stop running, Neil jabbed the device's stick at him and sent a shock through Zane's whole body. The shocks didn't leave visible marks, but they left a painful tingling in the spots where the stick had made contact.
As if the physical pain was not bad enough, Zane's emotions were going haywire. His mind automatically filtered through the thoughts and feelings of everyone around him. He sensed their eagerness, their interest, their excitement at testing him, at hurting him, at breaking him down. This was especially true of Neil, whose mind practically screamed with glee every time Zane tried to stop running and Neil got to shock him.
Neil could shock him as much as his cruel mind wanted, because Zane couldn't keep running any longer.
Zane's vision blurred, the front of the treadmill wavering in and out before everything went black. He fell, getting all tangled in the wires that were monitoring his every function, but that didn't matter. The shock from Neil's strange device hit him, then hit him again, then again, but that didn't matter either. Zane was down and out for the count.
His mind provided hazy images as he lay there, half-remembered happenings, partial dreams. He saw his family crowded around him, but he knew they weren't there. Zane was alone.
No, not alone. Worse than alone. Just like those two poor caged kids, Zane had the whitecoats for company.
A harsh pain, a tugging at his skin, a murmuring of voices and minds around him, all of it brought Zane back to his uncaring reality. He blinked up at the ceiling, squinting against the brightness of the light. Hands were removing the electrodes that had attached the monitoring wires to him, pulling quickly and sharply without a thought for how much that hurt.
"It went for so long," Neil's voice marveled, or maybe it was his thoughts. Zane couldn't tell. There were too many thoughts, there was too much going on for him to focus. "Incredible! We knew it would be good at this, but I didn't think it would be this good."
It. They thought of him as an it. Zane wanted to throw up.
"I'm still in shock that we get to study this subject," a different person maybe said, maybe thought. "I've been wanting to dissect the apparatus for as long as I've known about it. Maybe I'll get a chance to run some tests of my own. I hope so, I want to measure its intelligence."
Zane could feel how they thought about him, how they liked the things that made him different. That wasn't in a nice way, in the way Cole and Lloyd and Nya and Kai and Jay liked Zane. That was a distant way, a mean way, a way that made Zane into an experiment and a piece of equipment, not a person. That was the way that made Zane an it, not a he.
Someone either thinking or talking about "its uncanny likeness to humans" slipped a straw into Zane's mouth. It might be water, or it might be some kind of chemical. Zane didn't care. He sucked it down, swallowing over and over. It at least tasted like water, so that much was good.
Another whitecoat picked Zane up, thinking excitedly about the tests she was going to run. Zane lay limply in the whitecoat's arms, letting her take him away.
Wait. Zane shouldn't just let them do what they wanted. He should fight. He should run. He should escape. He would escape. He just couldn't right then. He was too tired and too overwhelmed. Too many minds were thinking too many things, crowding in on his own mind. There was too much exhaustion, too much pain.
The whitecoat carrying Zane placed him inside his dog crate and closed the door behind him. Zane curled up slightly on the floor of the cage, too tired to do anything else. He would rest for a while, then he'd make a plan to get out of there.
Slowly, he blinked, staring out at the world beyond the crate. He saw the furry doggish boy staring back at him. The other boy was gone, had been taken away that morning and hadn't come back, possibly would never come back.
That wouldn't be what would happen to Zane. Zane would fight. Zane would run. Zane would escape. Just as soon as he rested.