The tears started coming again and I had to physically hold back a sob that tried to escape. Ash was shaking his head, his skin pale and his hands shaking uncontrollably.
"No way," he said, his voice cracking. "There's no way. We…we saw what happened, Lil. We saw her body. They're screwing with us. Trying…trying to trick us into going back. Right? Right?" He looked at me, his eyes wide with fear and doubt. I felt the same way.
"Maybe we were wrong…" I said. Just the thought made my heart ache. If we had been wrong about Lyric's death…but how could we be? How could we mistake what we saw with our own eyes? I could still remember it perfectly…
It had been raining that day. Sheets poured down on the windows and the building shook each time there was a crack of thunder. Every flash of lightning lit the room up as bright as the overhead lights on the lab tables. Though it was the middle of the day, things were dark outside. The lights inside did little to penetrate the darkness that seemed to leak through the walls. A few drips had started from the ceiling early that morning, one of which landed right on the top of my dog crate. Every two seconds exactly there was an infuriating tap as it dripped onto my cage again.
Scientists hadn't come in that morning like they usually did for blood samples. At first I thought I'd misjudged the time when I woke up, but even three hours later there was still no sign of anyone. I could tell just by looking at Ash, sitting in his own crate across the room, that he'd noticed, too. He had a welt on the side of his face that day, still bleeding slightly…a result of punching one of the scientists in the nose when they tried to remove one of his back teeth for examination. A nearby Eraser cuffed him for acting up. They pulled his tooth out anyway.
About four hours after the usual time, someone finally came in. It was a woman, wearing her lab coat open over a tight black skirt and a red blouse. Her blonde hair flowed behind her as she came into the room, walking with an obvious purpose and goal in mind. When she reached my crate she stopped, as did my heart. She bent down, scanning a clipboard paper as she did so, and then looked up at me. By now I had my back pressed firmly against the back of my cage, uneager to begin whatever new torture this would be.
"Avian-human hybrid, experiment 11?" she asked me. Eleven was not my number, I knew that. I heard my number everyday from white coats, and eleven was not my number. It was Lyric's. But something was off with this lady, with this whole process. No one had come to us that morning, and now she was here looking for Lyric. It made me uneasy, and I didn't like it. So I took a chance,
"Yup, experiment eleven," I told her. "That's me."