It was one of… those moments. Where your mind goes wild and you're not exactly sure what you thought.
It was the first moment I remember. The first after a storm of dark and chaos, the first in which I could navigate my own psyche and feel the soft presence in my mind that was her.
In the first moment, there were two of us—in the second, she was torn apart, a nuclear explosion in my skull ripping whatever she was to nothing but atoms and then scorching them all away, one by one, at the speed of light.
Usually, the trip to the JDR was tedious—after he escaped Jheriko, at least.
But he always noticed when the Anxiety came back. It was a stark, cold feeling, bleeding at the pit of his stomach and scoring ever-so-slowly up his insides. When the Anxiety came back, it was all he could think about, and he found himself too cold to be bored.
He could sit still for hours as it bled through him. He had before, chained to one place by the impervious fear of every part of the world around him, flinching at any sound, choking back the nausea that arose with every voice grating against his ears, clutching his chest like he was trying to pierce it with his fingers and rip out his phantom terror.
He biked up the path, climbing higher in the sky as the sun sank lower, trading places with him. He kept his legs moving, his eyes blinking, forcing the cold blood in him to flow. He had to keep up motion; he had to find some way to force the Anxiety back wherever it came from, because it didn't make sense for it to strike him now.
Perhaps he was imagining it. Maybe the thought of Noah leaving for good had set him on edge—he could never forget that for long.
Orson pressed on, leaning over the bag in the wire cage. It rippled rather violently in the wind as it grew harsher, somehow less timid as the light died, as the sun fell lower, as he biked higher up the precarious cliff-face path, maneuvering his front wheel as best as nine years' experience taught him to, as best as he could when his arms started trembling.
He was in sight of the facility when they did. Stiffening and locking his elbows, he stared ahead, suddenly careless of the thousand tiny rocks and pebbles littering the path, waiting to tip his bike over the edge if he wasn't watching—but none of them dared. He looked up long enough to trace the hulking silver silhouette of the place with his gaze, to notice like he did every time how much it looked like a metallic giant crouched over the cliff side, legs dangling into oblivion, head bowed toward its lap. Petrified and frozen in place for something upwards of seventy years.
As he neared it, the lights dotting the electrical fence gleamed like thick stars, all juxtaposed in a broad ring that lit up the dark stenciled letters on the outside of the giant's left leg—JHERIKO DEPARTMENT OF RESEARCH. The spray-painted words had been reapplied over and over again, sometimes white, sometimes red—sometimes only the better-known abbreviation for the place. This was the ninth week the current words had been there. Something in the back of his mind had always kept track, ever since there was no one left to do it for him.
He pulled up to the gate, feeling his legs go limp in relief as the ground flattened out beneath him. Orson stopped himself when he felt the full force of the gate's artificial light pooling around him, making sure he was in a good place for the security camera to recognize his face, staring up and glaring through the brightness, eyes flicking back and forth between the empty concrete nests perched on either side of the gate. In the JDR's early days, the place had been guarded 24/7, able-bodied men with guns twice as heavy and many times as powerful as Orson's Ruger milling around the nests and the cluttered space beyond the gate. Military men were a common enough sight on the island—yet lately he'd seen none.
His mother would know where they'd gone. His mother knew everything.
The cold in his chest then dropped. Maybe they were concentrated inside the JDR. Maybe something had gone wrong in there—something radioactive, deadly, like that one time before he was born. Orson felt his skin prickle and the shivers trailing down his back; the air in his lungs was suddenly painful and poisonous and lined with beta particles. The restless cold in him inched towards his heart.
He swallowed.
"—son? Orson Dröge—can you hear me?"
At the sound he flinched hard, head snapping up to the speaker where it was fixed on the upper base of one of the nests, behind a grate.
"Can you hear me?"
Yes, he could hear her—her voice was broken, starkly feminine. What, did she think he'd jumped at the wind?
"What?" he called, narrowing his eyes at the speaker. "Why is—"
"You're Orson Dröge?"
"...Yes. I am." His voice was hoarse and stubborn—he thought he felt the coldness seep into his words.
"Can you answer me a question? Your father told said only you would be able to. And if it's right I'll let you in."
"My father? What?" Then, stronger, "Yes."
"Okay. What was the given name of A-ME—3's deceased twin?"
His face contorted and he stared upwards, searching through the glare of artificial stars for where the woman behind the speaker was watching him, studying every tic of his body language, waiting for him to move in a way that would give away his lie, if his answer was indeed a lie. His name is Yuri, he wanted to snap, but he never would. You couldn't be direct with these people—you needed a lighter touch.
The rush of indignant annoyance in him tried as it might to drown the growing cold in his head, his stomach, but he crushed it all down. He shifted unevenly, stared this way and that, grabbed absently at his ear—he felt her tense, even across this distance. When he spoke, she'd be on the edge of her seat, expecting some bullshit from a random kid hoping to sneak in, but—
"You mean besides A-FE—3? Her name was Shrike."
Silence. He swallowed a grin.
The gates lurched into motion, retracting to reveal the yawning path ahead of him, and the speaker managed to spit out a word—"Enter."
The yawning hallway seemed to stretch and spiral before him; he gritted his teeth as the twin sets of doors cascaded shut at his back, sealing off any lingering light of day and the blooming silver glow of night. He stood barely beyond the threshold, staring into silvery oblivion, feeling like he was standing on the edge of a black hole.
He realized for the first time in nine years that he didn't like this place.
The Anxiety was a cold, stubborn bubble pushing against his heart. His knees tried to shake; he locked them, pulling the paper bag and the pidgeotto against him. His bike leaned on the wall to his right, perched uncertainly, front wheel facing the way he'd come—ready, should he decide to flee.
The bag rustled, and he lurched into motion, staring down the silver pit of gravity that was the hallway, feet locking into the familiar path they took to the ex-room deeper inside the JDR—it was a room that hung over the cliff's edge, built into the giant's leg, equipped with a hatch to the outside that often fell open on its own. The cold inside him froze over at the thought of it and he could imagine himself there, standing over it as the heavy trapdoor swings open and lets the wind rush in, leaning closer and closer to the edge till gravity takes over...
He shivered and killed the thought.
"Orson!"
He froze. He recognized her voice just fine, never mind that it was freed of the static timbres and undertones that had accompanied it outside.
She had emerged another hallway that fed from his, flanked by a more familiar pot-bellied man dressed in pristine white—from his coat to his boots to his thinning hair to the pair of gloves he was turning over and over again in his hands, to the metallic frames of the glasses sliding off his thin nose.
"Lawrence," Orson said, brow furrowing. He glanced back to the woman, who was cutting a lanky figure against the darkened walls behind her. "You were in the gate room? With her? Why?"
He noticed the small cart Dr. Lawrence was reeling behind him, the top of it equipped with a few thin cotton sheets and what looked like a large white hand towel. He'd seen those carts—but only in the ex-rooms, where people like Dr. Lawrence were confined. He'd never known what 'ex' really meant, whether it be externalities or examination or experimentation, but he knew those rooms were a hell of a lot less secretive than what went on in the other wings of the JDR, places Dr. Lawrence and his colleagues were restricted from entering, places like where his dad worked.
The old man gave a curt nod, swinging the cart around in front of him, letting the forced squeals of the wheels dissolve in the black hole hallway. "Orson." He greeted him just as briskly. "You caught something on your hunt? I'll take it back for study."
But that's my job. That's what you pay me to do.
He found the woman's eyes, far above his own. Her face, hard-angled and severe, matched up rather perfectly with the static voice he'd heard outside—both exuded an uncertain forced authority, a false strictness. She gave him a thin-lipped smile.
"Why?" he asked, narrowing his eyes, shifting his weight. The bag rustled and small bubbles of cold burst behind his ribs at the motion—for half a moment he was cursing himself for ever having thought a paper bag was enough to contain a pidgeotto ripped from its home, the sky. He eyed a small case resting on Dr. Lawrence's cart, probably containing small syringes with specialized needles, picturing how he'd smash through the lock and grab for one to bury in the neck of the pidgeotto if it woke up now and flew into one of the rampages that had the tendency to leave scars on his face.
Dr. Lawrence cast an uncertain look towards the woman, sidling to Orson with his head down and his hands extended outwards, old ginger root protrusions from the bulky sleeves of his lab coat. "I don't know much, Orson—but the team back in the wing can take it from here. Don't worry, you'll still be paid before you leave tonight."
Orson didn't miss the sharp look the woman shot Dr. Lawrence. He didn't think the old man could bow lower as he rested his gnarly hands on the sides of the bag, struggling against the way Orson tensed and locked his elbows, hands going stiff as the doctor weakly wrenched it from his grasp.
The woman spoke and he started at how much her voice still replicated its static counterpart, how she talked as if he were still an outsider, a shady kid on a bike loitering outside the JDR's gates with a maybe-dead maybe-alive pidgeotto in his arms. "Sorry about this," she said, narrowing her eyes like she was unfamiliar with the word 'sorry'. "But I've been asked to pull you aside. Your father would like to see you."
The Anxiety had been a rising bubble, pressing against his ribs and his lungs, daring Orson to move in such a way that would burst it and send him staggering to the ground under all the weight of the air and the ceiling and the sky that he'd somehow gone without noticing for too long.
Now it was roiling. Ripping and pulling like a tide. He stared at her as his arms fell slowly to his sides, nervous fingers balling the fabric of his jeans as she gazed with a kind of blank curiosity, like she could see what he was thinking and wasn't quite sure what to make of it. He certainly hadn't seemed like the flighty type, looming before the JDR's fortified gates.
"My father," he echoed hollowly, crushing down the pathetic note of disbelief that almost managed to bleed through. "What? Is it about Yuri? What happened?"
Her brow twitched. "No need to panic," she reassured him. She said it like there was something to panic about. The Anxiety seeped and pooled in his lungs, poisoning the air he exhaled.
In his peripheral vision, Dr. Lawrence still had his head bowed like a stricken dog, slipping the unconscious pidgeotto onto the cloth and rifling through the case. Orson caught a flash of sharp silver.
"But…" She dragged the word out till Orson was staring at her again. "I'll need you to come with me."
"Will this be long?" he suddenly asked, mind jumping to Noah—to a grainy, fabricated image of him slumping in the ancient couch they'd shoved in front of the radio, listening absently, eyes flicking to the old grandfather clock ticking in the corner of his eye, watching the minute hand slip faster and faster and the hour hand's sluggish course in its wake, focused on nothing else as they made their stop together at 7:30—and he'd freeze till Orson walked through the door, barely on time as usual.
He wondered what Noah would think if he wasn't back—maybe that the angry people had found a way to turn their frustration into enough courage to jump him on his bike and leave him bleeding and unconscious in a ditch somewhere next to the pidgeotto they'd decided was dead.
Noah refused to admit he was the paranoid type.
"I can't say," she murmured, shuffling back down the darkened hallway from which she'd come as Dr. Lawrence meekly rolled the cart in the opposite direction, not bothering to spare a glance over his shoulder. Orson took a few tentative steps toward the woman till she was confident he was following her. "I can't say what Dr. Dröge wants with you, either. They only sent me to fetch you."
Orson trailed her, studied her from behind—she really was tall, almost terribly so. The inch heels weren't helping, but merely based on how she walked, with her face tilted toward the ceiling, her shoulders set back—it was enough for Orson to deduct that she was too confident to let it bother her. Or perhaps she enjoyed towering over her colleagues. Perhaps it made her feel powerful, like he knew it must've when she droned at him through the loudspeaker.
"What's your name?" he asked, gazing suspiciously at her back.
"...Dr. Bridger."
Unfamiliar—not that his father mentioned the names of his assistants or coworkers. Not that his father ever mentioned anything about his work.
But all the times he'd gone to the JDR, he had never seen her before.
Perhaps she was new. Perhaps her rank within the hierarchy of the JDR's scientists was rather low, despite the age evident in the deep wrinkles on her forehead and the spearow's feet he'd seen lining her eyes. She had admitted to not knowing what was going on.
In essence, his father had said before, leaning across the dinner table with a fork in each hand and a wide-eyed expression on his face, the JDR is like the world's most exclusive club. You're in or you're out. And even if you're in—he'd paused for effect, staring both his sons in the face before continuing—you're still sort of out. Most of the time, anyway. He'd hardly tried to hide his smirk.
Dr. Bridger was, most definitely, out.
But not you, Dad, Noah had said with a grin, thinly attempting to mask the pride in his voice.
Nope. Dr. Dröge chewed and swallowed before flashing his sons an odd smile. Not me.
Uncertain as she was—she knew where she was going. She took twelve turns and two short flights of stairs, Orson trailing in her wake, trying to fathom the blueprints of JDR and how the place must span out like a web on the sheet, hundreds of little fiber hallways darting this way and that in a building meant to confuse anyone who tried to navigate it, anyone who wasn't meant to be there.
Orson didn't know what he was expecting. Maybe a gradual arrival at some grand set of heavy double doors that were otherwise four-foot thick concrete walls without a key—not Dr. Bridger's sudden stop in the middle of the hallway, the tense way she said, "We're here," the small windowless door in the wall that had been left ajar for them.
She stood aside, taking the handle with her, nodding at him. He stared across the threshold—his eyes didn't get far.
"Orson."
His father stood there—a tall, broad-framed man gazing out of a face that was a mirror image of his son's, albeit aged forty years and pockmarked with old radiation scars instead of the pale lines scoring across Orson's. On both their heads were thick shocks of dark and unruly hair—though his father's was shot through with silver, remnants of the time when Atticus Dröge had been "susceptible to stress"—now, as he said, it was part of him, it lived and flourished in him, it was something he would never be free of—and it bothered him no longer.
Orson stared at his father in something that felt like disbelief but wasn't. His eyes narrowed as Dr. Dröge gripped his son by the shoulders, swallowing and trying a smile that wasn't real. "Kid. You made it." His voice was a strong, rasping whisper.
"What's going on?" Orson murmured, suddenly scared a sound too loud would shatter this moment, suddenly cursing himself for speaking and making it pass.
"Come inside," his father said quietly, eyes flicking away from Orson's to stare into the hallway that was a cheap imitation of the gravity pit he'd first walked into—and he found Dr. Bridger, reduced to nothing but the uncertainty she tried to hide without the severity of her face and posture and voice, nothing but a nervous twig of a woman in the presence of the acclaimed Dr. Dröge, under the weight of his stare and his voice—"Celia," he said, "Thank you."
Like that, Dr. Celia Bridger was dismissed. She tried to croak out a few words, gave up, and hurried back the way she'd come.
Orson felt alone, standing in his father's steadily loosening grip. The Anxiety was no longer a bubble, no longer a roiling tide, but something he felt streaming through his blood, pushing against his ribs with his pulse, echoing in the wake of his thoughts.
It would consume him. In minutes.
"Is this…" Orson swallowed, unsteady for a moment as his father backed away from him, into the clean, sterile darkness of the room at his back. He began again. "Is this about Yuri?"
His father looked away, his eyes focusing on something unseen. The darkness was not so thick, Orson realized, as he crossed the event horizon and arrived at his father's side. There was light coming from somewhere. He then saw what it was Dr. Dröge was staring at, and he wanted to look away, but the cold had frozen him from the inside out.
"Yes," murmured Dr. Dröge. "This is about Yuri."
I know what they're doing. They think if they blind me, I cannot see.
But I do see - smudges of heat dancing in a void, reaching here and there with twiggy arms and saying this and that in sharp-edged voices.
I'll be in the tank again soon. In minutes.
It does to me what it does to him. They've discovered that we're the same, he and I, if we want to be.
But he has no control over what is to come. And I cannot save him. He knows I can't, and for this I fear he may resent me.