Today is the day, Lana thinks as she changes into her sterile sky-blue jumpsuit. Today is the day I'm leaving. The cold bracelets press into her skin as she moves her hands, embedded just enough to feel uncomfortable. A reminder.

She recites the schedule in her head. She knows who today's guard is; she can tell by the brusque way he opens the slot on her door and by his brown fingers as he drops today's breakfast on the plate.

It's normal today, as far as she can tell. They're not running a test on how well she can use her psychic abilities with low nutrition. Just to make sure, she tests out her telepathy against the guard (his name is Terrance, she learns from the scan) and there's nothing. A dull warning headache and a twinge as the bracelets constrict.

It will get worse if she keeps trying, and the further away she gets from the building if she tries to escape. It's this reminder that firms her resolve, making her angry. She doesn't let any of it show on her face. She's learned better than that.

But she will not be here for one more day.

She slides off her cot, her bare feet touching the cold, grey floor. Her bedroom—as the Matron likes to call it instead of a cell—seems to be always kept a few degrees below comfortable. She moves towards the food—it's undercooked egg and burnt toast. Torchwood doesn't care about their test subject's food, just that she's living.

As she's picking up her fork, she hears the clicking of heels, the cadence and pace of which she memorized when she was nine years old.

The Matron, the woman in charge of Lana, and the only person who's spoken to her or given her any affection since she first came here.

Lana freezes for half a second and then continues to eat her food calmly, not showing the cameras that anything is wrong. It wasn't supposed to be today. She wasn't supposed to come today.

She doesn't speak, doesn't let her face betray anything but blankness. It's okay, it'll be fine. She can salvage this.

(The Matron is excellent at manipulating her.)

She hears the woman's long nails against the keypad—two nine four zero—and the door slides open. Matron enters just as Lana sets her fork to the side and folds her hands in her lap, eyes down demurely.

(But Lana is excellent at manipulating the Matron. She knows what the woman wants from her and has become an expert on appearing to give it. Sometimes, the acting gets so close to real life that she forgets that it's acting. That's what makes the game so dangerous.)

"Good morning, Lana." Matron says, smiling.

"Good morning, Matron." Lana replies. Her expression is smooth, but she taps her fingers against the table to appear nervous. The Matron notes it and smiles a bit wider.

(Some nights, staring up at the pure white ceiling of her cell, Lana acknowledges that she gets a bit of sick thrill in the game, as well.)

"I just thought I'd pop in to celebrate. Today is a special day, you know."

"It is, Matron?" Lana says in a perfect tone, polite without sounding overly sweet, confused without sounding stupid.

(The only way she tells time here is between sleep cycles.)

"It's your birthday."

Lana blinks. "So that means that I'm..."

"Seventeen, yes. There's always that bit of confusion about it, you know. You were logged as born in 2008 during the year 2007!" Matron chuckles falsely. "I do so hate false data."

Lana winces, a throb echoing around her brain for a moment.

"Are you quite alright, dear?"

(She hates the Matron. She loves Matron. She doesn't quite know, sometimes.)

"Nothing, Matron. Just a headache, the mana—bracelets cause them sometimes." Matron doesn't like it when she calls them manacles. They're for your own good, dear. Wouldn't want you hurting yourself with that nasty disease of yours.

Matron hums disapprovingly. "Well, perhaps we'll get those looked at."

They won't.

The thin woman smiles. "As a birthday treat, I've postponed your time in the Distributor until tomorrow."

Lana twitches, her stomach clenching. She can't go in that again, she can't, she can't, she—

Matron's hand cups along her chin and Lana shudders involuntary. The touch sends shivers off the point and down her back. She isn't touched very often. "I'm quite proud of you, Lana." She says softly. "You've been very good lately."

Lana almost smiles at the praise, then lets herself do so.

(It's an act. She knows it's an act. It's just sometimes hard to remember.)

The Matron smells like peppermints. She's been here practically her whole life, except for that stint in the foster centre when she was small. She remembers golden aliens, pulling on her for ages and ages, until a skinny man and a red-haired woman came and stopped it. She doesn't quite remember their names, which makes her feel sort of empty, sometimes.

"If you're good and go willingly tomorrow, I think we'll both be very happy. I work hard on that machine, you know, and I would hate for it to go to waste." Matron pulls away sharply, and Lana sits up straight, taking deep breaths.

Matron smiles, a touch of something triumphant in her eyes, then it's masked. "I'll see you again tomorrow."

Lana waits until the door closes, then stands up and walks evenly to the corner, a spot where she knows her face can't be seen by the camera. Inside, she's screaming.

She waits about a half hour, going through her normal routine. She braids her hair and washes her face using the small sink in her room before she starts it. The Plan. She's been working on it, on and off, for months. Years, almost. At first it was just a delusion, a fantasy to keep her occupied. But it's solidified into something hard and real ever since the Distributor.

They're trying to rip her telepathy out of her, to cut it out like she's a dog to be neutered. Every time she goes through it, she loses a part of herself, and it hurts. Bright lights around her and an awful tearing sensation and she screams and screams and screams—

Lana looks down and realizes there are white fingernail shaped indents in her hands, about to draw blood. She pulls her brain away.

Once she starts this, there will be no going back. If she succeeds, if everything goes right, she'll get to the States and hide out there. If it goes wrong, they'll take her back here and there will be no special privileges and they'll be so much harsher.

She's breaking out of here.

Lana moves to her bed, sits down, and summons her psychic powers. Not those small pushes she's been doing for months to lull the Matron, feints, like foreshocks before the earthquake. And something inside her sits up and stretches, fuzzy and contained by her manacles, but there, ready and waiting.

The euphoria of feeling it again almost makes up for the pain summoning it brings. Lana pushes it through the cracks of the manacles, the empty spaces that haven't been completely closed off, and reaches.

There are soft sensations of minds all around her. She searches until she finds the right one—the man in charge of watching the cameras. Currently, he's thinking about how boring his job is, because she never does anything interesting.

Savageness bursts inside her for a moment. She'll show him something worth remembering.

This next part starts her timer. She yanks on his sense of boredom of watching the screens, not too much as to alert Matron that something is amiss in her monitors where the woman monitors her psychic output. Lana brings to the front of his mind his worries about the next football game. Her manacles screech at her as she tugs on more time on his disinterest, then pulls back inside herself, letting that golden energy be trapped behind cold walls once again.

This is when it really starts, she thinks, feeling a thrill. She has about thirty seconds to do the next step.

Lana gets up and strides to the steel bolted box on the wall that holds the wires connecting to the keypad on the other side. She takes out a bent and sharpened plastic knife and pulls it open, the weak rusty edge of which she's been working on for weeks. She smiles.

The box is now open, the crisscrossing wires now bare and naked for her to play with. This next part doesn't take much finesse.

17, 18, 19—She slashes the serrated edge of the torn-off metal against the wires available and yanks out a few more, cuts and slashes until the lights start to flicker—21, 22, 23, runs to the sink and fills a cup she nicked after a well-time psychic nudge—26, 27, 28, 29—she feels the man at the cameras shake himself out of his daze just as she tilts the cup into the box filled with live wires.

There's an ominous pop, then a hiss, and the light shut off. She hears a distant alarm outside her door and there's a soft glow as the emergency lights come on.

Lana can't breathe. She did it. The power is off. Weeks of preparation and practicing and it worked.

She yells something wordless, just for the sake of it, just to hear her own voice. Cautiously, barely daring to hope, she pushes her weight against her door and—

It slides open.

Lana stands on the edge for a millisecond and then dashes to the keypad, kept active by emergency generators. She's memorized the code after years of watching the Matron type it in. Two-nine-four-zero, and she taps on deadlock seal. The door hisses shut once more. They'll think she's still locked in her room because of the power loss and won't bother checking until, hopefully, she's gotten a solid fifteen-minute head start.

She turns to look at her prison once more, the place where she's lived for nearly a decade. No, not lived, that's too good a word. Been kept alive, more accurately. She doesn't know what she'll do when she gets out, but she'll be living. Somehow.

There's no time for sentiment. Remembering the way, she walks quickly down the sterile white hall and left until she finds the door where all the experiments on her are done. The hallways are dim, kept visible only by dull red emergency lights on the floor. Lana wipes her sweaty palms on her clothes.

Thank goodness, she meets no one in the hall. Reaching the door, she punches in the Matron's access code that opens everything. The door opens silently to reveal panicked scientists fussing over equipment, not noticing her yet.

Blinding rage fills her whole body. She's livid, it's dangerous, and it feels good. It makes her feel powerful.

She can kill them. She can go inside their minds and leave them gabbling, mindless fools like they would've done for her. Ten years experimenting on her, never so much as a comforting smile or platitude as they poked and prodded at her and tried to rip out her soul. They deserve it, it's justice—

Her manacles heat white hot before she even realizes she's acting, yanking her out of her fury. It's still there, of course. At that moment she promises that once she escapes, she'll make herself so strong that no one will ever hurt her again. She'll get revenge on these people, too. They deserve to hurt like she has. The rage quiets down, a sleeping beast in her chest.

She twists through the barriers around her mind once more and directs their attention away from herself. It's an easy thing to do, to make their eyes slide away from her. As far as she can remember, she's been doing this since she was a little girl, before she even knew what it was. Her manacles pulse angrily but aren't quite strong enough to keep her from doing something so low level.

Quietly, she moves to the back computer, and almost at once realizes she doesn't know what she's doing.

Lana had sort of just assumed she'd know what to do, but now realizes how stupid she'd been, like knowledge of how to hack into a computer and release the manacles would just appear out of thin air. She sets her jaw and types in the Matron's code anyway.

With the time limit imposed on herself, she has five minutes. The computer boots up, it's glow obvious enough that she has to work harder to keep it unnoticeable. The pain increases.

She pulls up the database and searches her name, Lana Phillips. There are all sorts of information there, about what they've found on her over the years, and her fingers itch to learn more, but she restrains herself from getting distracted. There will be plenty of time to learn how to hack into Torchwood later, when she's free.

(When she's free, and she burns it all down.)

She scrolls till she finds a section titled Psychic Energy Inhibitors and reads quickly. The first entry is when she was nine in 2016.

[Subject 1] responds well to psychic inhibitors. No energy is detected influencing others. Still needs improvement, as the inhibitors are end-negative, and energy is not able to be redirected as a power source.

See the initial layout of psychic inhibitors and how they were adapted from the Canary Wharf Incident.

Six months later:

[Subject 1] has managed to twist Inhibitors off ankles despite heavy bleeding and pain. Unfortunately, our hypothesis of gradual tapering off of her natural abilities has failed, as her current psychic output without the Inhibitors is the same level as before her time with them. In fact, we theorize that it will likely grow stronger as she ages and throughout puberty.

Despite setbacks, we are certain that the next prototype of the Inhibitors will be much more effective. As the first device ever created to measure psychic energy, it still can be improved. Future schematics have been proposed that [Subject 1] will be unable to remove.

2017:

Attempts to transfer psychic abilities to others have been a resounding failure. More experiments will have to be conducted on [Subject 1] to determine what aspect of her brain chemistry makes her body able to emit high levels of psychic energy. The theory of partial non-terrestrial elements of [Subject 1] has been proposed, but after intensive research, has been dismissed. [Subject 1] is entirely human.

Genetic testing on locating birth parents has been unsuccessful.

2018:

Psychic Energy Inhibitors have been transferred to wrists of [Subject 1] and wrapped around the radial artery. If Inhibitors are removed, the artery will be severed, and the Subject will be unconscious in thirty seconds and die in two minutes. For additional security, a tracking device will be activated, and Torchwood will attempt to locate [Subject 1] before her termination.

(Logged attempt to convince the Subject's primary monitor to warn [Subject 1] of the consequences of removal of the updated Psychic Energy Inhibitors. Request was denied.]

Lana feels an involuntary shudder run through her as she finishes the last entry. She rubs her manacles. If she'd tried to remove the manacles without taking precautions, she could have killed herself. That said, she isn't sure how to take precautions in the first place.

Her lips tighten. She'll have to just deal with the restrictions on her mind until she finds someone who can take them off. This part of her plan had always been a bit woolly. Regardless, she has to get out of here, quick.

With a check down the hallways, she slips out the door and releases her hold on the scientists, letting out a breath of relief at the lack of pain. She walks as swiftly as possible to the way out as she remembers from a quick glimpse of an exit once while being walked to an experiment.

The back door is locked, but a punch in of the code opens it. It swings open with a creak and she's in a long, concrete hallway that twists and there's another door that she just pushes, no code needed, and—

Sunlight in her eyes. And... noise, and colors.

Lana stills, struck dumb by the novelty of it all. She's in a back alleyway, and there's cars honking, and people yelling, and buildings everywhere. She looks behind her—her prison looks almost ordinary.

She can't let herself get frozen, however. She can feel her time running out, so she takes off walking, trying to look like she knows where she's going. It becomes quickly apparent that Lana does not, so she stops someone to ask.

The words are almost out of her mouth, do you know where the airport is, but then the person looks up at her, an irritated look on his face, and the words die. Instead, a sort of croaking noise comes out, the prospect of speaking to another person becoming quickly overwhelming.

There's just so many people everywhere.

Lana steps back and takes a few deep breaths. She's talked to people before, she must have, outside of Torchwood, even, when she was a little girl. It can't have been this alarming before, can it?

Lana ignores her panic and resolves to try again. Stopping a pudgy man in a white suit that seems amenable, she asks, "Which direction to the airport?"

He frowns. "It's miles southwest of here, my dear. Just hail down a cab and they'll take you wherever you need."

"A... cab." The word tastes odd in her mouth. "The yellow cars?"

He gives her a look that seems familiar, of discomfort. "'Course. Are you foreign, or something?"

"No, just, er, acclimating. Ah, thank you?" Those seem to be the right words to say. People always seem to know which ones are the right ones by the way a person raises an eyebrow or clears a throat or something, but Lana never seems to get those cues.

The man nods and quickly walks away.

Lana looks around carefully, and notices other people hailing cabs. She copies them, stands on the edge of a sidewalk and raises a hand. "Taxi!" She shouts. A car doesn't immediately appear, but she does like the way volume feels. She yells the word again, and in a few moments a car pulls over.

She pulls open the door and sits down, running her hands on the leather. "Where to?" The gruff man in front of her asks.

"Ah... airport."

He grunts and accelerates. A laugh comes out of her at the speed, and he raises his eyebrows at her. She ignores it. It's like... rediscovering so many things she's forgotten. She remembers riding in a car, to get to Torchwood, and she remembers this city, London. Torchwood had tried so hard to convince her that there wasn't a world outside of her cell, but she's going to see it all.

She's been riding for about five minutes when the pain starts.

It's a shooting electricity in her wrists, making her arms feel numb. She gasps despite herself. She hadn't known... Matron must have been activating them, as soon as she discovered Lana was gone. She'd hoped it would take longer. The pain comes back, shooting through her nerves in her hands and all the way up to her shoulders.

"Stop." She says through gritted teeth. The man frowns.

"Sorry?"

"I said—" Lana fights off a yell as it starts again, the pulse much longer this time. "Stop the car."

"You haven't paid yet—"

"Stop driving!" She punctuates this with a strong psychic impression, a mistake that only makes the pain worse, but the man dutifully pulls over and unlocks the car. She jumps out and staggers into an alleyway.

She can barely think. It's going all down her legs, like the blood pumping from her veins in her wrists is taking the agony everywhere through her body. She almost wants them to find her, suddenly, if it would just make it stop—

No, no she doesn't, she's just tasted freedom and she's not going to let it go, not for a bit of pain, she can get through it if—

Lana can't help but scream at this pulse. She drags her wrists up to her mouth and bites down to muffle it. Tears leaking through her vision, she looks up and is certain she's hallucinating. There's an odd ringing in her ears, sounding like wheezing, and the next time she blinks there's a blue telephone box.

The novelty almost distracts her from the pain. She's certain that it hadn't been there before. The door creaks open and a tall, thin man in a suit walks out, followed by a red-haired woman, both looking around for something.

When she looks at them, at the box, something aches inside her. It's almost like—intuition, but the wrong direction, like she's remembering something that will happen, that did happen, and will keep happening for ages and ages.

Something tells her that she's not quite made it out of immediate danger yet.

A/N: chapter titles 1-4 are from evermore (the song, not the album) by taylor swit, and this one is from the moon will sing by the crane wives! sorry for the late update, if you'd like them more consistent you might consider following this story on Ao3 which is where i usually post, under the same name but with a differnet penname: MentallyIllTelepath. anyway, thank you so much for reading, i hope you guys enjoyed it. please leave a review if you can, they make my day!