by Shaye Easton
A shiver snakes up my spine. It’s as though he just described how best to saw off someone’s arm. “Why would you want to do that?” I say, horrified, disgusted.
“Isn’t it obvious? Once an ability has been isolated, it can be consumed.”
My heart trembles. If I could feel temperatures, I would be cold, cold, cold. “You want my powers.”
“I want all of them.”
“Why?” I ask, half knowing the answer, half not even wanting to.
“Why ask when you already know?”
I swallow. “I don’t get it. Why are you telling me all this?”
Davion smiles coldly. “Simple. I wanted you to know what you’d lost before you lost it. I wanted you to know how close you came. I wanted you to know, to feel, the consequences of that failure.”
I shake my head, dismayed, bewildered. “Why do you hate me so much?” If he didn’t know I was the Final Prophet, then why did he swap me in the first place?
“My god, so many questions. How about you figure it out this time? You’re a smart girl.”
He waits, obviously expecting me to form some kind of conclusion, but I can’t even try. He’s left no clues, no hints. It’s like trying to figure out someone’s height from their shoes: you have somewhere to start, but it’s not nearly enough
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you an hour. If you haven’t worked it out by then, well, I guess you’ll never know. You can go.”
Then I’m pulled back again by a rough set of hands. I protest immediately, but to no avail. I’m dragged from the room and the crooked door slams shut in my face.
Chapter Thirty-Six
I’m led down the halls, turned round corner after corner until I lose track of where I am. The place is a maze—a warren of short passages, tight corridors, and the occasional spacious hallway—and I get the sinking feeling that even if I were able to escape my captors, I wouldn’t be able to find my way out of their den.
We eventually come to a stop before a rusted metal door and one of my guards steps forward to unlock it. It opens upon a dark, dank, windowless room. I swallow, my feet unwilling to lead me into my cage.
“Get in,” my captor snarls and I’m shoved roughly from behind. I stumble forward into the dark, tripping over my own feet. Anger ignites in my veins and I spin around. But I’ve only just turned when the door slams shut, the noise bouncing harshly off the walls.
I stand staring at the newly sealed exit for a full minute, my anger mounting. My gaze strengthens into a glare and then the door begins to rattle, starting out with a slight vibration and progressing to full-blown tremors. I hear shouts coming from outside. They only cause my focus to increase and my power to grow.
Then a voice, clear as day, sounds in my ear: Enough!
I’m so shocked that my anger dissipates in a flash, the door ceasing to rattle as I stagger back a couple of steps. The voice is unfamiliar and I quickly come to the only conclusion possible: telepathy.
Now that I’ve lost focus, I feel the effects of my actions spreading through my body, and my limbs go slack with tiredness. My breathing is loud in the quiet as my anger cools and the scent of stale air reaches my nose.
Without the light from the hall, the room is pitch black—so dark that I may as well be stumbling around with my eyes closed. I hold out my arms in front of me and walk until they touch upon the wall, which I then follow until I reach a corner. The room isn’t very big, but it’s not exactly small either. I sink down to the ground, folding in on myself.
I want to cry, but the tears won’t come. I want to scream, yell and pound my fists against the door until they’re bruised and bleeding, but my throat is sealed shut by unshed tears and my hands are too numb to move. Davion’s given me an hour, but I don’t know what for. I can’t do this by myself—I don’t even know where to begin. And why should I bother? I’m a ghost, curled up in an empty room. I’m not really breathing, not really feeling. The beating in my chest is just a façade and it’s time I accepted it. Being destined for death is like being dead already.
I close my eyes, and my thoughts take me back to last night. Blood splatters across the back of my eyelids. I jerk them open again, but the blood is still there. It drips through the darkness like rain. I remember Caden’s promise; he said he’d never let anything happen to me. But Caden’s gone. I may never see him again.
The thought is like a fist squeezing my heart. I let out an involuntary gasp.
Time in my cage is not like normal time. Seconds stretch into hours. Hours into years. I can’t be certain how long I’ve been here. Has it been an hour? It feels like it’s been at least three. At the same time, it could just as easily have been ten minutes.
I can’t do this. This waiting around, my heart ticking like a countdown, tick, tick, tick, all the way until I’m dead. I follow one of the walls and crawl up to the door, giving one firm pound. “Hey!” I shout.
No one replies, but I know there must be someone standing there. I’m a spectre with supernatural abilities. There’s no way they would leave my prison unguarded.
“Hey!” I pound on the door a couple times more for good measure. “I know you’re there!”
When there’s still no response, I start to wonder if maybe I am alone. Somehow, the thought is worse than imaging the guards outside the door.
Then someone snaps, “What do you want?” The words are startlingly loud and full of venom. I flinch.
“I-I need to go to the bathroom.”
The response is a cold, pitiless laughter slithering under the door. There’s no warmth in the sound and it makes my spine tingle. “Like no one’s ever tried that before.”
I persist. “Please, I really need to go.”
“Well, then pick a corner. You have four.” The voice is distinctly female and hard as ice.
I slink back, defeated. For a while, there’s only the darkness and the ticking, blood in the air, blood on my mind. Back in the corner, I bring my knees up to my chest, hugging my arms around my stomach. I can’t close my eyes. I can’t keep them open. The horror is everywhere. Without realising it, Davion’s placed me into my own special kind of hell.
Suddenly, new sounds slice through the old. Footsteps. Muffled voices. I know without knowing how that my hour is up.
The voices quickly become more distinct and the door unlocks. I press up against the wall behind me, pushing my back into the cement until my bones feel as though they have merged with it. And then a dream—a memory—comes rushing back, in more detail than I have ever seen it.
A door opens and white lights spill harshly into a dark room, a man’s shadow falling across the floor and extending towards me like hands. He steps forward, a moving silhouette, and I scramble back further even though there’s nowhere to go. My small tears turn to violent sobs and then to cries as he approaches.
“Leave me alone!” I cry, but the words are indiscernible coming from my young, contorted mouth.
The man doesn’t listen and doesn’t care. He is quick to quiet me, hushing my screams as he closes the distance between us. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he says, and even at my young age, I can hear the lie in his smooth, low voice. His words are honey—they drip onto the floor and pool at my feet like sticky traps. Get too close and they’ll catch you.
I’m trembling and afraid, but no longer terrified, and the gap is filled with a child’s weak determination. I force myself to stare at his face even though I can’t make out any features, and my stomach twists when I can feel him smiling.
“I promise this won’t hurt a bit,” he says. I want to twist away. I want to make a scene, kicking and clawing to escape the round object in his hand. But I don’t. Even at four years of age, I know it’s futile.
He leans forward, placing the disk on my chest. It’s cold and hard, and when he presses a button on the side, everything erupts in pain. I can feel myself being torn from my body—can feel my very soul as it’s ripped from its moorings—and the sensation is the mo
st excruciating thing I ‘ve ever experienced.
Then everything goes black.
Everything is light as the door swings open, revealing the same man from all those years ago. He’s a little older, a little harder. He’s a silhouette standing in a rectangle of light. He is a long shadow on the floor. His hands extending towards my body.
He is my uncle.
Davion approaches and I get to my feet, not giving the past a chance to repeat. Without meaning to, my eyes trail down to his hands, searching for a circular disk I already know won’t be there.
When he takes his final step towards me, I flinch. Every inch of my body is screaming at me to run away. But where would I go?
“Have an answer yet?” Davion asks.
I glue my eyes to his and glare.
He chuckles softly to himself. “And to think I was worried about you swapping back.” He latches a hand onto my upper arm, yanking me from the wall, and I stumble as he pulls me along, striding purposefully towards the door.
I’ve never seen so much light. After an hour in the dark, the white industrial lighting is like a torch being shined directly into my eyes, even if it flickers, even if every second light box seems to have been blown out. I squint, my eyes watering.
Davion lets go of my arm after a minute, trusting me to follow him. Or maybe just extremely confident in the two guards following closely behind me. I could make a break for it, but I doubt I’d get far.
Then I remember I have abilities. Who needs to run when you can blast them off their feet? I spin around dizzyingly fast and force my hands forward, just like I have before. But the power never comes. I try again, pushing my palms towards the two guards who just stare, humour lighting up their faces. They exchange looks and then, smiling, the man says, ‘Nice try,’ and grips my shoulder, spinning me back around. I’m pushed forward, and continue walking, frustrated, defeated, and humiliated.
A few minutes later we arrive at an elevator. I step in after Davion, my guards after me. The elevator is smooth and quickly brings us up to the next level, but my thoughts are rough and rocky. They knock me down. I’m thinking over everything: everything I’ve seen, everything I’ve remembered, everything Davion’s said. Soon, I can’t hold my words in anymore.
“Why do you hate me?” I blurt out. The doors open. “Please, I need to know.”
For a moment, compassion flickers in his eyes, but it’s blown away by an invisible breeze, leaving only ice and hatred. “The fact that you don’t know is one of the very reasons.”
Then he steps out, and a second later, I’m forced to follow.
We venture deeper into the warren, taking so many turns I lose track. Eventually, we round a corner and as my eyes light upon the hall before me, my steps falter.
It was all leading to this.
My heart is beating fast as realisation sinks in. I’m following Davion down a wide hallway with large arched windows running all the way down the east side. Light from the setting sun shoots into the building, painting the opposite wall orange.
I recall my vision of a future self following a stranger down a grand hallway, the setting sun’s rays bouncing off the walls. Everything happens exactly the way my vision predicated. A lady in dark cargos walks past and eyes me with caution. A tall man sends me a glare. I’ve seen it all before.
It was all leading to this.
We approach the end of the hallway and my heart speeds up. My vision never took me this far. I can feel the very moment the sun dips below the horizon, the hall behind me growing dim and dark in the blink of an eye, as if in warning—a hint of what’s to come. I shiver, almost feeling the cold of the corridor creeping across my back. Almost.
We turn the corner, walking only a quarter of the length of the hallway before Davion stops.
We’re here.
In an instant, I’m consumed by fear. My heart speeds up, my breathing quickens, and my whole body trembles as my eyes latch onto the door. I rub my clammy hands on my pants as a cold sweat breaks out all down my back, plastering my shirt to my skin.
The door opens and before I have the chance to resist, I’m forced into a bright room. It’s an explosion of white, the light spilling onto me in burning waves, and the smell of disinfectant is thick on the air. The floor, the walls, the ceiling are all painted a brilliant white and all are drenched in harsh cold lighting. It’s so strange to see in this place of dilapidation that I momentarily forget why I’m here. People dressed in stark white coats hover around a few metal tables and a simple metal gurney with a thin white mattress on top. At the sound of the door opening, the doctors’ heads snap towards us. They straighten up, clasping their hands in front of them.
Even with all these to take in, nothing attracts my attention like the contraption poised over the gurney. The machine is huge and made entirely from metal. It hangs from a thick metal cylinder that extends from the high ceiling and its curved sides are decorated with an array of multi-coloured buttons and small metal tubes. It’s built in cylindrical layers, with a wide metal band at the top and subsequent bands gradually getting smaller and smaller. The smallest point is no wider than a coin, and protruding from the final band is a tiny needle two inches in length.
And it hums.
A constant droning that I can feel through the floor, shaking my bones, stirring up my blood. I look down and see the edge of my shirt quivering from the vibrations. Somehow, out of everything before me, the sound is the worst. It’s a snake slithering through my body, hissing, inducing a visceral fear. My stomach clenches.
I think I’m gonna be sick.
“Is it ready?” Davion asks, standing off to my right. I’ve subconsciously tried to back out of the room, but my guards take me by the arms and drag me further inside. The odour of disinfectant only gets more pungent. Every breath is like a mouthful of chemicals. I gag.
One of the doctors, a lady with crystalline eyes and brown hair tugged back into a strict ponytail, nods in response. “It’s been warming up while we prepped. We’re all ready to go.”
Davion nods in approval. “Let’s get this started then.”
My guards start to tug me forward and panic sets in. “No!” I yell. “No! No, you can’t . . . you . . . you . . . get off me!” I dig in my heels, kick at their shins, and squirm in their tight grasp. It’s all futile. “LEAVE ME ALONE!”
I ram into the gurney, my hip bone clashing with metal. I try to wrench my arms free, but I only end up hurting myself, their leather gloves leaving rashes on my skin. They hoist me up onto the bed, and it takes both my guards and almost all the doctors to keep me there. I can feel their hands everywhere: on my arms, my ankles, my thighs and my shoulders. Someone puts a large meaty hand on my forehead and thrusts me down into the headrest.
“LET ME GO!” I scream, tears streaming off the side of my face and into my hair.
They begin strapping me in with hard, metallic clasps. One on each ankle. Two for each arm. Another over my hips. A man attempts to close a final clasp around my neck and I jolt, driving my body forward with a scream. I’m slammed harshly back down onto the hard mattress, two unforgiving metal hands snapping shut around my neck with a sickening sense of finality.
Then I look up. I gasp loudly, my heart launching into a frenzy as I come face to face with the needle point of the machine. I have to clamp my mouth shut before the terrified scream building up in my chest can escape. Isn’t my soul in my chest?! My soul’s in my chest, right? Oh god, oh god.
There’s a pinch in my arm as I’m hooked up to a machine. The doctors above me appear no more than a blur as they move, attaching things to my body left and right. Shortly, a machine next to me starts emitting a fast, tiny beep. It takes me a moment to realise it’s my heart monitor.
“161,” someone calls, and then there’s a face above me, a set of crystalline eyes staring into mine.
“You need to calm down,” she says, placing a hand on my arm. Meanwhile, my heart is pounding against my ribs, fear infecting every inc
h of my body. My eyes spin in and out of focus as I try to latch onto her face, to latch onto anything. I’m falling and there’s nothing here to stop it: no arms extended, no ledges or footholds or overhangs for me to grip. And all the while, these people are standing up on solid ground, watching me unconcernedly as I tumble down, down, down.
“Can you hear me?” she asks, and now she is concerned. “You need to calm down.’”
But my pulse isn’t slowing down, and the fear in my body refuses to release its tight hold on my heart. “My spirit’s…in my chest…right?” my words come out as small gasps.
Worry flits across the lady’s face and she sends a quick look at something by the door before looking back down at me.
“Your spirit lives in all parts of you,” she says, “but the part we need to access is…” She looks away.
I follow her gaze. It leads me to Davion, standing off to the side with his arms crossed, his expression enigmatic. With dismay, I realise the worry wasn’t for me. She was simply concerned Davion would disapprove of her talking to me.
The woman looks back at me. “It’s in your brain.”
“178,” the same voice from earlier calls again.
“You have to calm down now,” she says. “It’ll be so much easier if you calm down.” Easier for me or easier for her? Either way, I’m not calming down. I can’t. My eyes dart in circles as I frantically search for a way out.
“181 and climbing!”
The lady leans away. “Sedate her.” She moves out of my sight.
There’re quick footsteps and rattling and the unmistakable sound of metal toppling to the floor. For some reason, they’re rushing. People are speaking over each other, the words blending into white noise in my ears, and the beeping continues to speed up, just as my breathing continues to quicken. Underneath all the chaos is the hum, droning inexorably, stirring my brain into mush.
A man steps up to my side, a needle clutched in his shaky hands. He takes a deep breath. “This shouldn’t hurt,” he says. “It’s just to knock you out.” His hands still but the panic on his face doesn’t dissipate.
