The Labs (The GEOs Book 2)

by Ramona Finn

  I did as he’d instructed and, sure enough, the door opened. The clones let me step inside first. They stayed by the doorway as the door slid shut behind us.

  “Is this my prison?” I looked around the stark white room. It had a bed—a double bed bigger than my parents’ bed—up against the far wall, and medical machines on either side of it. At the other end, behind a half open door, I could just make out another bathroom, as lovely as the one I’d just used. This room, too, was about the size of our whole home quarters in the Geos. It took me a good fifteen steps to walk from one end of the room to the other. “What’s happening? Why am I here?”

  “These are your temporary quarters,” Max explained. “Medical staff will arrive soon to take your biosigns and information.”

  “But I’ve already done that,” I said. “Down in the Geos.”

  “The tests that we can run are much more thorough,” Dax said. “We have better technology here in the Labs.”

  “I thought you told Ben we were going to see Dr. Farrow,” I said, puzzled by this outcome.

  “Dr. Farrow will be in to see you when he deems it necessary.” Dax had said it as if he’d memorized that line and had to repeat it often.

  “In the meantime, trust that our medics perform excellently. You will be in good hands.” Max added a half smile, as if he’d been instructed to do so by some invisible commander.

  I could tell that this examination was going to be very thorough, and very invasive, just by looking at the complex machines around the bed. But I didn’t like the idea of being submitted to more tests. I’d already gotten away with so much. With better tech, they’d be able to tell that I was never meant to be there. They’d find out that the data in my Acceptance file was different from what my body showed, and it would prove I’d tampered with the file.

  I might not even be truly immune to the Virus. It might’ve been dumb luck.

  Or maybe they just wanted up-to-date proof that I’d cheated my way up into the Labs. I scanned the room for cameras, wondering if this was the set up for my public shaming.

  I reached for one of two chairs in the room. My legs were feeling weak and I needed a moment to breathe.

  “The tests are painless,” Max said, misreading my nervousness. “You will only be quarantined in here temporarily. You will soon join the rest of the population here in the Labs.”

  I appreciated the clone’s concern, but he couldn’t know the fear that was growing inside me. I wondered what kind of terrible punishments they meted out here in the Labs. Did they throw people out the windows? Did they perform public executions?

  Before I could conjure up more horrors, the door to the room slid open. In walked three medical staffers dressed in white lab coats. The one in the middle, the only woman, had some kind of instrument in her hand. It looked menacing. I focused on her face so I wouldn’t fall apart out of fear. She was petite, probably shorter than me, with a long, dark ponytail draped over one shoulder that went all the way to her waist. She had large, almost black eyes, with fiercely thick eyebrows. Her lips were thin, which made her look very stern.

  “What are you going to do to me?” I asked. The clones gave a slight bow of their heads and left the room. I wanted to run after them, but the door shut quickly, leaving me in the room with the medics.

  “My name is Pradnya. I’m just going to run some routine tests,” the head medic said. She seemed too excited to get started. “We haven’t had anyone survive the Virus in a long time. You are a subject of great interest to many of us.”

  “Don’t you have all the information you need already? I’ve been tested so many times since leaving the Above.”

  “I will only perform one or two more tests,” she said. “There’s nothing to worry about. It won’t hurt. Now, please lie down.”

  She led me to the bed, and I lay down. A wave of fatigue washed over me. I hadn’t realized how tired I was. It seemed like it had been forever since I’d slept, and this bed was the most comfortable thing I’d been on—ever.

  Pradnya smiled over me. “Just relax and let me do my work. It’ll be over before you know it.”

  I tried to relax. I shut my eyes for a moment, but they flew right back open. What if this was the test that proved I was a fake? What would happen to my family if I was charged with cheating? All this had been for my mother’s sake, so she could get access to meds that would cure her Cough.

  “Do you know what’s happened to my parents?” I asked. “Were they brought up to the Labs?”

  Pradnya shook her head as she placed a scanner over my chest. “I don’t know anything about your parents, but if you stay still and quiet, once we’re done here, I can go and find out.”

  “Can’t you find out before we do this? My mother isn’t well, and I’m worried that she needs immediate care.”

  The medic twisted her mouth in a way that made her look annoyed. “I’m sure the Farrows have kept their word. Winners of the Acceptance are immediately relocated to the Labs, their families included. That’s how it’s always been.”

  “How it’s always been? There’s never been a winner, not since I can remember,” I said.

  “Well,” she hummed and hawed. “It’s in the rules somewhere. Now, I need you to remain still.”

  “Fine,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure I trusted her or the Farrows. I yawned as an instrument beeped loudly. I blinked furiously, trying to keep my eyes open, but something was making me sleepy. So sleepy that it took all of my strength not to succumb.

  “Just relax.” Pradnya’s s voice was gentle and soothing. Almost hypnotic. “This won’t take long.”

  I exhaled and sank into the mattress beneath me. It was like resting on a cloud.

  Instruments beeped at regular intervals on both sides. The room felt cool as the lights were dimmed. Slowly, my body gave in, and I could fight it no longer. My eyes fluttered shut, and the world faded away.

  Chapter Five

  Skylar Two and I were walking in the forest near his hideout. We talked about life in the Above, and he said he’d teach me to hunt and pick the safe plants for eating. I couldn’t stop watching his mouth as he spoke, observing how it curled up on one side more than the other. He had one dimple that formed with every smile, and his eyes lit up whenever he turned to look at me. It made my heart leap into my throat, and all I wanted to do was stop walking. I wanted him to hold me in his arms. I knew that would make me feel safe.

  I reached out my hand to him, dying to feel the warmth of his touch. He reached out to me, too. But we were too far away to touch. A second ago, we’d been shoulder to shoulder. How had I moved away? I reached further with my whole arm, and he did, too. Our fingertips barely grazed each other.

  My feet lifted off the ground as I tried desperately to walk to him. I opened my mouth to cry out for help, but no sound came out. The ground beneath me grew more and more distant as I stretched harder to get back to him.

  Skylar Two watched me floating away from him with no expression on his face. His smile was gone, the dimple erased, his dark eyes no longer sparkled. He lowered his arm, stuck both his hands in his pockets, and walked on alone as if he’d forgotten me. As if I’d never existed.

  I kept floating higher and higher up into the air. I screamed, crying out for help, all in a deafening silence. Skylar didn’t even look up. All of the other Rejs who I glimpsed walking through the fields and forests went about their daily lives as if I’d never been a part of their group.

  In the distance, I caught sight of the Labs. “Help me!” My voice had returned, but it took all of my strength to be heard.

  My eyes fluttered open.

  It had been a dream, yet my heart was beating so fast that I could feel it in my throat. It made an odd beeping sound that unsettled me. I blinked hard and tried to open my eyes. Blurred images floated past my vision. My breaths were coming in short and fast, and my heart was pounding inside my head now.

  The room was dim. There were machines all around me. The
beeping was not my heart, but a monitor. It began to slow back down to a hypnotic rhythm. My chest hurt. My stomach was on fire. I turned my head from side to side, to try to wake myself up fully, but it took more effort than when Skylar Two had first taught me to climb a tree.

  Skylar Two. He had been a dream, too. But he’d felt so real—and worse, he’d forgotten me so easily. Maybe that was the reality. He’d wanted me to help the Rejs bring down the Farrows, and if I failed, he’d just find someone else to do the job. I was replaceable, just one of many who could step up to the job.

  A tear squeezed out of one eye and I lifted my hand to wipe it away. That’s when I noticed the tubes that were attached to the back of my hand. Both hands. I tried to lift my legs, but they felt heavy, as if something was holding them to the bed.

  Wake up, Ty!

  I tried again, squeezing my eyes tightly shut and then forcing them open. I was somewhere in between the world of sleep and wakefulness, unable to surface altogether. After a few minutes, I gave up and let the dark swallow me.

  I didn’t know how long it was before I came to again. This time, it was easier to open my eyes. The room was still dim, and the machines were still quietly monitoring everything about me. Two transparent bags of liquid hung just over my left side. I watched as the drips entered the tubes that led into my left hand. The machine that controlled it had numbers in bright red, counting down. To what? I watched it for a while, then turned to my other side. The tubes here were filled with a dark liquid, almost black.

  My blood.

  My blood was leaving my body through these tubes, going into a flat, box-like machine, and then returning to me. Why?

  And then everything came flooding back to me. The Farrows, the clones, the Greens. The Acceptance and my hacking to get in and surviving the Virus. The heart monitor beeped rapidly again. They must have found out that I had cheated! Now they were performing some experiment on me and I was going to be stuck in this bed for the rest of my life.

  I couldn’t catch my breath and my heart was running straight out of my body along with all of my blood. An alarm went off. I heard feet shuffling. A light went on above me—it was so bright that it stung my eyes.

  “What is going on here?” a familiar voice asked gently. It was the medic. Pradnya. “Calm down. Breathe, Tylia. In, out, in, out.”

  I followed her instructions and matched my breathing to her voice. The alarm stopped and the monitor went back to its usual beeping rhythm.

  “Now, that’s better,” she said. “I’m glad to see you’re awake. You’ve been asleep for a long time.”

  “How—?” was all I could manage.

  “About five days,” she said. “You in the Geos would consider that to be about the length of seven shifts, I think.”

  Seven shifts? How had I been out for so long?

  “My—” it was a struggle to speak. It felt like I had glue in the back of my throat. “Par…ents?”

  “Don’t you worry about anything,” Pradnya said. She adjusted one of the machines—the one with the drip countdown. “You just need time to regain your strength. You may have survived the Virus, but your immune system has taken a beating. With all those years in the Geos, I don’t know how you survived it.” She chuckled softly, then touched my arm so gently that I almost cried.

  I knew how I’d survived. My family had helped me survive. My hand moved to my throat, and that’s when I felt the pull of skin. Looking down, I saw that there was a needle in the back of my hand, and it was attached to a long, thin tube. But that didn’t alarm me as much as the fact that my neck was bare.

  “My…” I wanted to say ‘necklace,’ but no words would come out of my mouth. It was as if all energy had been drained from me. They’d taken my mother’s necklace. My most precious possession. Where was it now?

  More importantly, I needed to know about my parents. Where were they? Was my mother okay? Nari had given her some meds, but those wouldn’t have cured her. She needed Lab meds and Lab attention, just like I was getting.

  I tried again. “Please, check to see if my parents—”

  “Now, now, that’s enough,” she interrupted me. “You’ll be up and around in no time. You can check for yourself.”

  As quickly as Pradnya had appeared, she vanished, as if this visit had been another dream. Everything went back to the way it had been before. The lights were dim again, the room was quiet except for the machines, and there were no footsteps shuffling over the smooth floors. Had I imagined all that?

  Something rectangular emerged from the ceiling in the far corner of the room, stopping just over my feet. I stared as it lit up. A familiar set of faces appeared on the screen. It was a TV. The latest episode of The Cure was about to come on. Before it began, the screen showed Ben, standing among a group of white-coated Elites, all of them looking very serious. They talked quietly for a few seconds. Then Ben moved away from the group and looked straight into the camera.

  “We are one step closer to finding the Cure today.” He addressed the viewers directly with a hopeful smile. It was the same smile he gave me. I missed it. “Thanks to our Acceptance winners. They’ve given us a lot of data to work with. To all of you in the Geos, I want to say we are so thankful for you. We work every day to make sure your time in the underground will not have been in vain. And that it’ll be over soon. For now, you’re safe there, tucked away from the dangers of the devastating Virus, living your best lives. Someday soon, we will be reunited as one people. All of us in the Labs—” he waved his arms in a wide arc, indicating his white-coated colleagues, “we are working hard for you. Now, please enjoy today’s episode.”

  The screen went dark for a second and then returned with a recap of the last few episodes of The Cure followed by the latest episode.

  I watched the entire new episode, entranced by the soap-opera-like goings-on of the scientists—who was matched to whom, and the scandal that one of them might be cheating with another who wasn’t his match. There was a petty quarrel over the ownership of certain findings; it was enough to keep the viewers entertained since research was slow and not something that could keep people entertained for hours on end. When the episode ended, older episodes were aired. Every so often, a Farrow Corp advertisement would interrupt the intrigue and remind viewers of how much the Farrows cared for humanity, and especially for those in the Geos. Even R.L. came forward to remind us of how the occupants of the Geos and the Elites had a symbiotic relationship, and that we relied on each other.

  I fell asleep somewhere in the middle of the fourth re-run episode, and when I came to again, the room was dark. The TV had been recessed back into the ceiling, and even the dim lighting had gone off altogether. The only light came from the red numerals of the countdown. It was in single digits now, getting close to zero. I watched it, blinking myself awake. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. A quiet alarm sounded, and for some reason, my hand shot out towards the machine and I hit the STOP button. Surprisingly, the machine obeyed me. The alarm went off; the lights went out. But the jerking of my hand dislodged the needle that had been embedded in my skin. It stung, and instinctively, I pulled away further. The needle and the attached tube came free, leaving the back of my hand with a small hole that oozed blood. I rolled over and, with my other hand, I covered the wound with the edge of the blanket.

  Now that my left hand was free, I pushed myself up into a sitting position. I didn’t know how long I’d been in this bed, but my body resisted me as I sat up. It must’ve been a while. The room spun several times before I could move again. I fumbled around for a light switch and found one at the head of the bed. A small light came on just over my head. I rubbed my eyes until the light didn’t hurt anymore. My right hand was still attached to the machine that was taking my blood away. If I pulled the tubes out of this hand, would I have enough blood to get myself out of this bed? I had no idea, but I desperately wanted to get out. I took a moment to study all the machines I was attached to. My pointer finger had a clamp on it that led to the mac
hine counting my heartbeats. Looking down at my gown, I noticed wires going under it, through my sleeves. On my chest, I noticed that the wires led to two circles that were stuck to my skin near my heart. Those led to another machine whose screen had a line going across it with peaks and valleys.

  I pulled off the sensors on my chest. The machine they were attached to beeped. I shut it off and waited to see if anyone would come rushing into the room. No one did.

  Next, I removed the clamp on my finger and another machine sounded in a similar manner. I shut that one off, too. This was easy. Finally, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stared at the machine that was taking my blood. I lowered my feet to the floor. A chill shot through me. The floor was like ice, and it took several attempts before I could stand. My legs were weak and wobbly, and every step was difficult, but I managed to stand and walk closer to the blood machine before I needed to stop and take a breath.

  What had they done to me? I’d lived in the Geos my whole life, where the Cough could get anyone at any moment, and I’d never been sick. I’d never been this weak. A thought snuck its way into my mind…they might have taken so much blood from me that I simply wasn’t able to function normally. Maybe they were waiting for the right time to reveal my shame to everyone, and they didn’t want me to be able to fight back. Did they know that I’d seen what had happened to the other Acceptance winners—the ones who hadn’t made it back to the Geos with me and Kev?

  Kev. What were they doing to him?

  I had to get out of here. But with this blood machine still attached to me, I wasn’t sure how. If I detached myself from it, would I bleed out? How much of my blood was in the machine and how much was still left in my body? I was feeling terribly weak and dizzy.

  I took several deep breaths and twisted my torso from side to side. So far, so good. I was still upright. Taking care to keep my right arm still, I attempted a few small movements to get my heart rate up. If I could handle that, it would be the first step to getting out of this room.