--ovw--LIV--ovw--
I break down walls then put up fences.
- from Towards the Light V
Did I believe when you said,
"Hey, come with me, I won't brainwash you?"
- from If Jealousy Was Money
--ovw--
MONDAY
9:22 AM
Northwest of Windcreek
"It's funny... I don't... I don't... I don't feel any pain at all anymore. Thank you."
Those were the last words he spoke.
My hands shook erratically, my skin crawled, like they didn't want to be a part of me. I didn't want to be a part of me.
I got up, turned around, and walked.
I did this.
"By the time you read this, you'll either have discovered your powers or this paper will be on top of your dead body. I'll guess you're alive because you get everything you want and my attempt to kill you probably didn't work.
I just want you to know you're worthless.
That you're pitiful, that everything you do is a mistake.
People will know you and remember you. And they will say good things about you.
I'll make sure you don't hear them. You'll hear only me. You will believe only what I said about you then, and what I think about you now.
Nothing you do is right."
Blood stopped running down my face, the blood from my eyes. And then it was blood with water. My breaths turned into that same ragged, uneven, choked breathing- it was like Nightingale, it was just like Nightingale... and that stupid experiment should have killed me.
I couldn't do one thing right.
"Fuck!"
My voice echoed around the walls of the mine below us, bouncing off to empty space around us.
What was this life, anyway? What did I ever do? It seemed to me, my only purpose was to be a mop bucket for all of the dirt in this world, all of the garbage and the dirt it had to offer.
AS IF I DIDN'T FEEL DIRTY ENOUGH ALREADY.
I hated guns...
And that other one, it fell down, down, down, down this deep, empty mine of who knew how many floors. I felt my feet, I felt my legs walking.
Kaylee's voice yelled from somewhere in the area.
"Chris!"
I heard it. But what else I heard was bedroom moans, torture wails, pleading. Seventeen years of what seemed mostly like senseless pain, senseless persecution. This eighteenth one didn't seem to be that much different.
Not now.
And I thought, probably not tomorrow...
"CHRIS!"
Two steps, four steps, six.
Seven.
He was in a black coat, a tuxedo, I think they called it. The man was across from me as I sat on the bed reading my only copy of the Bible. I wanted more books, but couldn't afford them. The only cloth on my body was half the bed sheet.
The man took his watch from the drawer and looked back at me. It was maybe the prettiest, shiniest thing I had ever seen then, his watch. Gold and silver, and shining things, I thought it was made of. He smiled at me.
"You don't want me to go," he said. "Do you?"
I looked at the man- he was somewhere in his thirties, maybe early forties? His hair was a mix of blond and some gray.
"You're the one that... doesn't make things hurt too badly," I said. I surveyed his eyes, any nuances in their movement or any movement of his body that was out of his ordinary behavior. It was something I knew to do, from early. How early, I don't remember. "So I guess not."
I was always honest with these people. Even the ones that hurt me the most. I was eleven.
"Do you have kids?" I asked.
He looked at me.
"Why do you ask?" he said.
I shook my head. "I don't know. Curious, I guess."
The man put a stack of paper bills on top of a table beside the bed.
"I'm not supposed to take gifts," I said.
"You don't have to tell anyone," he replied, discreetly. Hushed. "Get yourself something nice. Something new to read. A pair of shoes, something."
"I can't take it," I said. I tried hard to disguise the disappointment I felt but couldn't. "There's a camera."
Was there a difference, between "wouldn't" or "couldn't?"
One of Kaylee's vines wrapped around my less-damaged wrist and hand- the right one. I cut it off with a combat knife. I used the special marked one; the special marked one that I used on nobody but myself.
I counted one cut for each of the people that I was not able to save, when I saved myself; I counted one cut for each individual that used me all for themselves. I wanted one cut for each time that someone else had hurt me, because this way, I was hurting myself.
You make goodbye look so easy.
I remember noting how strong her accent was when she popped her gum again, chewed, and replied with, "Yeah, me too. You get to call me Sam." She pulled a folded piece of paper from a jacket pocket and snorted whatever was in it, then said, "Let's do this, Morphine."
I remember how her black-and-yellow striped pants made her look like a bumblebee; a bumblebee with the most breathtakingly colored eyes.
You make goodbye look so easy.
How's your life in wonderland?
I glanced at the strange, slow, orange-with-purple-clouds Overwoods summer sunset; I remembered Marie. Summers here that rained and snowed with typhoons or hurricanes or every other catastrophe you could possibly think of. The boys and girls- the children- that have never and will never recover from the tortures.
But Kaylee and I are damaged forever.
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While the ones who ran the experiment are probably out drunk and partying.
I am so hungry...
You make goodbye look so easy.
How's your life in wonderland?
You're spending for another call, and another time
Just to get me near you
Fifteen steps, twenty.
From the snakes, from the most evil of all the most evil, from the oblivion, from the misery that existed only in some places.
I plunged into the earth.
--ovw--
You make goodbye look so easy.
How's your life in wonderland?
You're spending for another call, and another time
Just to get me near you
But I've lost everything.
--ovw--LV--ovw--
Scream it
Watch as I turn midnight
All I have
Is thanks to you
- from Does to You, Thanks to You
Fifteen steps, twenty.
From the snakes, from the most evil of all the most evil, from the oblivion, from the misery that existed only in some places.
I plunged into the earth.
Wind- I descended and descended. I didn't remember how high the fall was; how deep this mine was. They must have been mining for long if it was that deep. Air tossed my black hair back and around and my double-tied ponytail everywhere, I felt this and nothing else as I kept my eyes closed and awaited my death.
Of course, like Century Spire, that's not how it happened.
I didn't remember hitting any kind of ground.
I was still descending, falling to death; I didn't know what hit me- or if anything even did- when I blacked out.
MONDAY
Around 10:36 AM
Below the earth
Exact location unknown
Bottles.
Bottles of... Vystir antidote. Just like the ones I begged for, from James, years ago.
Vystir antidote. That was the first thing I saw.
My teeth... bloody, only slightly more damaged than how fucked up they already were; the taste of blood was what seemed to tell me that I was alive still.
A very vaguely familiar, yet somehow deep and relaxing, almost musical- well, to me it was anyway- voice spoke. I wasn't sure it was real. And it was almost like I knew who it was. But this could've all been a trick.
"Chris."
I spun up and off the ground, until a chain on my left wrist cut me from the air and dragged me back down.
And then, it wasn't a chain; it was some kind of red plastic, tied to some kind of machine. There was... some kind of IV drip, several of them actually, on my right arm.
I was left bleeding on the ground but stuck with needles?
I...
I remember feeling like a trapped animal; a small helpless trapped animal knowing he was about to get slaughtered, or worse.
Much worse.
I don't want to be here
I don't want to be here I don't want to be here I don't want to be here I don't want to be here
"Chris, over here."
I ripped needles and micro tubing off my right arm, and glanced over at where the male voice came from. This room was dark- the walls were black.
Kind of like Nightingale...
The bottles of Vystir antidote were on a midnight blue tinted glass table. And there he was- the man who called my name. He looked maybe a few years older than I was? Perhaps five years, something? He had sandy-colored hair and silver-blue eyes, piercing and utterly luminous; Labradorite and Tourmaline gemstones mixed with a light blue sky.
Yes, exactly- it took me that long to put my guard back up. The kindest-looking men can be dangerous. I was off, I was so off. An easy target, trapped in a place unknown yet also strangely familiar.
Oh wait hold on a second
"Where am I?" I said, wincing, as more blood spouted off and onto my left hand when savagely I tore off whatever was above it; to say that I was dizzy was the top five understatement of the decade. A white light bulb, concealed inside a deep black mission style lamp to my left, started to flicker. But it almost seemed to flicker in a specific pattern.
No wait a second I know this place
My eyes wide, I tucked my right elbow and tightened my core, performed my half-turn evade into front double to one-legged roundoff to backwards whip- one of my most basic but most useful maneuvers- then dropping to the floor as black shards of wood and glass and plastic flew like bomb shrapnel from thirty-nine feet away. Twelve meters. Like a gymnastics floor.
I didn't even go out of bounds.
I remember wanting to immediately ask more questions; I didn't. Experience had taught me to always await at least the first response, to assess the situation (or assess whoever was in a room with you, especially if they were larger, or both) further, and to pause before you take any kind of next step.
I took a deep, slow breath, closed my eyes, and then made the decision to speak again.
Rising slowly from the marble floor which now had my blood on it, I said, "Should I repeat my question?"
He paused before answering me, like he was trying to put something together. The short, buzzed hair on his face was a funny shade of yellow, darker than blond.
"Wilson-Delos Santos-Martinez diamond mine. You..." he paused again. This man had the strangest expression on his face as he locked his eyes on mine. I couldn't place it. "You might know it as the, um."
Okay kill me now
"The what?" I insisted.
"Well-"
"SAY IT."
"Experimentation site."
Experimentation site...
"So..." I said. "You mean, like... like Nightingale?"
I pretended my voice didn't totally wobble at the N-part, the first syllable of that word. Even though it completely obviously did. It's possible I even stuttered.
Yeah, I probably did.
The man looked at me, like he wanted to say more... or, was it possible? Almost like he wanted to put arms around me.
But not in a bad way.
"Possibly," he said.
"Why are you here?" I said. "Why are we here?"
To our right, there was a glass wall. Just barely, vaguely, I made out the silhouette of what looked like a tall man.
Of course, almost any man or woman was tall to me.
"Chris."
"What? And how do you know my name?
He stood still, one of his wrists also tied by what looked like plastic of some kind. And then, I knew immediately it probably wasn't just plastic.
For just one fleeting moment, a blurry recollection of my body breaking through thin acrylic and pseudopolycarbonate sheets and layers of mysterious glass ran through my mind. It might have been my imagination. But the sense that my arms had been dragged and the strange, almost-dislocated-but-not-exactly sensation in my shoulders told me that's exactly what happened.
I continued.
"I..."
Well, I tried to continue, anyway.
I am a marshmallow
He said nothing; he just looked at me. His eyes locked hard on mine like he was asking some kind of unspoken question.
I kept my thoughts as logical as I possibly could have.
I am a marshmallow
This was not making any sense. I wasn't even sure if I was alive. If I said anything, what loss could that cause me? I was probably dead anyway, and this guy wasn't going to hurt me; he was behind something.
"I jumped." I looked at my torn pant leg. I remembered the shard of wood from the mutated giant tree I smashed into before I rolled like a cotton ball soaked of his own blood. "I jumped and now I'm... here."
"Yeah," the man said. "You attempted suicide trying to find me."
"Find you?" I said. "Dude, I don't even know you."
"Caleb," he said. "Your boyfriend. Kaylee's brother."
There was a pause before he spoke again, at which time I took the opportunity to select a very useful shard of black glass off the bloody marble floor. There was so much blood on it; how was I alive? Perks of having been forcefully stuck with a million needles in an eighteen-year career/lifetime of starvation? Perks of being one-half of the only two Nightingale survivors?
I visibly shuddered; I hugged my arms and added more blood to the front of my shirt.
UGH I couldn't even THINK that word
"Please," he said. "Don't tell me you've-"
"I'm literally triple gay, yes," I butt in- "But I am single, and I like it that way, and seriously, eff men sometimes because, like- eighty percent of them are really just awful."
I was lying. I was lonely and I wanted someone.
I didn't know if I wanted someone if I just needed distraction from the memories of the brutality of... of the... of the N word.
Not *THAT* N word OMG
I hoped he couldn't read that off me from behind the transparent physical divide between us. Was he a telepath? Because he seriously looked like he knew me; looked like he knew exactly what I was thinking.
"Anyway, Kaylee's..."
Kaylee. Where was my most valued friend; fellow Nightingale survivor?
"She... she tried to help me make it somewhere." I shook my head. This felt way too much like Nightingale. "We were... finding something, somewhere." I of course omitted the part that we were probably doing it as part of the Union of Stars; I didn't know who this guy was. "I met her dads. Awesome people. But the other one's kind of an alcoholic." I cleared my throat. "Sometimes. I don't know who you are."
Why was I talking to him, anyway? He could have been Krasvya, or a spy, or a torturer, or a murderer or rapist or both, or something.
Why was I talking to him?
"Do I know you from somewhere?" I said, trying to be polite. "I'm so sorry. I'm... lost."
I could have been wrong, but I think there was almost some kind of sheen in his eyes.
Sheesh. I thought I was the crybaby- I mean, I really was. Anything made me cry.
"Sorry if I insulted you," I said.
