Roxanne Fosch Files Collection

Chapter 17-2

The speakers buzzed once, and Dr. Maxwell"s voice crackled into the room. “Subject UX01-484, I want you to listen carefully.” He waited for my attention to focus on the mirror where I knew he was watching.

“This room will start filling with fast acting, enhanced radiation. We have reason to believe you can form an air shield around you and your mother. Once the room starts filling and you"re exposed, if you don"t form the shield within two minutes, your mother will die. You have enough immunity to live three minutes longer than your mother.”

Shock left me speechless for a good thirty seconds. “P-please don"t do this. At least let her go.” I choked.

My mother huddled on the corner, loose strands of her honey-blonde hair around her face, her black eyes huge and frightened, her skin ghostly white, and she was shaking and shivering. It was an image that brought me nightmares for many years to come.

“Those are my orders. I have no choice. I"m sorry.”

“If you"re wrong and I die then you won"t be able to experiment anymore,” I said furiously. Tears tracked down my cheeks, and I was shaking in fear too.

“I"m sorry. I have orders to follow,” he repeated before falling silent for a moment, as if debating what to say next. “They think if you can"t do this, then you"re not what they thought you were.”

I huffed a dry laugh. “Then I die, and you get to pick another victim to torture.”

“Subject UX01-484!” boomed another voice on the speakers. “This is Dr. Michael Dean. I want you to know that if you don"t meet our expectations, there"s no reason to waste funds and resources on you. You are nothing but expendable.” He clicked off, and I heard hissing from all four sides of the room. Gas leaked from small holes installed in the corners, and my mother came closer to me in the middle of the room. Did radiation have odor? Texture or color? I thought frantically about what I could possibly do. I imagined the air shield they wanted me to form, I even closed my eyes to concentrate harder, but nothing happened. Desperate, I imagined me and my mother inside a bubble and tried to project it… and nothing. Either I wasn"t concentrating enough or Dr. Dean was about to be proven wrong. An arm"s length away, my mother sat, sobbing, telling me she was sorry, over and over.

I crouched and held her close. We rocked back and forth together, and I kept trying to do something, to form that damn shield. For the first time since the day I had been brought to the PSS fifteen months earlier, I hoped they were right about me.

The gas reached us, and it had no odor at all, but my mother and I choked all the same. I guessed it was the principle of breathing radiation and the knowledge that it was lethal.

I tried to count the seconds, but I couldn"t pass one, two, three, before my thoughts jammed. My mind screamed that this was wrong, that this couldn"t be happening to me. My mother choked, and her skin began reddening, forming red splotches on every inch and growing. She cried out, and her gums were bleeding, red covering her teeth. I screamed at the mirror and a trickle of blood ran down her nose. I clutched her to me, trying to hide her face on my chest, to protect her and to not have to watch her die. I rocked from left to right, feeling my tears burning down my cheeks until—until—my mother stopped shaking.

I didn"t let her go.

Children shouldn"t watch their parents die. It just shouldn"t happen. My only consolation was that I would be dying also. The PSS had killed my mother to test a reaction from me and all I could manage was… rage.

Lava boiled in my blood.

I wanted to kill Dr. Michael Dean with my bare hands. No, I wanted to mutilate him with my new-found talons.

I felt the beginning of a familiar stir inside me and knew I wasn"t far from snapping. If I snapped, they would get a reaction from me. Perhaps not what they had wanted and expected me to do, but one nonetheless, and my mother would have died for nothing. My hands blurred and formed talons and for the first time since I had been brought there, I felt my teeth shifting and elongating, rearranging inside my mouth. I clenched my jaws and tried to fight any changes, but my rage was overwhelming. All I wanted was to kill someone—preferably Dr. Dean—and feast on his blood. To pull off his head with my bare hands and dance around his still-twitching body. I lowered my head to my mother"s limp shoulder and shook with rage and grief. All the while we rocked left and right.

They shouldn"t have killed anyone in an experiment. My rage grew to degrees I never thought possible. Something was happening to me, but besides my rage, my talons and teeth, nothing else was different… and yet, there was something more. Something other. Foreign, even to me.

My mother lay limp in my arms and all I did was rock her from side to side. Was this punishment because I injured one of the scientists?

My mother shouldn"t have been there. She shouldn"t have been able to visit. Didn"t Dr. Maxwell tell me no visits, no matter what, were allowed?

My mother wasn"t supposed to be there…

My arms, still around my mother"s prone body, reddened, then blurred and wavered like a mirage, and suddenly I knew, and I wasn"t afraid anymore.

I wasn"t afraid, because I wasn"t dying.

Because my mother wasn"t there. She wasn"t allowed to be there. I pushed back on my anger, gained an inch. I realized what was happening to me seconds before the PSS successfully provoked a reaction from me. I concentrated on the rapid beating of my heart, slowed my breaths. My teeth reverted to normal, my talons back to fingers. The tremors that shook my body followed moments after that.

My mother wasn"t there. I wasn"t dying.

I closed my eyes tight and concentrated. My rage dissipated slowly, and my breathing slowed down to a normal rhythm. When I opened my eyes again, I found myself alone in the room, my arms around myself as I rocked, facing the two-way mirror.

My nightmare was over. I"d broken the illusion spell they"d injected when I was unconscious.

Despite the many nightmares to sprout from that day, I"d won that experiment. They never found out how close they came to almost succeeding. I had managed to control my rage, my beast, and they had no satisfactory results. Up until the fire mage last year, I believed the PSS had missed their mark big time with that experiment. Indeed, after that test, I found and experimented with that slumbering otherness deep inside my soul often, but never really known what it was or could do until the mage.