The Condemned (11 page)

   With that triumphant thought swimming around sweetly in her mind, Alecia finally allowed herself to succumb to the waves of exhaustion that washed over her. With her head nestled against Amato’s shoulder, her arms loosely around his neck and feeling so very safe and secure in his arms, she closed her eyes and embraced darkness.

Chapter 9

Alecia opened her eyes to darkness.

 
She felt numb and confused, couldn’t work out for sure if the last few hours had really happened or
if they had just been a dream.
She waited for her eyes to adjust to the complete gloom and when they didn’t she felt a dull resignation in the pit of her stomach. In her recollection there was only one place where the darkness was so complete as to be absolutely impenetrable.

 
Sitting up, she swung her legs over the side of the narrow bunk and felt the cold seep into her as her bare feet touched the hard marbled floor. She hadn’t the energy to lift her head and her hair hung in curtains around her face. Defeated, a single tear slid along the curve of her nose, hovered for a moment at the tip and then fell silently to land on her leg.

 
It had all felt so real;
the fear, the shame, the bad feelings overridden by the hope and exhilaration, by the promise of freedom.

 
Amato had been real, Beriael and his wife.. It had all been so... So... Genuine.

 
Hadn’t it?

 
Maybe it wasn’t a dream, she reasoned
frantically
. Maybe
you
were drugged, some sort of... h
allucinogenic crap that gave you visions, made you think you had a chance.

 
It could all ha
ve been part of a bigger plan.
Induce her into some virtual escape plot to see how she would react, what she would do. It would certainly have been a learning curve for them, another way to experiment on her, probe her, steal her thoughts and rape her mind
, gradually tear her apart until there was nothing left at all, nothing that made her who she was, just rip away at her until she was
no more than a dead, empty shell
.

 
Leci shivered and pushed herself slowly up from the small bed
, her body ached all over, she felt a lot older than she was, felt ancient and as if the weight of the world was resting on her frail shoulders
. Making her way over to the sink she reached up and touched her face. Her cheeks felt smooth.

  
‘Course they do, silly bitch, you dreamed it all.’

 
The sound of her own voice struck reality home to her and she laughed; a harsh, bitter, humourless sound that seemed to echo around the cell as though taunting her by showing her that even her words could never leave this place.

 
Light flooded the room suddenly and she squinted against it until the glare stopped being painful. She turned in a full circle, and came to a stop when she faced the door. She stood, unmoving, watching. The hatch was closed and she could hear
nothing through the thick door, but she knew that somebody stood on the other side.

 
A tingling sensation passed through her.

 
She knew,
she knew
, with unfailing certainty that it would be the same guard she had burned in her dream, the man who’s neck had been broken by the Clone in the cell opposite. Had she dreamed some kind of premonition? Seen the future before it happened?

 
Was that possible?

 
Hell, she could create fire with her mind, she wasn’t sure that she should really cast aside the notion of seeing into the future all too readily. With the cleansing and new dawning
of humanity
there had emerged several new talents and skill
s possessed by a small number, h
er Pyrokinesis being just one of a multitude of dangerous mutations.

 
While her mind whirled with the possibility of a newfound skill
,
her eyes and ears paid ca
reful attention. When the whirr-
click notified her that someone was entering she backed against the far wall of her cell, her body tense and rigid as she waited for what she knew was coming next.

 
Two men stood beyond the doorway. The light in the corridor was as bright as the one that lit her chamber and it illuminated them in their suits. The stark glare hit the shiny metallic surface of the table between them and bounced
reflections at her, dizzying her.

 
This wasn’t right, this wasn’t the way it happened...

 
What was going on?

 
She shook her head and tried to back up further, prevented from doing so by the wall at her back. The suited men advanced, bringing the table with them. It was a sort of trolley set on wheels with a series of drawers beneath it. On the top were shackles positioned to restrain a person at their ankles, wrists and neck. It looked very similar to the one she had found herself waking on four years ago after falling from her horse in her attempt to flee the Officials chasing her.

 
The door swung closed behind them and they stopped in the centre of the room. One of them pulled open a drawer to reveal rows of very shiny and incredibly sharp looking instruments. She could hear their mocking laughter and she held her hands over her ears, her eyes screwed tightly shut and her head shaking back and forth in some vain display of denial. She heard herself repeating the word ‘no’ over and
over, then a hand grabbed her arm,
and she was hauled onto the table. Her clothes were torn away and despite her struggles she was easily overpowered, the shackles
were
locked into place
,
rendering her motionless.

 
The man to her left took a scalpel from the tray of instruments and held it
up
so
that
she could see
it clearly
. The man to her right raised his arm and pulled off the hood
that covered his face.

 
Alecia stared into Amato’s eyes uncomprehendingly as he laughed down at her.

  
‘Gonna turn you into a Clone, bitch.’

 
As the hooded guard slowly, oh, so slowly, lowered the blade in his hand towards her chest Alecia opened her mouth wide and screamed at the top of her lungs.

Chapter 10

Her scream was cut off when a hand clamped across her mouth.

   Alecia sat bolt upright, fighting against the man who held her, her fingers hooked into claws, raking the skin of his hand. She kicked out at him with her feet but found them bound and she struggled fiercely to free herself.

   The grip across her mouth loosened and she sucked in air but did not scream again, while she thrashed and writhed he simply held her, gently but firmly, against himself, rocking her slightly, trying to calm her. When she had exhausted herself she fell against his chest sobbing.

   Amato ran a hand through her hair and spoke softly to her much in the way one would attempt to console a child waking from a nightmare.

   When her tears had dried and her laboured breathing returned to normal she raised her head and took in their surroundings. The room was dim but the blackness wasn’t absolute and she could make out enough to see that they were in some sort of underground shelter.

   Towards the middle of the 21
st
Century, in a very similar way to events during the Second World War, paranoia over the advancement of weapons of mass destruction and other various
threats had led many people to invest in fallout shelters. Hideouts underneath the ground that would protect them from the effects of a nuclear blast, alien invasion, fiery comets of judgement raining from the heavens, that type of thing. Leci had seen many of these buildings. A lot were now inhabited by people who simply had nowhere else to go, some served as way stations for renegades travelling and in need of a place to rest for the night. She had never stayed in one while she had been alone.

   She remembered them mostly from her time with Xavian, even had distant memories of sitting inside a room just like this on her father’s knee. They had always sort of scared her a little, she couldn’t really place why but when she had found herself alone and self reliant she had avoided them, maybe it was the feeling of being trapped underground in a room that had only one way in or out that she wasn’t so keen on.

   The layout was similar to that of her cell at the prison, slightly larger, four bunks along the walls, one lower down on either side and one above each of those. She sat on one of the lower beds; a thin blanket was twisted and bunched around her ankles, this explained the bindings she had perceived when she had been struggling.

   Looking down at herself she saw she was still dressed in the oversized baggy prison issue men’s shirt. Tentatively she raised a shaking hand to her face. It came away wet with tears
but she felt the rough scab of her healing scratches and breathed a sigh of relief, noting the irony in being pleased to find herself injured, choosing to ignore it.

   Her tortured mind was playing tricks on her. Their escape had been real enough but subconsciously she still didn’t believe it and was trying to tell herself this through her nightmares, trying to cause her to doubt herself and the people around her by casting them as the villains in her warped imaginings.

   Glancing down, she saw Amato’s hand. The back of it was raw and bleeding, crossed with scratches made by her nails. She looked up at him and he smiled briefly.

   ‘I’m sorry... I didn’t mean to hurt you, I thought I was bac- I had a bad dream.’

   ‘Don’t worry about it, Firebug. I reckon I came off lightly, you coulda just set fire to me.’

   He grinned but the gesture didn’t reach his eyes and she knew it was a genuine concern. It stunned her to find herself wondering if maybe she had made the hugest mistake of her life. She would never be accepted into a normal society when people knew who she was and what she could do. She could attempt to control herself for as long as possible but she wasn’t naive enough to think she could hide her ability forever and if people did accept her she knew it would be out of fear. There would never be trust, in the past the people
she had
become
close to had a way of winding up dead. Now the people she was close to would almost certainly die, they just knew there was a chance it would be directly via her own hands.

   She found herself unable even to allay his worries, the only reason she had not used flames to protect herself was because in her mind her attacker had been the man who had led her to safety and she would never knowingly hurt him.

If she had dreamed of Beriael then the Amato who held her now would have been reduced to ashes.

   Perhaps she should’ve just stayed where she was, paid her debt to society by not forcing her presence upon them. Maybe it was safer for everyone else if she were kept imprisoned. Better yet, if she just wasn’t here at all, didn’t exist and could cause no more hurt to anyone ever again.

   Leci fidgeted to sit up and since it was clear she was no longer a danger to herself or anyone else, Amato released her.