𝙎𝘼𝙏𝙐𝙍𝙉 ✮ 𝘯. 𝘳𝘰𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘧𝘧

{𝟎𝟓} - 𝐖𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠

Unknown Facility

Russia

March 2001

NATALIA often said that Semna was a sore loser.

Semna would disagree potently with this statement; she was not a sore loser. Every time Natalia called her this, she would argue that since she never won anything, she had nothing to compare to the feeling of losing. After all, how could she be a sore loser if losing was her normality? The first time she had even won a fight had been the first day of the to-the-death matches, meaning it had taken her a rough seventeen years to finally achieve what most had by their tenth birthday. Even then, she never got the chance to bask in the newfound success before Madame B had gotten her dragged away.

So although she had won a fight by now, she still found herself wondering what it must feel like to win at something, or to have the right intuition for once. She wondered what it was like to achieve one of the highest honors for a girl her age. She had always believed it would be a joyous feeling of triumph over another being.

This was what she thought about the morning of That Day, as she was kicking and screaming at the many limbs that threatened to rip her in half.

She had been woken like any other day, with the unlocking of the cuffs tethered to her wrist. However on this morning, she immediately noticed that something was wrong—all of the other girls were already out of bed, each of their white beds made to perfection. Had she somehow missed the wake up call the first time? Had she really been that exhausted from the previous night?

Before she had time to ask any of these questions, however, she was pulled up roughly by her frail arms, which frantically tried to reach down to fix the uplifted skirt of her nightgown. Hands seemed to grab her from every direction, so many that she couldn't see where the source of them were. Finally, with an abrupt, violent pull of her head, her vision was shrouded in darkness.

And this was when the screaming began.

Before long, the screaming had turned into violent shrieks, and finally into jostling, muffled sobs. She could feel the cool, hard metal under her. She could smell the antiseptic. She could remember the black vans creeping into the driveway only hours before, and thinking they couldn't be a good sign.

And this was when Semna decided, with exhausted, heaving breaths, that she never wanted to be right ever again.

Winning was for losers.

.          .          .

It was awfully loud around this new facility. Semna was used to the sound of guards yelling, so this was nothing to be alarmed about, nor was the routine bang that echoed through the building, seemingly without a source to the noise. By now, she had learned to cope with it, tune it out, make it so much apart of her normality that when silence finally did strike, it was...unsettling.

What did alarm her was the screaming that sounded through the chambers every night, at the exact same time, and always the exact same voice. A man's, agonized and echoing, crawling into every crook and corner of her cell.

She had now heard his screams exactly 42 times.

She knew this because she had counted every single one of them, every single night that she had been in this cell so far. Where others may have marked the passing of time with the sun setting and rising, Semna merely waited on her rickety old mattress after supper, waiting for the mystery man's voice to fill the empty space. Once she heard it, she knew it was finally time to drift off. She had not yet to discover who this man was or where his pain was taking place, and with each second that passed, she became more and more aware of this fact, and even more restless. The Red Room had been like a prison in her mind, with the brutality and constant surveillance, but since coming to this mystery place, the Academy had somehow become a safe haven to escape to in her mind. Even the Red Room would let her out of a cell at least once a day. And it had now been 42 days since she had last been outside of this old, grimy room.