Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
✷
NOW.
LEGACY CITY
IN THE PHARMACEUTICAL LIGHT of the bathroom, Sloane watches the water run. She turns the tap off, and is met with deafening silence, heavy as a heartbeat in her ears. Unable to stand it, she flicks the faucet on again, and the white noise of water guzzling from the faucet fills the gap between her head and her thoughts.
In this wall of static, her mind runs.
In the beginning, there were only villains.
In the beginning, there was only Warner Castello, and the hand he'd extended to pull her out of the dark. When she closes her eyes, she can still see him lurking in periphery, dark eyes fixed on her as he watches from behind the glass, his hands folded behind his back.
When Warner had assembled the Horsemen, his vision had been to cull the world of weakness. At least, that's what he'd told them. But the names that Sloane and her crew had been given to strike off the list held weight to them, power that came from business conglomerates, politicians, and journalists. It didn't take much to put two and two together to see that Warner had been using the Horsemen to take people off the chessboard, to advance his position among Elysium's hierarchy. Granted, back then—and even now, in retrospect—Sloane hadn't cared much about the morality of the entire situation. Warner had taken them in and given them a purpose. Had helped them hone their gifts as noumena to become something more. And all of this, for the hope that someday, they might leave the ground behind. The hope that, someday, Elysium would open its gates for her. Her and the others.
Ascension. That's what Warner had called it.
Sloane remembered the day the illusion dissolved. After three years of doing his dirty work, of dispatching competitors and politicians, Warner wanted to go higher. It made sense. If he could crack their genetic code, he could become one of them. If he could crack this phenomenon, he could rise in power, make himself invincible, become richer. He could control the world.
What made a Noumena?
It started with blood samples, skin cells, bits of muscle tissue here and there. Then it was vivisection for organ tissue samples, cutting them open under blinding lights and sewing them back up for the next mission, the next round of testing. When they began drilling for bone marrow, Sloane remembered begging for death when they'd put her under anaesthesia, remembered praying—for the first time in her life—to never surface from sleep.
Was it a mutation? Were you born to it?
All over her body, Sloane's scars blaze beneath her clothes, a phantom ache tugging and tugging and tugging on the thread of memory, threatening to unravel it. To unravel her. Until the seams burst, and memory shatters over her, fragments spliced together in a vicious Rolodex reeling back and forth. A white cage of sterile suffocation and clinical walls and painfully crisp sheets. Needles rattling on metal trays beside the cold embrace of two separate gurneys with their leather restraints. The tail of a white lab coat, a flash of a nametag: Dr. Patmos, and hands covered in blue surgical gloves strapping her down. Gleaming scalpel blades slicing through puckered skin. Syringes filled with green liquid, hooked up to machines and their pointed teeth gleaming in the fluorescent light before they sunk venom into her flesh, into her blood—and lit her entire world on fire.
