**CURRENTLY A FEATURED STORY**
highest ranking: #11 in Science fiction
❝true happiness is only achieved without freedom.
There is a girl who wakes to a world that she was supposed to protect. Instead, she fights it.
There is a man who is cursed wit...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
evanna
THE LATE AFTERNOON sun that hovers above us is blotted behind grey clouds in a sky bleeding with colour.
Hit the left. It's all they're saying. Hit the left.
The snow reaches my mid-calves, but it doesn't bother me. There's something off about it, though, something- something wrong... The snow should burn my bare skin, and I know it: I remember reading articles from mountaineers that dies with faces blackened, charred from the cold.
I look down. It feels like I'm standing in nothing. The prickling from the cold that stands somewhere in the back of my complicated, maze of a mind fails to surface. That was a different me— or maybe it's a false memory.
Perhaps that was me, and now I'm not even sure who I am.
"Parrish, hit the left!" I turn around. Two men, clad in identical winter clothing dyed an identical ugly shade of khaki green adorned with a, frankly useless, camouflage pattern, stand in the snow beside the open steel door.
Not exactly what I'd call a pair of incognito suits, if they're supposed to be going for surprise attacks. Where are they even from?
The padlocked chain that had been keeping me trapped inside lies in pieces in this white wasteland- already it's disappearing underneath more falling snow.
Both men have now assessed me, labelled me as a threat. Both of them point handguns at me, a little metal block in their hands that's supposed to fire a bullet. A bullet. Some animal instinct within me tells me to flee, that standing at this end of the barrel is a bad thing. Instead, I want to laugh. In another life, I would have cried and stood there, shaking, hands up. But I was only little, in that other life. A child.
And now, I think, not today.
The younger one holds his gun unsteadily. He's unfamiliar to this, probably more afraid than I am. I think of the plug that was in my body what feels like mere moments ago, and come to the conclusion that I must be something different. I have to be something different. Not- human, or not quite so.
It makes me feel indestructible.
Anything is stronger than a human, than a sack of blood and meat with a bit of bone to keep it all standing. Poke them with a knife and all the contents leaks out. A knife. Interesting.
It's too late to go back for any instrument of that sort, however— any scalpels in the laboratories I passed are too far within the complex behind me, most of it hidden underground. If I turn tail, they will fire. That much I know.
"Shoot it, Parrish!" His finger coils around the trigger, his tongue passes nervously over his lower lip.
