Guardian

Chapter 28

I was looking out of the window when suddenly, my chest grew tight and it felt as if I was being burned from the inside! I couldn't speak, I could hardly breathe! I slowly sat down on the floor, clutching my chest.

What's happening to me, I thought, is this some sort of a panic attack?

After a few minutes, the burning feeling left as suddenly as it had started. One of the doctors came in and asked me what was wrong, but I just got back up and said I was fine. The doctor looked skeptical, but just told me that I needed to rest.

I did as told and got into bed. The doctor checked my vitals then left as he turned off the lights.

I laid in bed, facing the celing, and clutching my old red jacket to my chest. If I really thought about it, the jacket almost smelled like the fires Dark and I had sat by before we were captured again.

After that whole fiasco in the medical wing, nothing much has really happened. All I have done for the past day or two is stare out the window thinking philosophical thoughts, or sometimes no thoughts at all. I don't know what these doctors have me on, but whatever it is apparently has some interesting effects, that panic attack for one. Every minute I spend in this room though, my fear of this place and what Steros has planed grows.

Hot silent tears slid down my face as sleep gripped hold of me.

......

A hand firmly clasps over my mouth, and I scream as loud as I can!

"Quiet," a male voice hissed.

I open my eyes and see Steros leaning over me. His stone grey eyes are burning with a pale fire, and I immediately go silent. The room is darker, so I guess I did sleep for a few hours before almost having a heart attack.

"You are to come with me without a word," Steros whispered, "you must follow my every order. No running away, or it will just end worse for you."

His tone was mild, but his eyes held the real threat. At this point, I was too terrified for my life to even think of anything.

He must have taken my silence as an answer because he then yanked me out of bed and started walking me to the door. Before I knew it, we were speeding through the medical wing and out into another section of the building. We passed nobody in the halls and I wondered why the building was so huge if it looked like maybe a few hundred people worked here.

His grip on my arm was tight, but he didn't say a word as he stared ahead, lost in thought. I had a feeling I didn't want to know what he was thinking, but that I would soon find out anyway.

We passed through many heavy doors that he had to use a card to get in, and I realized that I recognized this wing as the one I was taken through to see Dark last time we were here.

We went even further though, the last door needing a handprint scan to get in. Steros shoved me ahead of him into a dimly lit room. I stumbled but gained my balance as I took in my surroundings.

The room was similar to that of the lab that they had Dark in last time, but with more medical supplies. It reminded me of one of those dentist offices you see in movies, the ones with all the scary looking tools, or maybe a surgery room. Either way, I didn't like it.

Steros walked ahead of me, "This way."

He led me to the other side of the room to a large door with two armed guards standing on either side of it. He nodded to the guards and they opened the door.

We walked in, and the tight ball of fear that had been twisting in the pit of stomach released in a wave of pain, confusion, and anger.

"Dark!" I went to run to him, but Steros grapped me by my shirt and yanked me back so hard that I fell to the ground!

Steros loomed over me, "I said no running."

I was trapped yet again in his horrifying stare. Hot tears of fear and anger streamed down my face as my gaze slowly went back to Dark.

He was laid on the floor in a glass cage, something that looked like a breathing mask was over his face. He looked as if he was peacefully sleeping, but I knew something was wrong, I could feel it.

Was that what that was earlier? Was it his fear I was feeling?

"What did you do to him?" I asked with shaking voice.

"I didn't do anything," he replied coldly, "Subject 134, or Dark as he now wants to be called, did this to himself."

"What do you-"

"His regenerating abilites have slowed," he interrupted, "his body is now vunerable to intense light, and he is suffering from fits of breathlessness that lead to extreme coughing."

I did not move from the floor and instead quietly asked, "Why?"

"His core, the very thing he is made of. A sort of 'dark matter' that I discovered several years ago. The government wanted me to see if I could turn this rare and mysterious element into a weapon. I nicknamed it 'The Shadow Element'."

As he explained, he walked around the glass box, never taking his eyes off of Dark.

"At one point I decided to test how the element would react to different lifeforms. I had taken the living embryos of different animals and exposed them to the element. One of the first was that of a wolf. I was amazed to find that it attached itself to the embryo, mutating it, but the embryo didn't survive.

"I continued to expose it to different embryos, but every single one died. Then, I decided to mix the DNA in hopes that it would make the embryo stronger. In the end, I had a wolf embryo with traces of DNA from all of the major predators, but also human. I was skeptical that such a mutant could ever live, but I exposed it to the element anyway, thinking I had nothing to lose."

He paused, "Yet here it is, alive.

"The element not only attached itself to the embryo, but completely engulfed it. It excellarated the embryo's growth, but also morphed it into something else entirely. It was something so amazing and unlike anything on earth, that I had no idea how to even classify it. I studied it, trying to figure out how it worked, so I could make more of its kind."

I had finally gotten up from the floor and asked the qustion that had been bugging me this whole time, "Why are you telling me this?"

He stopped walking and turned to look at me, "Something is missing from his core, that's why he is like this."

An eerie smirk crept onto his face as he pulled out something from his pocket.

"So you see," he said, "I have a theory."