Outlier

The Machine

Venus awoke to humming. It wasn't human. It thrummed in her bones.

Blearily, she opened her eyes. There was a metallic taste to the air that she couldn't place. The world swayed before her; she moaned, her stomach turning. Someone was wailing, crying out for their mother. Whatever she was sitting on was vibrating like she was in motion, but when she focused on the ground, she found that she was still.

The ground itself was concrete and stained with something that looked suspiciously like blood. She recoiled at the sight of it, but found that she couldn't move. Something was holding her still, something that was connected to the back of her neck.

It wasn't numb anymore. It hurt, deep within her muscles, as if something were intruding into the nape of her neck. She dreaded to think about what it was. When she tried to reach up to check, she noticed that she was clamped to a black chair. Both her wrists and ankles were held in place by restraints.

She doubted the restraints mattered, though. She was too weak to move. She had a feeling that that thing Jace mentioned before- the remora- was on her again, siphoning away all of her strength and power.

Jace. She wondered where he was.

As she adjusted to her surroundings, things started to come into focus. The room was large with a ceiling that Venus couldn't see. It was lit with blinding fluorescent light, and she was sure that it was indeed blood that stained the floor in huge, dried puddles. There were other things on the floor- things like vomit and possibly urine. She nearly vomited, herself.

High, high up, was an observation window. There were people there in white labcoats, Venus's vision was too blurry to see if they had any emotion on their faces. Perhaps they didn't have any.

She thought she spotted a head of white hair up there, but when she squinted, everything got blurrier.

"We waited for you for hours," said a voice to her left. "Hours, wondering what would happen to us."

Venus tried to turn her head, but a sharp pain went up her neck. She cried out, but the cry sounded more like a gurgle.

"Where are we?" Venus asked.

"Hell." The voice stated. It sounded female, and about her age, maybe a bit younger. "We're all going to die. The kids that get taken here never come out alive."

"What..." Venus's voice shook. She looked down as best she could at her body, at the chair she sat upon, and began to see the way the chair connected with curving bars of rubber to a chair on either side of her. On her right, she saw someone in her periphery who was slumped forward and unmoving, and to her left, there was a girl with long black hair, the girl that had spoken.

"Why, Venus?" The girl whispered. "Why did you do this to me?"

"Victoria," Venus choked. "I-"

"Did you hate me?"

Venus couldn't speak to that. She could only hang her head and try her best not to break into chest-heaving, back-breaking sobs.

"I wasn't sure if you'd have it," Victoria said after a while. "The hole."

"The... hole?" Venus swallowed around the lump in her throat. "What hole?"

"They operated on all of us." Victoria sounded so far away, like she'd been drugged. "They put holes in the backs of our necks to plug us into it."

So that was why the back of her neck had felt so numb earlier. She must have had some anaesthetic in the area. She could remember Jace's hand on her neck before, could understand, now, why he'd said what he did.