Project Gemini (WATTYS 2016 WINNER!)

Chapter Eleven - Run, Pariah, Run.

H.

HUMAN.

THE ONE thing that shouldn't have been on the black market. The status and the identity the world aspired to be since patient zero had died in the inner city sixty years ago. The identity was sacred, protected, and enriched in the ideal that to be Human was to be correct. To be part of the two definite black and whites: man and god. But like the ancient stories had said, man always triumphed over god.

But not this time. Someone had claimed their prize.

And oh hell, the world was going to pay for it.

Eva couldn't tear her eyes from the glass jar, at the floating sheet of skin inside. She was committing a crime looking at it, and with her position right now she couldn't afford to be caught here. Disgust and shock and everything collided with her at once so she just sat and trembled, her voice lodged in her throat. Her gaze fixated as if she was watching a car crash unfold in real-time. The golden inked tattoo floated and moved on its own, like a ghoul in the wind. For a split second the light caught it just right, and she saw the sign:

Price upon request.

Written in beautiful black calligraphy, the paper blotted and blurred propped behind the jar. As if someone had been too fond at examining their prize, too eager to stick their hands into the water and stroke a piece of some luxury that wasn't theirs to have.

She swallowed hard as she tried to look away but couldn't. A morbid sense of curiosity coursed through her. A dose of familiarity settled in her gut as the surgeon got to work on her arm, the twinge of who rather than what the tattoo belonged to reeled in her mind.

Her own out-dated V tattoo throbbed at the thought of it being stolen, a piece of her and who she was being taken by force, and she couldn't quite place the emotion. She'd prayed to lose her V tattoo as a child, but seeing the alternative, seeing the hell it relieved her from she didn't want to let it go.

Instead she gripped the underside of the surgery bed, her fingernails digging into the faux leather as the wet squelch of the needle forcing its way through her skin joined her shallow breathing. The sorry bastard that tattoo belonged to wasn't from around here, never had been, and she'd bet every last penny she had that the git was lying on a slab in the morgue.

Wickers. 

There was no game to play. No debate to make. She point-blank refused to be the next one in those jars. Beads of sweat rolled down her skin as she fought to keep silent, the jolts of pain forcing gasps and hisses through her teeth. The needle jammed deep, ruthlessly slithering through her wound with a trail of wire following it. Blood smeared silver flashed in the corner of her eye one second before it disappeared back into her arm the next.

The surgeon didn't pay her much attention as Eva rolled the medicine vial she'd stolen from Jasper in her pocket beside the key card. He'd begged for it, demanded it, and considering how much he'd needed it—and how much he had broken into something else entirely—she knew it was important.

Her eyes scoured the racks and racks of medicines displayed on the battered shelf, looking for the vial's signature venom yellow flare but each bottle was either murky white, completely colourless or formed of little pale green pills. Of all places the black market should be the one to stock it. If it wasn't here she didn't know where else it would be.

And who else would have it.

Her skin burned as the thread tugged tight. There hadn't been any small talk or anaesthetic. Just time to shut up, lie back, and grit her teeth as the sixty-year-old-something surgeon pulled up a medical mask over her face got to work. For a split second Eva wondered how many bleeding and broken Voids fleeing something had landed up on the operating table the same way, and how many hadn't left.