The White Wolves

Hatching

Maya
Slowly I became conscious of my wings, pressed uncomfortably against what I could only guess was a floor without opening my eyes. Memories washed over me like a tsunami, the voice that ordered me to fight, the hulking man that I hesitated to knock out, Shuri....
My eyes snapped open, the light dim enough for my vision to only have to adjust a minimal amounts, Shuri. The walls were a painful white, and even more painfully close. I sat up, panic beginning to seed itself in my brain, there was no door, no window, no way out.

I focused on my breathing, calm down, they are just walls, you can get out if you want to, in and out nice and slow. Pain began to register and I tentatively raised my hand to the throbbing at the back of my neck, behind my hair, tangled and matted as it was. To my horror my fingers struck metal, what had they done? What was it? After further exploration, I discovered it was about the size of  fifty pence piece but, this small implant filled me with terror I had felt before only waking up in a pool of my own dried blood. I fought to calm down, they need me alive, they wouldn't fit me with anything that would interfere with my health. They wouldn't want to blunt their own sword; still I feared what they had done, these people were willing to take ten children and inject them with a serum that made them ill enough to be transferred to a hospital in a different country. They had refused to back down on sending me with T'Challa to Wakanda even if it meant the other nine children would die. They might not want me dead, but they certainly didn't care how much pain I was in while I was breathing.

By the time I began to notice a change in my heart rate I was proved wrong about the absence of entrances , there was a door, it was set into the wall like the one in the room I had mentally named the arena, for where else would I be forced to fight? It slid open painfully slowly and one of my new least favourite people stepped into the rays of the single annoyingly bright light. It was one of the guards who had brought me here, the largest and most likely to have been in prison for half his life as far as I was concerned.

I wasn't scared of him in the way people were scared of dogs or heights, I was scarred of him the way people were scared of dying, it was a deep and ingrained fear that meant I couldn't help but scramble to my feet and back towards the wall behind me. My back struck the wall, there was nowhere to go... I couldn't change that.

A smile cracked across the man's face, as broad and shining as a slit throat. "Scared are we? I knew they should have gone with the boy," he taunted and caused me to think back, the test. The test at the orphanage, that had been them, helping to decide who they wanted. I had wondered why there were some strange questions in between the painfully simple maths. Questions about what you would do in certain situations... or highlighting the most sensitive parts of the body. Strange questions I had thought nothing of at the time but now began to form some kind of great puzzle in my mind. 

The boy, the one person who's name had been read out after mine when we got our test scores back. The one that when we were allowed to flick through had done only one thing different to me, the last question...
You hear a scream. It is clear to you that it is the scream of a young child though it is unclear whether they are male or female. You run to the source of the scream to find the child, injured and bleeding, clutching a knife. What do you do?

I had said I would help her, find the source of the bleeding and try to help but he... he had said to kill her. My answer was wrong... his was right and yet mine was right in a different way. I wouldn't have changed my answer for the world.

"Oh so you are just working that out?" The guard teased and began to walk, or rather swagger forward. Too confident...he wasn't just here for a chat, "you will answer when I ask you a question am I clear?" He tested. In half a show of defiance I didn't answer, half of the reason was just fear though. "Am I clear?" He repeated and tilted his head to the side like a cat looking at the bird it was about to pounce on. "Yes.." I whispered almost too quiet to be heard. "And you will do it loudly," he scolded harshly, "So little bird... how'd you end up where we found you? Tragic car crash? Serial killer?" He asked and while it seemed like a completely innocent question if not a tiny bit mean to ask an orphan how her parents died, the way he said it made it something completely different. It was like a sneer, as if he just wanted to remind me they were dead and not actually curious as how they died. I wasn't going to answer, he didn't deserve and answer. My face hardened into anger, he had no right to say that, not when they died like they did. "Answer me," he said first just as if he hadn't expected me to anyway, I kept my lips firmly pressed together. He didn't deserve to know. He came closer, backing me further into the wall painfully and said into my face, his voice bristling with malice and venom, "answer me..."

I still don't know why I responded the way I did, it was a stupid and reckless thing to do, whether it was instinct or anger I don't know but I know I did it, I know I slammed my head forward and into his. Instantly he backed away yelling a torrent of atrocities that I won't repeat for the benefit of a certain senior citizen in the room who I'm told can't stand bad language, just as quickly my head began to spin. I really was going to have to stop trying to solve every problem by bashing it with my head. He must have either had a really thick skull or a really small brain as he recovered quicker than I did and pulled a small remote from his pocket, if I thought his voice was hostile before I couldn't have comprehended how much he wanted to hurt me now as he yelled, "you'll pay for that one... answer me!" I couldn't get it into my brain that maybe it would be best to just tell him, now I wish I had, everything might have gone so differently.

Apparently it wasn't enough to just want to hurt me.

His finger slammed into the remote as if he wished it was my eyeball and pain erupted down my back. I consider myself quite resistant to pain now and I guess I have this man to thank in a twisted way. The pain burned like the wildest of fires, my legs didn't give way so much as give up and I slumped to the floor. Normally on tv people scream when they're in pain, what they never tell you is some pain is too bad to scream, some pain leaves you mute. This was that kind of agony. It was centred on the back of my neck, the device... All I could think about through the agony was Shuri, her face, what it would do to those eyes if she could see me now.

The guard's eyes widened.
His finger lifted off the button.
The remote fell to the floor.
I lay shaking as the agony faded.

I looked up at him with the eyes of a child, the pleading and begging eyes of a child but he didn't see that, all he could see was the wings.