Stones and Glass Houses (Book 1)

🕷(27) Flash's Challenge

Brooklyn POV-

The room was dark, cold, and the faintest sound of beeping echoed in the distance. 

How was that possible? Brooklyn had been dropped off at home last night and asked FRIDAY to turn on the heater before crashing in bed.

That's when she realized, this wasn't her bed, it couldn't possibly be. 

Where plush comforts should be, there was now a cheap string mattress with a metal base so strong Brook could feel it hurting her back. But it wasn't completely unfamiliar.

Eyes shooting open, Brooklyn tried to reach for her Stark watch to use against whoever had taken her from her apartment. But her hand wasn't met with the now familiar feel of the smooth red metal piece, but rather... a handcuff.

That was the first thing the teen noticed, her hand cuffed to a metal bar of the headboard. Then she noted the darkness of the room and the barely visible beds beside her. Twins to her own, spread in rows all across the large room.

With a panic, Brook realized where she was just as the blinking yellow lights of the room turned on one by one.

It was then that the hand she'd been staring at shrunk to that of her younger self, and all knowledge of the future disappeared.

Now she was no longer Brooklyn Stark. She was just 10452.

There was no such thing as an apartment in Queens waiting for her, or a family and a future. 

There was only the Red Room.

Like she did every day, the five year old agent in training stretched out her arm upwards, waiting to be free of the metal bite of her handcuffs.

An agent in black passed by each row, unlocking each girl one by one, looking like shadows of death rather than saviors. As it was expected, the young girl kept her expression neutral, not wanting to start off the morning with a punishment for show.

When all the girls were freed and lined up perfectly still before their beds, a voice came in from the speakers above, sound loud enough to damage her ears.

The voice, belonging to the one and only Ivan said, "Otpravlyaytes' v osnovnuyu trenirovochnuyu komnatu dlya yezhenedel'nykh otsenok"

The order ran along her head as she followed the rest of the small widows out the sleeping chamber. It was as if those were the only words that mattered as they looped like broken record in her mind.

Head to the main training room for weekly assessments.

So the young girl went to the changing rooms, which was just a glorified metal cage with black uniforms on the floor for each of the hundred or so girls her age.

No one cared for modesty, there had never been such a thing as privacy in here, and everyone had been witness to the other's punishments to be bashful about scars. There was no need to hide a thing.

Once the familiar comfort of her suit was on, with the red stains from last week washed off, Brooklyn followed her sestras down the flickering dark hallways, not minding the coldness of the concrete against her bare feet. 

If anything, it was a small comfort.

Blood that was to come was warm, the body of the girl she'd no doubt have to kill would be sweaty as well. But the ground was cold and lifeless. The perfect way to ease her mind of what was to come.