The Truth in our Lies

Chapter 62

I don't know what happened. Bagels and coffee, then cuts and blood. What used to be thin white sheets were soaking and heavy. They didn't look white anymore. Dipped and coated in blood.

I shouldn't have remembered. I was sure of that. Why did I suddenly remember all those memories they took away from me? They probably never wanted me to, so why?
Why, why, why?
I thought of all these things as the red-haired nurse carried me into a different room. A storage room with bottles and syringes and tubes and needles. Things I had seen way too much in these past days. The woman kept telling me not to make a sound as she de-activated the alarm system.

I didn't say a thing.

She lay me down on a metal table, removing the big cardboard boxes and placing them next to the thick metal door. They looked heavy from the way the red-haired nurse's biceps flexed as she moved them. My limp body met the cold surface of the table, sending shivers down my spine that I tried my best to ignore. Along with my dizzying vision and cramming headache. I took a glance at the mirrors covering the walls of the room, so many mirrors multiplied my reflection, that I was surrounded by myself and my blood. Everywhere.

There were cuts all over my collarbone. But the skin faced outwards.

They had been made from the inside.

I pulled my gaze away to meet the nurse's and tried shake off how I felt like throwing up after all that blood. All my blood, everywhere. All my memories, shattering me, drying me out until there is nothing left but another body. Meaningless, forgotten.

"Your body is fighting your memories. Anything you are now remembering from your childhood before your tagging includes emotion" The nurse spoke quickly as she grabbed a syringe and stabbed it in my thigh. I flinched at the contact "Any bit of emotion you remember will scar you." Great, I thought to myself. Just what I needed.
"I didn't expect this to happen so quickly... I didn't expect all the tests to be made on you. I didn't think it would get to this" She stopped fiddling with the bandages for a moment and stared deep into my eyes, as if she could see through me, all the way into my soul. If I even had a soul. "You have to understand, I'm truly sorry" Then she moved on to placing a powder on top of my cuts, which effectively stoped all the bleeding, leaving me in shock. Not because of the powder.

How could she be sorry? She can't feel anything... So, how is she sorry? It's impossible. It's... human.

"How-" I mumbled the beginning of my long thread of thoughts.

"I want you to get better, trust me" She took out some bandages from the cupboard and spared a single glance at me along with a reassuring smile "But right now, I need to stop you from bleeding to death. And I also" She started cleaning the cuts with a wet cloth "need you to promise me to not say a thing about what just happened to Andrew"

I took a moment to process what she was saying, my eyes darting away from hers. She was asking me to lie to government official. Break the rules. Which I was okay with, not much of a life I would be missing out on if I got killed.

This is no life

Shaking a melody that hung uncomfortably in the back of my head I brought my thoughts back to the nurse. She would get killed if they found out she was breaking the rules. Because me not telling Andrew meant she couldn't either.

"You mean not tell him about me bleeding or remembering?"

"Exactly. If he finds out you have been remembering, it means the formula of the 'operation' isn't working. It means that you are remembering what you were supposed to forget after each session. The 'operation'..." she seemed to struggle finding the words to explain what she was thinking, frantically moving her arms around the air "-It's carefully manufactured so that after he doses you with something to resurface your memories and studied your body's reaction was to it, hence the bleeding,  you would then be dosed with yet another medicine, that would make you forget everything you had just remembered. It's all to find a way to point you out. Signal out and kill people that haven't been tagged so they can't hide." She carefully stuck skin-coloured plasters onto each of my cuts "The problem that we are now faced with is that that medicine is not working"