Chapter 12 Asher #2
I grab his wrist and let him haul me up. The space above is a utility corridor, narrow and lined with pipes that hiss and gurgle with mysterious fluids. The ceiling is higher here, enough to stand upright, but not by much. The red lighting turns everything into shades of blood and shadow.
Appropriate, given what this place does.
Jace comes through next, silent as death, knife already in his hand. Then Marlee, her rifle sweeping the corridor in both directions before she's even fully upright. We crouch in the corridor, weapons ready, hearts pounding.
"Children's wing is two levels up," Jagger feeds us through the comms. "Take the service stairs at the end of the corridor, thirty meters on your right. Security station on level three, directly adjacent to the stairwell exit. Night shift is two guards."
"Moving," Jinx confirms, and we're off.
The service stairs are narrow and steep, metal grating that clangs under our boots no matter how carefully we move. The sound echoes through the shaft, bouncing off concrete walls, announcing our presence to anyone listening.
No one comes.
Level two. Level three. The door to the security station is right where Jagger said it would be, a reinforced steel barrier with a small window at eye level.
Jinx peers through. Holds up two fingers. Two guards, just like the intel said.
He looks at Jace. A silent question.
Jace nods and moves forward. He opens the door without a sound. The guards don't even have time to react. One moment they're sitting at their monitors, bored and half-asleep. The next, Jace is between them, blade flashing, and they're crumpling to the floor in spreading pools of red.
Clean. Efficient. Merciful, in its own way. They never knew what hit them.
"Security neutralized," Jace reports, wiping his knife on one of the guards' uniforms. "Cameras?"
Marlee slides into the room, fingers flying over the keyboard. "Loop is holding. Eight minutes left on the window. Children's wing is through the east corridor, past the medical bay."
"Let's move."
We leave the security station and push deeper into the facility.
The corridors here are cleaner, brighter, the kind of sterile white that hospitals use to project an image of healing.
But there's nothing healing about this place.
The air tastes wrong. Recycled and stale, with an undercurrent of chemicals that burns the back of my throat.
The east corridor stretches ahead of us, doors lining both sides. Most are closed, dark windows revealing empty rooms. Examination tables. Monitoring equipment. The tools of conditioning, waiting for their next subjects.
Then we reach the children's wing.
The doors here are different. Heavier. Each one has a small window reinforced with wire mesh, a keypad lock, a slot at the bottom for food trays. Prison cells dressed up as hospital rooms.
And behind them, we can hear the children.
The first door Marlee opens reveals a horror none of us are prepared for.
The room is small, maybe eight by eight, with a single mattress on the floor and a bucket in the corner. But that's not what stops me cold. What stops me is the wall.
Someone has been scratching words into the padded surface. Hundreds of them, thousands maybe, layered over each other until they form a dense tapestry of desperation. The same phrases, over and over:
I am not a person I am not a person I am not a person
Pain is instruction pain is instruction pain is instruction
Do not feel do not want do not love
The boy huddled in the corner has bloody fingertips. Raw, torn, the nails ripped away to nothing. He's been writing these words with his own flesh.
"Jesus Christ," Marlee breathes.
The boy doesn't react to our presence. He's rocking, hands pressed flat against the mattress, whispering under his breath. The same words that cover the walls.
"I am not a person. I am not a person. I am not a person."
I crouch down, keep my voice soft. "Hey. We're here to get you out."
He flinches like I've struck him. His hands come up to cover his ears, and I see more damage. Burn scars on his forearms, perfectly circular, evenly spaced. Cigarette burns, probably. Maybe worse.
"Out doesn't exist," he says. The words are automatic, rehearsed. "There is only the facility. There is only the work. There is only compliance."
I know those words. I said those words, once. They drilled them into us until they became the rhythm of our heartbeats.
"Out exists." Jinx looks at him. "I'm proof. I came from a place like this."
His rocking slows. His hands lower, just slightly. "You're lying. Liars get Protocol Nine."
"I'm not lying. Look at me." Jinx pulls up his sleeve, shows him the scars on his forearm. The injection sites that never fully healed. The brand they gave me when I completed basic conditioning. "See this? H3. That was my designation. I got out. You can too."
He stares at the brand. His rocking has stopped completely.
"H3," he whispers. "You're from the Protocol."
"Harrison Protocol. Yeah."
"They said Protocol subjects don't survive past deployment. They said the conditioning is too deep."
"They lied. They lie about everything." He holds out his hand, palm up. "What's your designation, or your name if you remember it?"
A long pause. His eyes dart between my face and Jinx.
"M7."
"Okay, M7. Do you want to come with me?"
He looks at his hand for a long time.
Then, slowly, he reaches out and takes it.
The next cell is worse.
A girl, maybe ten or eleven, is strapped to a chair in the center of the room. IV lines snake into both arms, clear fluid dripping steadily into her veins. Her head is shaved, electrodes attached to her skull, and her eyes are open but empty.
Whatever they've been doing to her, she's not here anymore. She's gone somewhere deep inside herself. Somewhere they can't reach.
Asher moves to disconnect the IVs while I work on the restraints. The girl doesn't react. Doesn't blink. Her body is limp when I lift her from the chair, a rag doll in a hospital gown.
"Hey." I tap her cheek gently. "Hey, can you hear me?"
Nothing.
"She's catatonic. Whatever they were pumping into her, it's shut down her higher functions."
"Can we bring her back?" Jinx asks.
"I don't know. This level of psychological trauma... We'd need a specialist. Time. Even then, some people never come back from this."
I look at the girl's face. Slack. Empty. A child-shaped shell with nothing left inside.
This is what Helena Cross does. This is what she calls "improvement."
"Carry her," I tell Marlee. "She's coming with us."
"Jinx, if she's too far gone—"
"She's coming with us." I meet her eyes. "We don't leave anyone. Even if she never wakes up. She deserves to sleep somewhere that isn't this." She takes her can carries her out, handing her to two of the older boys waiting in the hall.
The next few cells blur into a parade of horrors.
A boy who attacks Marlee on sight, screaming in a language none of us recognize, trained reflexes turning him into a weapon even at seven years old.
She takes a hit to the face before Jace can restrain him, and even then he keeps fighting, teeth snapping at the air, eyes wild with programmed terror.
Twin girls who won't let go of each other's hands, fused by shared trauma into a single unit. They move in unison, breathe in unison, flinch in unison when we approach. Whatever they did to these two, they did it simultaneously.
A teenager who laughs when we open his door. Laughs and laughs and can't stop, hysterics that have nothing to do with humor. The sound follows us down the corridor long after we've moved him to the extraction group.
Each one carries marks of what was done to them. Burn scars. Needle tracks. Missing fingernails. Teeth filed to points. Brands and tattoos and surgical scars that hint at horrors I don't want to imagine.
And in every room, the same words scratched into walls or whispered under breath:
I am not a person.
Pain is instruction.
Do not feel. Do not want. Do not love.
Helena Cross's brand, carved into these children who will never fully escape it.
I know because I never have.
It’s haunting, devastating that only something like this could be.
There’s crying as we round the hall. Soft, hopeless sounds that seep through the gaps in the doors. Whimpering. The shuffle of small bodies in small spaces. Somewhere deeper in the wing, a child screams, high and sharp and terrified, and then goes suddenly, horribly silent.
Jinx stops in his tracks.
His whole body has gone rigid, his hands white-knuckled on his rifle. His breathing is fast and shallow, and even in the dim light, his face has gone pale.
"Jinx." I keep my voice low, steady. "Stay with me."
"I know that sound." His voice is filled with fury. "I know what they're doing to them."
"We're going to stop it. Right now. But I need you here, not back there."
He turns to look at me. His eyes are dark, haunted, filled with ghosts I can't see.
"Get me through those fucking doors," he says.
"That's the plan."
Marlee moves to the next door, pulls out her tablet. "Electronic locks. Give me thirty seconds."
The longest thirty seconds of my life. The sounds from the door on the other side is a chorus of suffering that claws at my chest.
The lock clicks. Green light.
Jinx yanks the door open and inside are more cells, but these are more like lab rooms than the prison boxes on the other side.
We open the first door. The child inside flinches back, pressing herself into the corner of the tiny room.
She's maybe eight years old, dark hair tangled and matted, hospital gown hanging off her thin frame like a shroud.
Her eyes are wide with terror, pupils blown, tracking Jinx like he's another monster come to hurt her.
Her arms are covered in bruises, needle marks, the evidence of whatever they've been pumping into her veins.
The room itself is barely bigger than a closet. A thin mattress on the floor. A bucket in the corner. Nothing else. No toys, no books, no decorations. Nothing human. Just a box designed to hold a child until they're needed.
"Hey." Jinx's voice changes. Softens in a way I've never heard before.
All the rage, all the violence, all the sharp edges that make him who he is, they disappear.
What's left is something gentler. Something that hurts to witness.
"Hey, it's okay. We're not here to hurt you. We're here to get you out."
The girl doesn't move. Doesn't speak. Just stares at him with those huge, haunted eyes. The eyes of a child who has learned that adults bring pain.
"My name is Jinx. What's yours?"
A long pause. Her mouth opens, closes. Her throat works like she's forgotten how to form words. "They call me Seven."
Jinx closes his eyes. Just for a second. His hands curl into fists at his sides, knuckles going white. When he opens his eyes again, his expression is calm and controlled, but there’s rage burning underneath. The memory of being in a room just like this. Being called a number instead of a name.
"That's not a name. That's what they gave you to make you forget who you really are.
" He crouches down, makes himself smaller, less threatening.
Holds out his hand, palm up, an offering rather than a demand.
"We're going to find your real name. But first, we need to get you somewhere safe. Can you come with me?"
The girl looks at his hand. Looks at his face. Her gaze lingers on the marks on his neck, the scars visible on his forearms, the evidence that he's been hurt too. That he understands.
Something in her expression shifts. Not trust. She's too damaged for trust, but the beginning of hope. The first crack in the walls they've built around her.
She reaches out. Her small fingers wrap around his.
Jinx helps her to her feet, gentle, careful, like she might shatter at any moment. She probably could.
And behind her, in the depths of the children's wing, more are waiting.
"Marlee," I say quietly. "Get these doors open."
"On it."