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( 00 ⎼⎼ PROLOGUE. )
Fear was a concept that could never quite be understood. It could push a person to commit heinous acts or strengthen them to prevail despite all the odds. It could bring people together or it could tear them apart. It could push a mother to abandon her child or a President to lock up the country's children.
Clarissa Thornton knew fear. She knew it like the back of her hand. She knew it when her brother stared at her with glassy eyes, a mess of jumbled words falling from his lips. She knew it when the word irreversible fell from the lips of the doctor who scanned his brain. She knew it when her mother drove towards a large, intimidating building after the promise of a surprise.
So when Clarissa felt the press of a needle injecting an unknown substance into her bloodstream she greeted fear like an old friend. She let it wrap its tainted arms around her to protect her from the searing white hot pain that shot through every nerve, every cell in her body.
And as the crackle of electricity dissipated and the volts decreased to nothing that fear kept its arms around her, in a chokehold or an embrace Clara didn't know.
But she wasn't alone, despite how she may have felt as she was strapped to that operating table. For she wasn't the only child that had developed peculiar powers, powers that gave her the ability to melt another's mind to mush, to form illusions that looked as authentic as reality, to manipulate a person into hearing or feeling whatever she wanted without lifting a finger. Clancy Gray had joined her in her exquisite suffering, he possessed the same brutal lacerations that would fade to almost nonexistent scars. But not enough to erase the damage inflicted to their psyche. He experienced the same bruising humiliation, the same burning hatred and above all else the same tumultuous fear that permeated through their battered bodies.
But while his suffering came to an end the day he stepped outside those walls, abandoning two of the only people he found himself to truly care about, Nicolas Ramirez and Clarissa Thornton's agony would continue for years to come. Clancy left Clarissa to the monsters they had been running from for so long and eventually for her to be swallowed by the demons she had fought so desperately to keep at bay.
And submerged she remained as she stepped into the cabin she had seen being hastily constructed weeks prior from her cell window - cabin 27, her home for the next six years of her life. When Clarissa swayed those scientists, changed their memories of her so they would believe she was a Green who had been pulled from the program, leaving Nico to his fate, she finally understood Clancy's actions. Self preservation came above all in places the devil liked to lurk.
