Hope in Ruins Book III: The Fountain and the City of Salt

Subjects 1 and 2: A New Subject

Marta was right. About everything. I should have listened.

Today they returned with Subject 1, intact and safe, but they also brought in a new subject. A boy. Not a boy: a young man. He's maybe twenty years old and severely damaged. I don't know what they did to him or how many of ours he killed in the process, but it must have been a terrible fight. They must have used Subject 1 to bring him down. Was that why they took her? One of his legs is shorter than the other. He's limped all his life. I wonder how that happened. Whatever happened to him, we can use Subject 1 to heal his limp after his more serious injuries have been addressed.

They rushed him into surgery, just like Subject 1, but I was able to calm myself this time. W̶e̶  I've already had one subject who was badly injured and survived. This one may as well. But I didn't understand the significance of Subject 2 until she herself came to the lab.

I meet with her occasionally, but most of the time, I focused on my work. If there's something we need from her, blood samples or specific tests, we have her personal doctor take care of it and give us the results. She follows our work closely for obvious reasons and sends her orders through the General Eternal or the head of our department, a sniveling man who hasn't worked in a lab in years and prefers politics to anything else.

It wasn't until the Eternal Mother, and General Eternal came to the lab themselves that I realized what I had done.

Marta, I'm so sorry.

The Eternal Mother came to see this new subject and watched his operation intently. She just stood there staring at him through the glass. This one meant something to her personally. I asked her what was special about this one, and she said that he would turn the tide. She said that with him on that operating table, it was already over no matter the outcome of the operation. In the end, it didn't matter if he lived or died: she had already won.

That was when I realized who this boy was: he was my missing link—the one thing we needed to create the perfect weapon. With him, we can make the perfect Human Element.

Our Mother had found Perseus at last, and there he was, cut open on a table, being put back together again stitch by stitch by bloody stitch. I never imagined we'd find him. And I never imagined he'd be so vulnerable. He's just a child.

He was supposed to save us.

Apparently, he has abilities we know nothing about—mind control, the ability to restore Burned memories—and those abilities mean that we can create the perfect weapon. But even with his abilities, the cure is still unsure. I told her that even with his powers, we might never find a cure. But she looked at him and smiled. She said that all I had to do was create the perfect weapon, and the Fox would do everything else.

Marta was right. We should have saved Subject 1 when we had the chance, and then we might have been able to save ourselves. But what am I now? A coward who turned in the woman I love to be

But if Marta was right, then... there is still time, and I don't have to be what they made me. I can still survive this because that's what I am: a survivor. I just had a wrong idea of what needed to survive. It's not my body: it's my soul.