Give Me Love

chapter forty

Noxella was grey.

A big, old, hunk of gray.

Just a dusty, muted, boring-looking rock in the sky, only as you reached the atmosphere, it was actually the clouds that made it that way— impossibly thick and heavy, always blocking out the sunlight, and pouring large droplets of rain onto the inhabitants every chance they could.

The planet didn't go a day without rain, and it was lucky to get more than a couple hours of sunlight on a good one.

You didn't miss it one bit.

Not even when the speeder drove up the long lane of your gated driveway, twisting and winding up the hills of your large estate. Your father owned a good chunk of land in the back of the city, away from the hustle and bustle of cosmopolitan living, which was good for his research and peace of mind. Honking speeders had a tendency to distract.

That would be your only reprieve, you already knew— the forests you used to explore as a child. It gave you a sense of freedom, running around in the wilderness, because it felt like an escape from everything, even though it was all inside a gate.

Running away without running away— until you actually ran away.

It seemed like your father didn't want to wait around for you to get acclimated, though. You didn't have any luggage, just the clothes on your back, so he told the driver to drop you off at the back of your estate, where his lab was. And then he was leading the way inside the building, flicking on the heavy fluorescent lights, sanitizing his hands, and pointing you to a dressing room.

"There's a uniform in there for you to wear," he said, and you did as he suggested numbly.

Coming home was like your worst nightmare come true— but coming home just to be locked up in a lab and studied by your father... it was so much worse.

The uniform was hanging up on a clothing hangar behind the door. You closed and locked it, quickly shucking off your dress and pulling the thin blue pants and shirt over your face, and then looked at your reflection in the pale fluorescent lights beating down on you.

You looked awful.

You hadn't slept one bit on the way over, and your hair was a mess from being slumped over in a seat for so long. Your face seemed to drag downward, eye bags horrendous, all of your features just cold and distant and empty. Tired.

You already just wanted to be done with this.

But there was a long way to go— that much was obvious as you walked out into the lab, barefoot per his instruction, shivering as the cold air of a sanitizing breeze washed over you. He was prepping a large glass tank right now, filled with some sort of fluid.

You knew what it was for— filled with tiny little nano bots, test objects were submerged into the water for hours— live beings kept on oxygen— to give the bots time to dispense over the skin and into the body. It was a technique that provided the absolute best readings on the organs and any system that needed to be inspected from the inside out.

And now it was your turn.

"I would like to get a full biological reading done first," your father turned a dial on the tank, flipping through a clipboard of paper at the same time. He looked up at you through his glasses when you just stood there.

"Come on now, don't be difficult. You're familiar with the processes of this machine."

"Yeah. I know." You approached the steps cautiously, searching for the breath mask. You had been there when your father first invented it, performing his first test-run on a volunteer from the nearby prison.