When the Darkest Secrets are all White

Chapter 9 - The Plight of Those Played by the Masterpiece

The silent chamber was no more.

Thud.

A body hit the centre of the floor. A young body striving through adolescence. A girl on the cusp of her double figures, perfectly healthy - a perfect human. This girl was exemplar in her training throughout the white hell. Always achieving above satisfactory results in academics, fitness, and other criteria. Surprisingly quick in a fight and merciless within striking range. She was feared by the remainder in the Fourth Generation.

She was looked at by the analysts with a mixture of curiosity, pride, excitement... but alas, there was always something better.

The meticulous control she had over her own body was simply flawless, breath-taking. The makings of an ideal human. Yet, the uncontrollable writhing and squirming she was currently exhibiting was something far from human.

This was her limit.

Her posture crumpled on the floor looked like that of a new-born faun. She had enough. Her voice begged to scream out yet was silenced by her own cries. Inaudible yells of 'help' came out strangled, as if the inanimate white walls had their non-existent hands clasped around her windpipe. Her heart overclocking in her chest, forcing too much blood to pound against her eardrums. It was too loud. She placed her shaking hands firmly over her ears and curled up into a ball.

"N-nothing should be this loud! Please!" she screamed. "...please...stop."

She sobbed into the nothingness, not expecting a reply. Her vision was disfigured, as if looking through fragments of broken glass. The itch of the nose, the dull ache of the back of her throat; all the coming signs of tears which were already wetting her youthful face. At least to her, this greyed, blurry, incomplete sight was preferable to clamping her eyelids shut tight and seeing the horrors that appeared on the black canvas of the back of her eyelids. Instead of the blinding white of her surroundings, to the pitch black of her subconscious; this muddied, dulled grey of incompletion was like a haven.

Too petrified to close her eyes, living in this state of unfocused imagination. This fisheye lens vision she had created for herself was why she could barely see the silhouette not more than five paces away.

"It's just noise."

Her breath hitched and body stilled, almost paralysed - frozen. Her shaking hands and tingling feet screamed out in protest at the sudden use of her muscles. Even her heart seemed to know that its own beat would reverberate loudly around the halls. In this panicked, stupefied state, she didn't seem to realise that her self-inflicted deterioration had momentarily stalled.

"...?"

Unable to force a word out of her frozen voice-box, she hummed her silent question.

"It's just noise. You'll learn to ignore it. It can't touch you. It can't hurt you. After all, it's just noise."

Came the monotone reply. It was eerie in its delivery, but perfectly calming. The dull voice of the blurred boy five paces away.

"You control it," he continued. "So, silence it."

His last line could be mistaken for a threat; however, the girl didn't think so. It was advice. She released the strain on her arms and legs and gulped in a lungful of fresh air. Letting the tears run their course unimpeded. After all, everything becomes clearer after rainfall. Laying on her back, she steadied her breathing with her self-made tempo. Ignoring the previous unstable rising crescendo for her own methodical almost melancholic beat.