Lies & Harmony Trilogy

Chapter Six: Realization (Part 2)

I close my eyes, imagining the hospital rooms before me and the cool breeze from the open window. When I open my eyes, I’m still standing in the same room with the same stagnant air and same people. Hatred begins to rise through me before I squash it down with the sole of my foot.

     “I have no family,” I say, my voice slow and quiet, the way it usually is back at the hospital. I only talk when necessary. I will not give Tabitha and Gordon any more information than I have already. Telling Kasie about Mr. Lawrence was a bad idea and a bad choice. I will not make bad choices any further. Once presented with choices, I seem to be making mistakes everywhere.

     “Yes you do,” Tabitha says firmly, her eyes set on mine. “Everyone does.”

     Before I can contradict her, and tell her that I truly don’t have a family, she focuses her attention on the screen and the words that were at the tip of my tongue escapes me. I stare at her and wonder what the words were again. I don’t have a family. I lived in a hospital. I’ve always lived there. Always.

     But the photograph that Tabitha showed me screams otherwise.

     “You weren’t volunteered,” Tabitha informs me. “In fact, you were taken. But it doesn’t say it was against your will,” she says, pointing at the words on the screen. “You were on ‘their side’ according to the transcripts.” She gives me a smile, but I can already see the darkness in her eyes when she looks at me. “Maybe we should have looked further before we took you.”

     I don’t understand half of what she is saying, but I don’t admit it. Instead, I just stand there and stare at her. She’s crazy. She must be.

     “You were captured along with someone else,” she says, her voice catching at the end before regaining control over herself. “And then you were brought to the hospital and the doctors blocked out your memories.”

     I shake my head, denying this insane story, but there’s a part of me that secretly agrees to everything she says. There’s a part of me that tells me that this is all true and the hospital is the place full of bad people.

     It’s not true. It can’t be true.

     It is.

     But it isn’t.

     It is!

     It’s not true.

     Yes it is!

     There’s a riot inside my head, and I press my palms against my temple again, squeezing my eyes shut and trying to push all the noise and arguments away. I don’t know what to believe. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it!

     Someone is screaming my name, but it’s probably inside my head, and I’m falling through the darkness, and when my hands reach out to grab hold of something I can’t feel anything, and I slip through the darkness screaming for help, but nobody can hear or see me, and I’m tangled in a cobweb of lies, and the spider cackles at me when it sees that I am helpless in its trap, and it approaches me, but then the trap of lies fall loose, and the white light is so blinding, and it hurts my eyes so much, and I realize that the truth isn’t what I wanted either and—

     Hands grab my shoulders, and they shake me until I’m well in my mind again. My eyes open, and I see that Gordon is shaking me, his eyes fixed on me.

     “Seven Young,” he says, but that’s not me anymore. I don’t even know who I am. “Seven Young, you listen to what she has to say right now. I know things are hard to take, but you need to listen to this.”