Beyond the Maze

Chapter 3: Trust

I supposed it had been a day or two since I'd been talking to Thomas in that horrible experiment room. He was still confused and disoriented, although, I must admit, my stomach turned less and less. You can see that all that shit that they had pricked me was diluting, like a sugar cube in a cup of coffee, in my blood. The shower water fell all over my body while I looked at the ground. I was leaning against the tiles on the bathroom wall, head down, silent, remembering some episodes from my past. Incomplete, in fragments, distorted, as if I were in some kind of nightmare from which I could not wake up. Everything I tried to remember turned an intense white, unpleasant and that made me feel very restless, which was linked to that strange feeling of not knowing what time it was. Everything in me was a sea of doubts, an ocean of bewilderment, a vast nonsense. I was still not happy. I hated this feeling.

My mind tried to link and thread the numerous flashes that were happening in my mind in the form of thoughts, isolated and nonsense, and the relationship between them. I was totally overwhelmed by the situation. I wanted to find many answers, but as I found some, little by little, thousands of other questions followed one another. It was frustrating that Thomas's only response was: "You'll know more in due time."

After trying to meditate for several minutes, I didn't realize the full amount of time I had been under the shower, even though the bathroom was covered in an intense cloud of steam. I grabbed the white towel and dried my body, legs and then my hair. The only thing that went through my head at this moment was a small reflection on my own being. It was the feeling of being able to shower without my own mechanical self-breaking down. I was also amused by the fact that the best reflection I had had on myself, in many days, had been on the question of water. How ironic! Although maybe I could get used to being able to think on my own, the fact that any thought arises without having to repress it because of a drug or a chip that controls my will.

After drying myself I proceeded to get dressed, I put on the clothes that WCKD had left me in the closet. A white T-shirt, which gave off a rather pleasant smell of detergent, dark pants, style of chain mail with a few small touches of carbon fiber and white and blue nylon. I have to say that the clothes that they had left me were much more comfortable than the old Umbrella uniform, although I liked the latter better and the arrangement of patterns and colors was better than that of WCKD, but, anyway, you can't have everything, and as the saying goes: don't look in the teeth of a gift horse. I sighed and put on the jacket, made of a similar material to the pants, although it had a high collar, two metallic suspenders, divided into several rectangular silver-colored sections and located about an inch from the sliding area of the jacket zipper on both sides. It also had two straps that hung from the rear area, in the middle of the shoulder blades and about that same height, about four or six inches. It had two zippers for pockets, perpendicular to the slide, at the height of my elbows. The sleeves were long, but I pulled them up a bit, folding them in until they were about elbow height. The jacket was surmounted by a kind of silver-gray fiberglass vents, circular in shape, about three centimeters in radius, and divided into six identical sections with a spiral that started from the intersection of the six radii.

Before getting ready to leave the bathroom, I stopped for a few minutes in front of the mirror. The first thing that came to my mind was the memory I had with that kind of dark representation of me. I squeezed my eyes shut, clenched my fists, and then opened them again, praying that impression would leave my head. Luckily it was all my imagination. I stopped to comb and put my tousled blonde hair a bit. After putting my hair back on, my scar, which ran across my face from the right eye area and slightly slashed the eyelid of the same eye, turned electric blue, the same color as my right eye. Afraid of meeting my authentic self again, I rushed to wash my face, opening the faucet with my left hand, waiting for the water to come out lukewarm so that I could wash my face a little later. Afterwards I dried it off and walked thoughtfully towards the large window that crowned the room, to the left of the bed.