A Second Chance

You Are Mine

Having come from Price's office, she felt shaky, every step unsure, knowing what she had to do.

Immediately upon her return, there had been whispers of the boy's death, but nothing had been confirmed. And noticeably, very few words had been shared about Rae. So she decided to check on her for own sanity.

It took one look to know what happened to her. The girl was shaking, her injured arm held weakly against her chest, and her eyes darting about the room.

At first she couldn't believe what her eyes were seeing. They actually did it. They had gone and let that ravenous beast out on her.

They could have lost her, she realized, biting her cheek in anxious rage. They had basically gambled with her life, the company's most valuable asset, treated as if she were nothing.

She hardly spent one minute watching her before going to speak with the Director personally. She had stated it before in previous conversations with him, the xenomorph was too dangerous. It was of a warrior class, not one of the simple drones she had seen in files, a much more volatile breed meant to protect the Queen. To put Rae in the ring with it, with no prior knowledge of the species or of their weaknesses, was homicide. The fact that she was still alive astounded her. All odds had been against her, and yet she won.

Before entering Price's office, she attempted to clear her head, putting on a face to numb the real emotions she was feeling bubbling under the surface. After having a few choice words with Price, she was shown the recording taken from the hidden camera inside Damon's cell.

He really thought her seeing it for herself would change anything. He was wrong. The footage only made her path clearer.

Watching the perfectly captured altercation, she hardly held back a gasp as she witnessed the xenomorph claw through the narrow opening on the far side of the cell and gallop after the boy. Her nails bit into her palm when it finally caught up to him, its barbed tail retching right through him. Her eyes shut, thankful that there was no audio associated with the footage, the sight being plenty.

But what had happened next, gnawed at her insides.

Not a moment later after the boy's gruesome end, there was a commotion on the other side of the cell. Rubble collapsed inwardly as a smaller, more human form, fell through.

Rae.

The vein in her forehead pronounced itself as she began to put it all together. They baited her, made her waste precious energy to break through a dense wall, and then sat back to watch her fight a monster almost twice her height and three times her speed? Were they insane?

Thinking back to what she saw, Amanda knew for certain that she would never be able to unsee Rae's desperate movements as she crawled to the boy, turning him over to find his mortal wound. Everything about it was wrong.

She almost couldn't watch when the xeno finally attacked. It wasn't hard to tell that the girl fled for her life, merely fighting to preserve herself, not to avenge, not to conquer.

Price and some of the other scientists somehow numbed themselves to the truth, but she couldn't lower herself to that. Rae was not a thing. She could not be owned. She was a person. A young girl with heart, with a personality, with a future. And they were robbing her of it.

Staring at the screen, Amanda could not fight the tears building up in her eyes at the absolutely heart wrenching vision of Rae falling to the boy– Damon's side. The way she cradled his head in her arms, her head bowed, and her mouth agape, it pulled at something deep within her. Something that was at the cusp of breaking.

Price was not the only one to blame. She did this to her too. She was as much of a monster as the rest of them. She ruined this poor girl's life, and did nothing to stop what was happening to her friend. She couldn't have stopped the experiments, nor the xenomorph, but she could have gotten them out. She could have made a stand.