I Am Annika

Chapter 11

Chapter 11

He talked, I listened. 

His voice shook, from fear, the cold, exhaustion, I didn't know. I stayed a safe distance, resting upon a cement stoop, just out of the icy rain that had descended upon the city. He paced in front  of me, hands clasped behind his back, rivulets of water dripping down his tense neck. 

He was asking me to do the impossible. 

I shook my head slowly, releasing a long breath through my teeth. Clearly, he didn't know who--or what--he was up against. The plan, he said, was for me to gather intelligence from the inside. It sounded easy; getting patrol schedules, prisoner lists, the numbers and codes to the weapons rooms. The part that he seemed to have not accounted for was that I would be going against the very people who created me. They owned me. They knew everything about me, about how I operated. If I were to get discovered--which was more than unlikely--I'd be terminated. Or worse, I would get set upon the very side I was trying to help. 

"It would be simple--" He started, swallowing hard and raking a hand through his slick hair before I quickly cut him off, my voice a blade cutting through the misty darkness. 

"No. It is simple to say the words. It is simple," I clenched my teeth, "to imagine a favorable outcome." His hand fell to his side. His shoulders seemed to sag at my words, his tired silhouette illuminated by hazy light from the lamps that hadn't burned out or been broken. It suddenly occurred to me that I was standing before someone who had seen too much in his lifetime and carried the weight of it all on his shoulders. He was a rebel. Of course he'd seen friends die, family starve. The shadows in the night suddenly seemed sharper, darker, more sinister. The world we haunted was an evil place that seemed to catch up with everyone. 

I paused, searching for the right words to try and salvage the spark that he had had only moments before. But I wasn't made to console people, I was made to ruin them. I stood in silence, watching as he paced up and down and up and down. 

"Fine." The word sounded so bitter on his tongue, as though it revolted him to even be saying it. I recognized him as a man who did not compromise, who had made many difficult decisions in his life time and wasn't used to them being turned away. He was a leader, but in order to lead you had to think. He needed to think. 

"I need you to access the weaponry files. To start, that's the bare minimum we need. We'll be able to take out some supplies with that information...not all at once. They'd be tipped off that we have someone on the inside." I slowly nodded, returning to my place on the stoop. 

"I can do that." Maybe. Maybe I can do it. How did I even know that this was the right thing? Why was I turning my back on the government now? What was changing within me? Perhaps what they'd put me through, or how they were hurting others, or how they treated humans below them like less than dirt. Like I did. Like I was supposed to. 

But I could feel something else within me, a coiled urge of animosity, a willingness to give up whatever part of me was human, an evil slowly seeping into my mind, my skin, my hands. It felt sick, creeping along my thoughts and whispering in my ear. Kill. Kill. Kill. The monster within me now had a voice that grew stronger with each day. How long until the rest of my mind slipped away, leaving my body behind with the blood it would undoubtedly have trailing behind it's footsteps? I felt like a time bomb, ready to snap at any moment and leave irreparable destruction in it's wake. 

And yet, knowing this, feeling this other, darker self within me, I agreed to get the information. Was I being selfish? Trying to do a scrap of good in my cruel existence before committing the terrible crimes my future held? 

I stood, flicking my hood up to shield me not from the cold rain that fell from the sky, but instead from the gaze of the man--the boy--in front of me. I was afraid the darkness would reach my eyes, if it hadn't already. 

Or perhaps it had always been there.