Purity's Price

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Pain. Pain was everywhere, coursing through my body, blinding me, murdering others. Three different people had already dropped dead, two others unconscious. Orin and I were the only two aware ones remaining, but could even we survive this? No matter what I tried to tell myself through my scattered thoughts, they still seemed to have forgotten about us, leaving all of us here to die. I hadn't seen a single one of the scientists in what felt like hours, but rationally must have only been one.

And maybe that's what they actually did, left us here to be cooked to a crisp, or to have our hearts start pounding so rapidly that they nearly exploded until they finally gave out. Maybe they were done with their experimentations and treatment, done trying to do whatever they were trying to achieve with us locked away in here. We've outlived our use to them. To them we were nothing but another failure.

There was a scream. One, two, three. All shrill, scared. Panting breath. Silence. Another has fallen. Another was dead. Was I next? Was Orin?

I shook these thoughts of death out of my head, or attempted to because I couldn't get my head to move. I did manage to shakily lift a vibrating hand up and latch it onto Orin's, grasping his hand as though it was the only thing keeping me alive and maybe it was. I pried my eyes open and worked my way back to the land of sight, through the foggy haze and blurs that were all I had been able to work out, in time to see the tears trailing down his pale, sunken cheeks, his hold tightening so strongly on my fingers that both of our hands were a pale ghost like white. Soon I was copying his tears, closing my eyes once again, my only thought being that Orin had to win, he had to survive, because if anyone was to get out of this palace of torture it had to be Orin. He was all of the good in the world to me, he was the one holding me together. He was my everything and if he was to die . . . He just had to live, even if I didn't. He just had to.

Another howl, more pants, screams of pain, the last was forced awake in her final moments of life. "Please, please, let me out of here!" a cracking voice begged, but nothing happened, there was no sign anyone heard. They'd left us. She cried, hard, each sob getting weaker. She's given up, like everyone else. This was a fight no one was winning. We all knew it.

With the last bit of life pulsing desperately through her, electrifying her, she franticly pulled at the restraints, once more trying to claim freedom from this place of torture. Her grunts, the sound of hands tearing at leather and unknown fabrics, danced across the room, painting a picture in my fading mind, letting me picture what my eyes could not see. Until, silence.

Soon it was Orin's grip that slackened, our sweat making our grasps slippery, weakening the strength of it. I tried to hold on tighter, to somehow bring him back closer to me, but there was nothing I could do to bring him away from the horrible deaths that had just happened. His hand was slipping and I couldn't keep a hold. I started crying harder, almost making myself unable to breathe.

When his hand fell away from me, I forced my heavy eyelids back open and painstakingly forced my sore neck to turn, to let me see the boy strapped into the chair beside me. I watched as his chest sped up, rising and falling rapidly, and I almost heard his heart pounding against him chest. Colour seemed to be flooding through him, a dangerous amount shooting around his exhausted body, causing his pale cheeks to flush with colour. I sobbed watching as the red and all of the other colors dived out of his cheeks, out of all of his visible skin. It was when his chest stopped expending and his whole upper body collapsed into itself, in a rare silent death, that I truly snapped, broke. My sanity was lost.

And I screamed. I screamed and screamed and screamed. I started to fight, blinded by the tears that were racing out of my eyes. I shrieked and threatened murder, not caring that it would most likely be an empty promise, and I promised that I was going to tear those sons of b*itches apart for what they had done to him. I swore that I was going torture them like they had done to Orin and the others before leaving them here to fry, too, to die by electric shock just like the rest of us had. And I screamed some more, I just screamed, barely pausing to breathe. I screamed until I was hoarse and then screamed some more, no longer noticing the currents pulsing threateningly through my body, to my heart, not noticing the physical stopping six seconds after my first howl out to them. I was too busy letting it all out, too busy expressing everything I had been feeling since I'd came to realise what they were doing to me, to us, here.

It was when I finally fell silent that they opened the doors and came in, all in their fancy white lab coats or body suits, as though we all carried some horrendous disease that would spread and kill them. They just casually walked across the white room over to me, as though there weren't four other people dead, all of which they had been the cause of murder for. We were nothing more than lab rats to them, not human beings in those dull, haughty eyes that I so desperately abhorred, as though what they were doing was really such an acceptable, even great, thing, as though it was all fine and ok. One of them just stepped over to the chair I was strapped into and slowly undid the restraints, and once he realised there was places that they had melted together and that there was no way they were letting go and unhook, and, figuring I was passed out or too weak to fight back, they did it. I let my head drop.

''Would you like a drink?'' the man who had released me asked softly as the others walked out and left the room. I nodded my head weakly and he turned his back to me and walked over to the sink which he set the knife beside as he filled a red plastic cup.

Before I even realised or understood what I was doing my body lunged forward and picked the object up, grabbing the man from behind and holding my newfound weapon to his throat, all the while leaning almost all of my weight upon his shoulders to hold me up because of how weak I was.

''Now, listen to me and listen carefully,'' I hissed dangerously, "you are going to do exactly as I say and have your little science pals help my friend over there and bring him back to life, otherwise I will cut your throat open and watch you as you bleed out all over to this floor. Now. Understand?''

He opened his mouth to give his reply right as the door burst open once again and the other men, and women, flew back into the room, guns at the ready.