The Diaries of The Secret Keeper

Part 1: Chapter 1

She learned to hate the word almost. She almost avoided them. She almost fought back. She almost escaped thirty seven times. She was almost strong enough to save herself.

Gray, so far 217 shades of gray.

She really hated that color. It was all she ever saw. Four gray walls, one gray window that had a stunning view of the gray sky, her gray pants and gray shirt.

The room was fairly small. Just tall enough that she could walk upright in it, but if she stretched she would hit the ceiling. There was a tiny window that was nestled high up in the wall just below the ceiling, at an angle that made it impossible for her to see anything other than the sky. She was sure they did it on purpose. There was a simple metal bed with what was supposed to be a mattress but felt suspiciously like a piece of cardboard. The window was the only light she had.

She had been staring at the right wall for the past five hundred and forty two minutes.

Numbers, numbers, numbers. There were four gray walls, exactly a hundred and ninety two cracks in them, there were nine hundred and fifteen scratches she left on them. She hadn't eaten in fifty six hours, two point three days. She hadn't slept in seventy hours.

The only thing that kept her sane amazed her, it was what she knew. It felt like there were hundred upon thousand of books crammed with information inside her head. She knew how long a human being could last without sleep, how to drive a motorcycle, how to dissemble one and put it back together, and could name all the elements on the periodic table. She had Pi memorized to two thousand and five hundred digits (Which seriously why would anybody know that?). 

But what surprised her the most were the memories. Don't get her wrong, they weren't her own memories but she had a countless amount of people's lives in her head. It was as though she knew everything about them, like she was them. By everything she meant every moment they breathed, every thought they thought, every feeling they felt. To add to her utter amazement, she had a larger group of random significant or what she thought were important scenes of random people's lives in her head.

It felt like she knew everything. She had all these people's lives in her brain, all those numbers and skills yet she still couldn't figure out the most important thing. She couldn't, no matter how much she tried, remember anything about herself.

It was like she had an entire library but the one book she needed was blank. She couldn't recall anything. She remembered wandering the streets clueless and lost being captured and then . . . gray. It aggravated her to believe she couldn't remember anything except a simple four digit number and a name.

5972 Themis

She was pretty sure her name was Themis but she couldn't for the life of her figure out what 5972 meant. She didn't remember how old she was, her family, her favorite color (although she was pretty sure it wasn't gray), anything. It was like having a word stuck on the tip of her tongue, yeah exactly like that but with her whole life.

She combed her head for any information that could give her a clue but came up empty handed. If the people whose memories were in her head ever met her, she didn't recognize herself or the memory wasn't there.

It was getting quite annoying. She didn't even know why she was in what she guessed was a military base prison. By the constellations in the sky she guessed she was somewhere in the north. She held onto that small piece of information as a lifeline. If she knew nothing else at least she had some vague sense of where she was. 

She loved looking out the window at night, it was one of her only chances to see some color even if it was the dark black sky. The dim light in her room went out years ago so her only source of light was the sun. If she timed it perfectly she could rarely catch a reflection of her green eyes, elfish ears and dark black hair in the window. But the window was too small and awkwardly positioned to look properly. 

She muttered and talked, and said this all aloud, so her voice wouldn't crack, and partially because the silence drove her crazy.

The wall was hard against her back as she sat against the concrete, trying to think in silence. The soundless energy was there, the feeling of chaos brewing, like the world was vamping up for a huge event. The silence lasted six more hours before the energy disappeared and the screams started.