BIRTHRIGHT Book One: The First Key

Chapter 6

A metal brace slams down hard on a human forearm.

Then another.

Two more clang around calves.

A bright green syringe punctures a vein.

A scalpel carves a deep gash into flesh, removing a small steak's worth of tissue.

Alex screams in pain and tries to sit up, but a medic slams his head down hard into the perfectly round operating table on which he is spread-eagle. His bruises and broken bones from Isaac have all but disappeared. Now it's just these new, more surgical wounds that decorate his body.

Looking around the room as best he can from the table, Alex sees a rounded wall with no corners. A completely cylindrical operating room.

No doors, no windows.

No way out.

Until one particular spot on the featureless wall catches Alex's close scrutiny. Despite the medics continuing their cutting and drawing of blood, his gaze is transfixed and his attention is undivided.

This spot on the featureless wall is different.

On the other side, Tia is pressed up against the two-way glass in a small adjacent changing room. Her hair still wet and wearing an ill-fitting military uniform, a smile comes across Tia's horrified face when she realizes it: He can see me!

In the room next to Tia's, Isaac finishes buttoning the vest to a new three-piece grey suit, watching his own dim reflection in the two-way mirror, as if he's completely oblivious of his view of Alex's torture.

Or enjoying it.

He grins as he uses the refection to finish tying a chartreuse green tie in a perfect double-windsor knot. He steps out of the sterilization cell directly into the General's enormous office.

The General sits behind a large, deep red mahogany desk. The only splash of colour in an otherwise mono-tone office of grey and aluminium. The lamps, the overhead light fixtures, the chairs, the end tables, they're all some shade of grey except for that opulent desk.

Beside the massive stack of paperwork and reports scattered across the General's desk sits a single picture frame.

In it is Tia's college graduation photo.

"Three full rounds of testing, Harris." the General laments with deep frustration. "Three."

Isaac pulls up a chair across the desk, trying not to focus on how starved for food his body has already become. He begins chewing on jujubes from his pocket, carefully picking through each handful he draws, eating only the green ones. Isaac leaves every other colour of jujube on the end table beside his chair.

"Do you have any idea how much each round costs?" the General barks as he leafs through a dossier on his desk, visibly frustrated.

"Your men look like high schoolers dissecting a pig in there." Isaac knows his remark is not helping the General's disposition, and he enjoys the reaction all the more for it.

"Those are some the finest biologists to the graduate from the corps, Harris!"

Isaac looks up from his jujubes with disinterest.

"Lemme guess," he says, chewing the gummy candy loudly "they studied human biology?"

Inside Tia's sterilization cell, she has ceased any semblance of putting herself back together in favour of trying to communicate with Alex. She can tell he's not looking around aimlessly. He's staring right into her eyes. Tia tears up and mouths 'I love you'.