Window Cracks

▶️The Aftermath◀️

If this is the sunken place to give in to death, to darkness, I am slowly falling further in, losing light and orientation. I feel I have lost everything, including my life, as I vaguely and distantly think of Adrianna, my father and Vivian. Memories have started to fade as I am slowly letting go. I am slowly becoming nothing... and my mental pictures of Hannah slowly flash away, she seems ghostly now as her scent is gone. Just a soulless image of her, going too.

But then, something about her rushes past my mind with an overwhelming surge of confrontational urgency, it shocks my body.

I suddenly wake.

I am not dead?

I feel cold.

The left side of my neck stings with pain.

I have been alive this whole time.

"He's up!" I hear an echoing booming voice. I look around me. The place is densely dim but I can see seated and standing shadows of people a distance away from me.

I am confused.

What big room is this?

A dark figure appears and scurries past me and suddenly, the large room is brightly illuminated. I narrow my eyes to see that opposite me, a huge desk is on the other end of the long room and Zelch is leaning against it, looking at me and washed over with an oddly happy facial expression. He has got several authority members standing beside him, stolid, stationary and armed.

"If you didn't skip some of the days at Tank, you would have known that what we shot you with was a Tra-nqui-li-zer. Just a temporary blackout Myko," he bursts into laughter, and the authority seconds him with their condescending chuckles.

The unnecessary ridicule instantly revives the fresh memory of the same authority laughing at me before Mel took the shot.

I have been tricked.

I frown with sadness and anger but a cringe washes over as the neck pain gets worse.

"Look beside you, Mr Myko."

I shift my shoulders to see that to my sharp left, Adrianna and Hannah are fidgeting, slowly awakening and also reacting to some discomfort on the left side of their necks. They are trapped; tied down to chairs that I recognise came from Zone Zero. I instinctively try to get up and free them, but I realise I am in the same compromising circumstance.

"What did you do?" I struggle to say, clouded with stinging, compounding pain.

"Oh! All of your abilities are gone. That's all. The pain shall end. No worries about that," Zelch's gleeful tone of voice echoes across the cold room.

I feel anger rising, but it is subdued by the defeat.

"I must say, however, these are impressive abilities from you and the Hannah lady over there... they were really... unique."

He waves two small glass tubes that he picked from a tray settled on the large desk behind him.

"But even more surprising, we discovered two abilities in that lady. Odd, I tell you, but marvellous. We had to put her abilities in two separate tubes. It took a long time, Myko. So what were you thinking about while you were sleeping?"

I look at Adrianna. She has gained awareness of where she is, and now she eyes Zelch with pure contempt in her eyes.

"Francis, you've always been like this. Hungry for power, even if your hands get dirty..." She slowly and deliberately articulates every word to him, but her anger is shortchanged by her pain. Her voice cracks.