Torment, Flight
I looked over to Lin her robotic eyes locking with mine, I gave a smile and stood a little taller only to have those things they screwed into my spine ache. I tried my best not to grimace, but by the look on Lin's face I didn't cover it up well enough. There were two girls in the middle of our common area, 'Great, they took even more.' I thought to myself. Gran came out of a door at the back of the room, she gestured to the two girls and spoke in a voice like honey. Slick, bright, and just all around too damn sweet, introducing the two girls as Elizabeth and Imogen or Pain and Misery. I had to fight the urge to growl at her that those weren't their names. The HATC, Human Android Tech., employees had nicknamed us during our stay in this prison.
The first time they called me Torment I screamed in the one man's face, "MY NAME IS CLEO TORRÉZ!" I'm the daughter of Eliza Torréz CEO and own of Torréz Enterprise, an offshoot of HATC, the leading corporation in nanotechnology. I thought the wings had been painful, that day they pulled me into a room and installed one of my own inventions into my forearm. They cut open my arm, using a scalpel, sharp enough to cut through the muscle in one cut, they ran wires through my arm to my brain. I screamed and kicked but Cruise slammed my head into the metal table. When I woke up I was sprawled out on my thin cot that laid in the corner of my cell.
There were a throb and an ache in my left forearm, I sat up and looked only to see my own technology turned against me. It was a tracker/GPS and a guide for pets to be brought home. The needed wiring to their brain stem, to control it, it would force me back if I ever escaped. The project was still in the prototype stage, it had killed all the animals it had been tested on when used, but I haven't been part of its development since I was taken. The HATC was my own grandmother's company, HATC is short for The Human Android Technological Corporation, I was one of the leading engineers of the company at just 12 years old. My grandmother was the one who raised me, she told me she was going to make HATC the biggest name in the world. I never knew how far she would go to do it.
I snapped out of my own thoughts when Lin called me over to the new girls, "Cleo!" she yelled, "Don't you want to say 'Hello'?" I smiled at the two newbies as they looked nervous and in pain. The one on our right waved her Android arm to introduce herself but stopped after one shake putting her arm to her side, looking down with a grimace. She looked up again, her grey eyes cold as the stormy seas that they resembled. "My name is Imogen," she said curtly, without a hint of warmth in her voice. Her sister was not quite so sombre even in her situation, she looked at us her own grey eyes shining silver in contrast to her sister. She smiled at me and introduced herself as "Lizbeth, short for Elizabeth!"
Looking between the two I gave a half smile and waved softly. Tori then decided to take it upon herself to introduce the rest of us.
