What If | tmr, newt ✓

Chapter 19

It's the same girl. Teresa. We're much younger this time, maybe four or five. We're both shouting for our Mother. Our Mother? Yes, that sounds right. We must be related. Outside our wooden hut, a campfire blares and people scream. Some with joy, some with fear... and some with madness. She grabs my tiny hand in her cold, clammy one, dragging me outside. I know we need to get away. But to where?

We start running, but I can't keep up and I fall face first onto a bed of dirt and pine-needles. Teresa doesn't notice and just keeps running, but I scream her name - is it her name? - as loud as my small lungs can handle, until hands reach down to grab me and take me away from my one last hope.

***

Time moves forwards in a ray of blinding light, and I'm sitting in a small, clinical room by myself. I can tell I'm older, but not by much. Strapped to a chair, tears are falling down my face as the man in front of me continues to ask the same question. I repeat the answer over and over, until I feel numb inside and out.

Adalyn, I keep saying. Adalyn. Adalyn. The man is content that it's the right answer, but the words sound foreign to me.

Adalyn.

***

Snippets of images pass across my vision; sneaking around hallways, sitting in solitary lessons, singing alone in my room, being introduced to officials. I know I train, too - running on treadmills for hours into the night and slashing down targets in a large gym. I'm also being examined, studied. Sometimes I'm angry, sometimes I work alongside these people, but I always long to talk to someone who doesn't want to monitor my progress every moment of the day. Just one person my age.

***

Much more time has passed in total. This time, I'm in another small room, but there's more people. I sit and talk to a few boys around my age, and Teresa is there as well. I can't see any faces, but somehow... somehow I recognise most of them. The boy with the blonde hair sitting next to me makes a joke, and I laugh, him smiling at me from the side. At once, the set of doors fling open and once again I find hands reaching down to take me away.

***

This time, I'm in some sort of computer lab, screens filling the wall in front of me. In some of the previous memories, I've been crying, but here I can tell I'm sobbing relentlessly. I don't think I'll ever stop. Finally, I take one more glance at the monitor before me... and scream. I scream until my voice is hoarse and nothing more can escape it except a few painful whimpers. I curl into a ball and cry silently into my own shirt. I can't remember, but somehow I know that something has just been taken from me. And I would never get it back.

***

When I wake up, sitting bolt upright and coughing, I can't control my breathing. It's ragged, uneven, and heavy, as I try to gulp down mouthfuls of air and also refrain from retching. It feels like I've been drowning, and for one frightful moment I think I've woken up back in the Box.

I'm just registering that I'm in a room of the Homestead when the door bursts open. Frightened, I picture the hands from my memory picking me up and taking me away, so I shuffle away from the door as far as I can, into the head of the bed.

But it's just Jeff. He shouts at Clint to get Alby as his eyes widen. "Adalyn. Thank God you're alive."

"Wasn't gonna give up on you that easily," I try to joke, but I feel limp, and so were my words. "How long have I been out?"

"Four days," Jeff says, muttering. My jaw drops down of its own accord. "We thought you might not make it."

I go to pull my hand through my hair, but stop, realising my fingers of my right hand are bandaged up. "What the shuck happened?"