Overdose

34. The Executioner

The Facility had gone quiet. No training, no experiments. Nothing was happening. The guards whispered among themselves, and the teenage prisoners just sat in the rec room quietly. It was unsettling.

The Master had called me into his office again. When I got in there, I found that he wasn't alone. There was a person sitting in one of the chairs. The white uniform contrasted heavily against their dark skin. The thing that really caught my attention was they bright blue eyes. They almost looked fake, like when people photoshop their eyes on social media.

"Evan, this is Rem." The Master gestured towards them.

"I thought Xander killed him." I sat beside them, but kept my distance. Heath said that he was extremely powerful, and the last thing I wanted to do was set them off.

"Them."

"Sorry?"

"My pronouns are they and them."

"Oh. Right, sorry. I didn't know."

Rem gave me a small smile. "But no, Xander did not kill me. He has nothing against me. Not even a gun could stop me." Their accent was thick. As they talked, they played with the necklace he was wearing. Bright, colored wooden beads surrounded their neck, making noises as they moved around. "I only pretended to be dead so I could come see Lazarus."

"I got them out of the morgue."

"There's a morgue here?" I shouldn't have been surprised.

"How did you fool Xander? Wouldn't he have noticed that you weren't dead?"

Rem laughed. "Not if I didn't want him to."

"Your friends think you are dead." I leaned back. "Are you going to tell them that you're not? They think that you've been down there, suffering. Heath said that Xander ruined you."

"Yeah right. No, Xander did not ruin me. I had to stay down there, work on my powers. I would not be able to pull off half the stuff I could do now if I stayed up here playing house."

"Rem will tell them when it is safe to." Lazarus interjected. "For now, let us talk about this escape plan."
It was simple. Lazarus had access to any place in the building, and none of the guards would dare shoot him. He wasn't worried about the rest of staff, as some of them were still on his side from before Xander took over. Rem, Lazarus, and I would go down into Containment, and Lazarus would open the door, releasing everyone. He would take Nathaniel and I to Ivingly, and the rest would go to his Academy.

"What if Xander catches us?" That was the only thing I was worried about. I doubted that Xander and Caesar would actually shoot us, but there was still a voice deep in my mind that told me that they would.

"Then I'll take care of him."

"What about everyone else in here?" I asked. "Are we getting them all out?"

"For right now, I am only worried about us. Once we get out, and my students are safe in The Academy, then I will come back for everyone else. I am leaving my staff here, so they can make sure that Xander doesn't do anything. I fear that once he believes he has full control, he will go to the extreme. I will do my best to try and prevent that."

I stood up. "I'm going to talk to Nathaniel."

"It is the middle of the night." Rem cocked their head, looking confused.

"That didn't stop you from having this meeting." I shrugged and walked out of the office. Rem and Lazarus started talking again the moment that the door shut.

Almost everyone was asleep in the Containment Unit. Heath and Marina were leaning on the walls opposite each other. I assumed that they had fallen asleep talking to each other. Elijah and Felice were laying in their beds.

There was, however, one person who had stayed awake. I watched as he played the piano. I didn't know the name of the song that he was playing, but it sounded very somber. He played it slow.

I lightly knocked on the glass that separated us. "Nathaniel, can I speak to you for a moment?"

He took his hands off of the keys but didn't look at me. "What do you need?"

"I just talked to Lazarus. He ran over the plan with me. I thought you'd just want to know about it."

"Does it involve me escaping?"

"Yes."

"Does it involve me killing my father?" The question caught me off guard, and I didn't really know how to answer it.

"I don't believe so." I said slowly.

"That's a shame." He put his hands back on the piano, starting the song again.

"Nathaniel, we are not friends and I know that you probably don't trust me." He kept playing the piano, so I didn't know if he was actually listening to me. "I just want you to be aware that I have no respect for your father. The only reason I am wearing this uniform is because if I wasn't then I'd most likely be dead. Your father is a terrible person, and I am sure that you don't have the same views that he does. I don't know if he did anything to you besides locking you up for years, but I get why you hate him. I do too."

He didn't respond, or even look at me, so I left.