Strong For Too Long Trilogy ✔️

10. Tracking The Dart

CHAPTER 10: Tracking The Dart

She was a whisperer, my mother. Speaking out of a whisper was unusual, I remember that as a child. I never heard her yell at me, not once in the small time of a childhood I supposedly had, if I remembered anything of it when I snap my eyes open, another few weeks of the same process, the same needles embedded into my scarred skin, I felt my cheeks hollow and my eyes sink deeper into my skull. My pale, pristine skin was washed under another machine, I was pulled out and I vaguely remember being changed, always by a woman, a doctor of sorts.

"Can you tell me your name?" Lucinda asked me.

I stare at her red high heel shoes. She looked to be so uncomfortable in such priceless shoes, as if her feet don't belong in their confining spaces, she sits there waiting patiently for an answer I couldn't give.

"I don't remember." I told her, my voice scratchy, unattractive. The lines of my drained veins inside my forearms were prominent, deadly and obscuring. I held in the harshest of breaths, whenever I needed to deeply breathe, it was impossible because no matter how hard I could have tried, it was a grilling process I no longer wanted to go through.

"Do you know how long you've been here?" She asks me next.

If I couldn't remember my own name, what made her think I could recall how long I'd been in this place. In a facility I didn't understand, when all I remember is Washington, that's all and even then, I couldn't tell where Washington was.

I look up at her, "I don't know."

"They have given you the designated Candidate Number of Candidate Eleven. You've been here for just over two years, your name before this was Olive Crane. You were eighteen years old when you enrolled in the programme, Eleven. Tell me, how are you feeling today?" She asks me, a question I don't know how to answer.

"I don't feel anything." I tell her, again, I couldn't stop being truthful.

"You've survived all eight stages. Congratulations, Eleven. They will now be training you to get back out into the field. Are you excited? You'll be let out in to the real world in a month's time. This is very good news. You've been doing very well, you should be proud of yourself." She says to me.

I blink, "I don't feel anything."

My mind felt locked after one month. Or at least it felt like a month of being drugged up and placed under multiple different simulations, told how to kill, shown how to do it in my mind, yet I never physically hurt anyone, it was a mechanism embedded in my thoughts like an ever-growing cancer.

It was killing me slowly. On the inside more than the outside and breathing felt so difficult before my meds were changed. She called herself Doctor Lucinda, my main Doctor, my main therapist. First seeing so many people was strange as I walk down another corridor, not recognising my own features the longer I'm pulled by the platinum chains around my wrist and neck, the doctorate gown.

I'm shoved back into her office. She sits behind the table, two guards on either side of her. She had long blonde curls, pony-tailed up high as she gestures they leave. She gestures I take a seat on the couch, "Remove her cuffs." She orders, gesturing to the metal jarring into my skin, creating blood red lines, opening flesh, yet I struggled to feel the pain as they're removed.

She stares into me now, one month ago, she said I'd be ready to breathe the air of outside, to feel the sun on my face again. That's how she described it, as if I'd forgotten the sun, along with everything else I knew.

She places a pair of folded clothes on the pristine white couch I sit on, "Get changed." She says to me, watching me closely as I robotically collect the clothes and stand, stepping towards the en-suite in her office, I close the door, releasing the bows around the hospital gown. I looked down at my ribs, at each thin lining of them.