Silent Knight

Chapter Eleven

They start the experiments on my brain first, a month after my parents were killed and once my face is a little healed. I didn't know it at the time, but they were trying to make me the perfect soldier, one who could follow orders without question and never once hesitate or regret what needed to be done. The doctor with black hair, whose name I learnt was Dr. Crowe, comes up to look at me.

"She's ready," Dr. Crowe said to the others in the room and walks away before I have the chance to correct her pronoun usage. I am forced into a wheelchair and taken down a brightly lit hallway that hurts my eyes. At the end of the hall is a giant door. I am pushed inside. I am lifted out of the wheelchair and thrown onto a chair that looks like it belongs in a dentist's office.

They strap me down to it, so I can't move any part of my body, no matter how hard I try to fight my way out.

"What are you doing?" I ask through gritted teeth. No one answers me. I struggle more in the chair. "Let me out!" A man walks up with a razor that he uses to shave my scalp, not bothering to be gentle with it. I begin to sob. Once he is done, they strap my head down, like the rest of me. I can't turn my head at all. "Help!" I try to call, feeling panicked. It feels like the oxygen mask is choking me.

Dr. Crowe walks over to me. She is wearing large white gloves and these weird glasses on her face. She looks at me and grins,

"It will be okay," she says. But I don't believe her. Her voice holds no emotion. Something pricks my arm, and I see a tube connecting me to some fluid. Everything starts to feel hazy and numb. But not numb enough. I hear the lady pick something up and, with a flick of a switch, turns it on. It sounds worse than nails on a chalkboard. The sound gets closer and closer to my head until I feel it digging through my skull. I begin to cry out in pain wishing for the pain to stop. But it never does.

I woke up screaming, shaking, with tears running down my face. I sat up in my bed, rushing to put my hands to my ears, the sound of the bone saw still echoing in my brain. I touched the part of my skull where one of the many incision marks were. My hair hasn't grown back normal ever since, hence why I kept it buzzed down. The clock told me it was only a few minutes before I was supposed to be awake. I leaned back in my bed and tried to take a few deep breaths to stop my shaking when suddenly there was a soft knock on the door. I froze, unsure of what to do.

"Hello? Knight?" It was Morathi. "I heard screaming, is everything alright? Can I come in?" I realized he would've been the room beside me, with the walls being as thin as they were...

My helmet was in the bathroom beside my suit, where I had hung it up last night to dry. There would be no time to get it. Morathi knocked again. "It's just me out here."

"Yeah," I said softly, wanting to hear noise different from the one in my brain, "You can come in." The handle turned, and the door opened enough for Morathi to slip in. He closed the door behind him without making a sound. When he turned around and saw me, he tried to hide the look of horror on his face. I could imagine what I looked like. Half burnt face, scars over my scalp, an oxygen mask over my mouth, and my eyes red from crying. I wiped the remaining tears off of my face with a very shaky hand. I looked at Morathi, who was still staring at the burn marks on my face but caught me watching and looked away.

"Sorry," he quickly said, looking down at the ground. I shook my head.

"Really adds to the whole psycho assassin look, doesn't it?" I said, trying to crack a joke, but the room just fell silent. Morathi put his hands in his pockets, trying to look casual. His frizzy hair was messier than usual, I could tell I woke him up. He was hovering in front of the bed, so I motioned for him that it was okay to sit down on the other end.