Strong For Too Long Trilogy ✔️

22. Lillian Severin

CHAPTER 22: Lillian Severin

I stare into her aquamarine eyes and study her, "Hello." Is the first thing I say to her. Candidate One was sitting awkwardly on the couch, directly proportional to where I was standing now with his muscular back towards me and his rough, callous hands typing away on a useless screen.

Candidate Eight.

Lillian Severin looks up at me, "Hi. You're the new girl, right?" She asks me.

I study her, "I guess, though everyone at some point was new, right?" I ask her.

She slides the bookmark in the sleeves of page twenty-three, of a scientific journal, she gestures down to the seat in front of her and straight to the chess set at the window sill. She lifts it up and between us, "Do you know how to play?" She asks me, studying me closely before her eyes flicker over her shoulder.

"Clear the set." She says to me and I tilt my head, grabbing my phone, hacking into the cameras of the library and freezing the screens, turning off audio from the central monitor systems as she stares down at the chess seat, breathing out when I nod.

"I can't believe you survived." She breathes out in relief.

I stare at her, "You should have more faith in me, Eight." I say to her.

She moves her first pawn, "Four knows, we weren't sure about One because he's seen us in the halls often, but didn't recognise us for a good month when we stopped taking the same classes and was at a stand still because he had your diary that would have given us the ticket out of here had he remembered who the hell we were." She says to me, moving the pillow around and under her bruised elbow.

I study it, "What happened there?"

She stares at me, "What do you think? When you were taken, a game changer is what happened, Eleven, we were taken out, imagine that. I hadn't seen the moon or the stars, I hadn't smelt the night air for months and all of a sudden, we're dragged out, tranquillisers injected in and we were susceptible to orders. I saw them take Four and One aside and I saw them place Thirteen on some sort of truck with a few others, all unconscious, then I wound up here. A new identity and a clear order, stay on the down low and make one wrong move, they'll terminate me. Imagine my surprise when I see you've showed up, but you were so close with Candidate One, I feared something else had happened. What did they do to you?" She asks me, moving her knight forward.

I purse my lips, two different stories.

But which one of them were telling the truth?

"Taken. For more experimentation." I mutter under my breath.

She looks up to me, "I'm sorry, Eleven." She whispers. A sincere understanding in her eyes as it leaked from her voice. The same emotion, the same similarity and connection we share through pain and an institute I was going to take down.

Even if it meant my death along with it.

"What of Four?" I ask her slowly.

"He's here. He's safe and stabilised, but he hasn't spoken to me much because we just...we weren't sure. No one is, in some cases-this place feels normal, but in other cases, the students here are almost too important, too entitled. As is the teachers. It makes me wonder whether there's a connection between them and this school." She murmurs to me, side glancing the room, looking for any lingering eyes where there were none. No one who was bothered, no one who was suspicious and that-in itself-was dangerous.

"We should lay low for now. I don't have all the information I need to infiltrate the Continuum." I say to her, moving another born, while she uses her bishop to take it, I use mine to take her rook. I wasn't not accustomed to the game of chess, they had in fact used it in the containment unit to basically counteract my moves, as if they believed it was logical that I would play life like I would play on a chess board. They claim to be smart, they claim to know it all...when they themselves must have been as secluded as I was...just more deluded than I believed I would get out before they could hurt me.