“—won’t do it!” shouts a voice from extremely close by, jolting you back to consciousness. The fogginess of your mind makes putting a name to the voice difficult. Hoping to jog your memory, you attempt to open your eyes, but they’re heavy, so very, very heavy. With extreme effort, you open them just a crack — enough to take in the side of a beautiful face — before they snap shut again. Ellemenie! That’s who it is! And she’s close, very close. Is she… holding you?
“Your only other option is that I destroy it,” says a less familiar voice, deep and smooth, pleasant even, if not for the fact that the word ‘it’ is undoubtedly referring to you.
The arms apparently surrounding you tighten their grip, and Ellemenie’s voice draws even closer, as though she is hunching over you. “I won’t let that happen! You’ll have to kill me first, and I know you won’t!”
Sighing so hard that you’re certain he rolled his eyes along with it, Imxach says, “I will not need to kill you. Incapacitating you is not a difficult task. But if you force me to resort to such measures, I will kill the disruptor.”
“But you need her too, don’t you? For your experiments?” Ellemenie says, her protective grip remaining firm. “Why else would you want her in there? You won’t kill her either!”
Imxach’s voice draws closer, accompanied by the clacking of shoes against the floor. “Subject #539, your resistance grows tiring. Do not allow your status as an invaluable specimen delude you into believing that such privilege extends to anyone else. As much as I want to experiment on this disruptor, it is not necessary. And more to the point, your other friends, such as Subject #374, remain as expendable as they always have been.”
The body beside you goes rigid, the sound of Ellemenie’s breathing stopping for a moment. “Ee—eeozi? You wouldn’t, just to punish me…?”
You can practically hear the cruel smile on Imxach’s face through his tone. “Oh, but I would. It has, in fact, failed to accomplish the very simple tasks that I laid before it. Why keep a tool that cannot accomplish the tasks it is meant for?”
Something wet drips onto your cheek. “I—I… you…” Her grip on you slackens. “You won’t kill her, if I put her in there?”
“What I do once you leave this room is none of your concern… But my current plans do require that the disruptor remains alive.”
Gripping you more tightly than ever before, Ellemenie practically whispers, “Fine.” A moment later she stands, bringing you with her, nestled in her arms. You feel her take a few steps. Then her breath tickles your ear. “I’m sorry,” she says, so softly you can’t imagine Imxach heard it. That’s all you get, though, before she pushes you away from her and through some sort of cold, squishy substance. It’s thin, as your head quickly passes through it and back into regular air. Soon enough your whole body is through the strange permeable membrane, and you collapse to the ground, your shoulders and feet pressing against two sides of rounded glass. Sticking your arms out confirms it — you’re inside some sort of glass tube. The idea of trying to open your eyes again fades the moment it arrives, and your conscious mind fades with it.
~~~
“Boss, please!!” shouts a voice, once more rousing your mind from unconsciousness. Where…? Oh, right. The circumstances of your horrid situation return to you, lying as you are in a heap within a tube. Struggling to work up the energy, you sit yourself up, eyes still closed. Moving even that much takes so much out of you that you nearly fall asleep again. All the fighting, and the body switching, and the shock to your spirit form… it’s left you with nothing, no energy to be had.
“We did our best, sir,” says another, softer voice, drawing your attention again. With great effort, you pry your eyes open, allowing you to confirm that you are indeed in Imxach’s lab. At first, it seems like no one else is here, but then you realize that Imxach is standing in the doorway on the other end of the room, his back to you. The other voices must be coming from beyond him. No longer able to handle the weight of your own eyelids, you let them fall and focus on what your ears are able to pick up.
“You understand that your claim that this work is the best that you could do is not, in fact, an argument in favor of keeping you around,” Imxach says, hands clutched behind his back.
After a moment of incoherent sputtering, the voice of Eeozi shouts, “B—but boss!! What were we supposed ta do, fight the whole sch—”
Consciousness escapes you once more, despite your efforts. When you manage to find it again, who knows how long later, the first thing you hear is Imxach.
“Time is not an issue, not for me. Only for this planet.” Forcing your eyes open again, you see his hands drop to his side, some sort of dark energy pooling in his palms. Your strength fails, and your eyes fall shut again. “If that is the extent of your arguments, then we have nothing left to discuss.”
Despite the anger evident in their tone, Zujii’s voice is barely loud enough for you to hear. “This conversation was a farce. Your mind was made up before it even began.”
A low sound reverberates through the air, a sound it takes you a moment to place. Is Imxach… laughing? “Ah, Subject #407, proving more intelligent than I believed you capable of… A pity… You are correct.”
“What!? Wait!!” Eeozi screams. The sound of shuffling meets your ears, followed by a roar and what sounds like a crack of thunder. “Zujii!? You—!? No, NOOOO—!!!!”
Eeozi’s screams are the last thing you hear as consciousness leaves you once again.
~~~
A short, painful burst of electricity wakes you this time, forcing your body to jerk, your lungs to inhale, and your eyes to fly open. In front of you, through the glass, is the face of the person you least wanted yet most expected to see — Imxach. His eyebrows lift, his face otherwise remaining unnervingly neutral. “Good, you are awake,” he says, as his hand, which you hadn’t noticed at first, retreats through the glass of the tube, along with a small device. You imagine that was the thing that just shocked you — it does vaguely resemble a taser. His hand and the device move through the tube with ease, as though through water. Unable to help yourself, you reach forward to touch the spot his limb left through, but there is no give, only a solid, glass-like material.
Glancing at your hand, Imxach turns toward his desk and says, “You cannot move through it. Only fluxorite is capable of that.” He holds his hand up and you realize that it’s covered in a glove, which you assume is made from or infused with whatever material he’s talking about. “It is a shame. I have only ever found this material on Abraxalan, a planet which is… no longer accessible.”
That means nothing to you. Why is he talking about something so irrelevant? What about Ellemenie, or even Eeozi and Zujii? With far more effort than the task normally requires, you force your mouth open and attempt to speak. Unintelligible air comes out at first. When you finally find your voice, it’s raspy, and hurts your throat coming out. But you talk anyway. “W—where are they?”
Imxach looks at you for a moment, one eyebrow raised, then turns back toward his desk, writing something in a notebook. “Who? Your friend, Subject #539? In her room, I imagine.”
“And the other two?”
When he turns to you this time, he maintains eye contact. “The two you fought? The two who put you here? Why would you care what happened to them?”
It takes you a moment to form a response, because loathe as you are to admit it, he has a point. Why should you care about them? You’d still be at the school if they hadn’t attacked, with Ruem and Kittpey and Umeso. You wouldn’t be stuck here, at the whim of an evil man who to your knowledge has only ever hurt those around him. But then, that’s part of it, right? Eeozi doesn’t seem like the sort of person you’d want to be friends with, exactly, but neither her nor Zujii seemed to want to do what they did. Well, Eeozi was upset with Ellemenie, and wanted to fight because of that, but… you can’t imagine their tiff would have taken the form it did without him. Really, would they have had a reason to fight at all, without his influence?
“Because I don’t hate them,” you finally say, fists clenched. “Because they don’t deserve to die.”
He stares at you for a good thirty seconds, unblinking. Then he turns away, picking something up from his desk. “Their fate is not your concern. You will meet your own soon enough.” Stepping toward your tube, he reaches into it with one gloved hand, wielding a familiar-looking sharp instrument. Pressing your back up against the tube, you try desperately to move away from him, but have nowhere to go. As the instrument approaches, you try to slap it away, but your hand passes right through, as though you’re a ghost. He slashes the spike against your arm, tearing at your flesh. Gritting your teeth, you stare in horror at the chunk of you that’s now attached to the spike, a chunk that doesn’t look like flesh at all, but instead a lot like whatever Ruem’s sphere form was made of. Looking at your arm, there’s a small bit of you missing, but there’s no blood, despite the pain.
“You are a spirit, not a flesh and blood being,” Imxach says, retreating from the tube with his prize. “Though most spirits do not have a form like yours. Most are shapeless masses of spirit energy, or at most simple shapes, like spheres. Truly you are an aberration in every sense.”
Given the insult’s coming from him, you’ll take it as a compliment.
“Who are you, Disruptor? Where are you from? And how did you corrupt my perfect creation?” he says all this without looking at you, instead focused on the chunk of you he now has on his desk, which he’s poking and prodding with various instruments.
“I have no reason to tell you anything,” you say, crossing your arms. He might have you at his mercy, but that doesn’t mean you’re interested in complying with his every demand.
He sighs. “Did you impart that stubborn streak in Subject #539? What do you stand to gain with this lack of cooperation?”
“The irritation of my tormenter, for one.”
Fast enough that it makes your hair stand on end, Imxach is in front of you, looming, staring down at you as though you’re an insect he’s about to crush. His hand shoots through the tube, smashing a device into your body that electrifies. Pain coursing through your every cell, you are barely able to understand Imxach’s words as he speaks, slow and steady. “I have not even begun to torment you, Disruptor. I can make what remains of your life excruciating, and I can make your every second of pain feel like it lasts an eternity.” He allows you a moment of silence, perhaps so you can fully focus on the all-consuming agony you’re currently experiencing. “Subject #539 may enjoy some measure of safety from such measures, but you do not. Cooperation is your only escape from the horrors I am capable of putting you through.”
After what feels like hours he finally pulls away, and the immediate pain stops. Your body collapses, your heart hammering, your lungs gasping for air. The pain in your muscles, from all the tensing and spasming, becomes dull, but doesn’t disappear. Somewhere in the far recesses of your mind you wonder how you’re capable of feeling such pain if your body isn’t even flesh and blood, but you don’t have the mental capacity to truly ponder that sort of mystery right now. Instead, you stare warily at the man in front of you, who has returned to his desk and to his habit of not affording you a glance. Despite not wanting to fear him, despite wanting to stay strong like Ellemenie always seems to, it’s hard to deny that the pain he just put you through was excruciating. And it’s quite possible this man has already murdered two people you knew. It’s hard to imagine he’d be unwilling to do the same to you.
Body beginning to tremble, you pull your legs up and wrap your arms around them, a tear sliding down your cheek. You’re alone now. Another person might be in the room, but you’ve never felt more alone in your lives, not even in your empty apartment, isolated from the world, or when you literally died and existed within darkness for who knows how long. That was preferable to this.
Why even continue, then, if this is all you have to look forward to? Maybe you should egg him on, upset him enough that he just ends it. Would death be like before, floating in a void, forgetting yourself, eventually finding someplace new? Or does something darker await you? Maybe it was only the exceptional means of your death that gave you this second chance on life, a chance that you’ve thoroughly squandered. Maybe the void that awaits you this time has no comfort to bestow and no destination to signal its end. Maybe it goes on forever, and what makes you a person fades, and maybe that is something like an end, something like a true, absolute death.
Maybe that’s preferable.
A soft tapping sound draws your attention, pulling you out of the spiral of your own thoughts. Imxach too, turns in the direction of the door, where the sound is coming from, and slowly stalks his way over to it. The door slides open with a hiss, but Imxach’s large frame obscures your view of what or who lays beyond.
“I want to see her,” says a beautiful voice, a voice you’d worried you’d never hear again: Ellemenie.
“No. And do not interrupt me again.”
“But, I—”
Without another word, Imxach turns away from her and walks back toward his desk. The door slides closed behind him, but before it finishes, you catch a glimpse of her, for the briefest of moments. Her gorgeous red eyes meet yours, and the feeling that overwhelms you from that tiny amount of eye contact feels familiar. For a moment you think you might begin to dissolve, like you always did in your dreams. You think you might finally be free. But no. Your body, however real it may or may not be, is still here, still stuck inside this tube. This is not a nightmare that you can escape so easily.
And yet, seeing those eyes, even for a moment, reinvigorates you. Reminds you of who you’d be missing if you were to die, were to float into the void and end up someplace new. In your short time on Idrest you’ve made more friends, more close relationships, than you’d ever managed to make in your first life. When your original world came to its cataclysmic end, the only person you had to mourn was your sister. And even then the pain was dull… the two of you hadn’t seen each other in years, hadn’t talked in months. The two of you were never close. But Ellemenie? Kittpey? Umeso, and even Ruem? The idea of never seeing them again hurts. Hurts worse than the physical pain Imxach put you through. And that realization… that’s what will carry you through. You don’t know how, but you’ll find a way out of this, find a way to see your friends again. You will survive.
“More sample matter is required,” Imxach mutters, grabbing the sharp instrument and turning toward you.
But it isn’t going to be easy.
