ɴᴏ ʀᴇꜱᴛ

Father has a separate study with the books he reads more regularly and finds more useful.  Some of the works in this library don’t seem like they’ve been opened more than once or twice, and she’s never seen him in here aside from once, when he came to collect her.  She likes books because they’re different from what she’s used to; they’re not forms and reports and lists of names.  She likes the library because it’s quiet and dark and there’s no one to perform for.  She likes it because there’s carpet instead of tile, dark wood with a fine layer of dust instead of perfectly sterilized white walls.  Father says that someday he’ll take her to a much grander facility, under what was once an orphanage much like their own, called ARK.

She won’t learn about the ARK's namesake for weeks yet.  But this is the first time she finds the Bible, perusing the shelves, looking for something heavy and dense and complicated, something she’ll have to strain to understand.  If she’s trying too hard to decipher difficult prose, she can’t remember doing bad things.  Mostly, she goes with encyclopedias or scientific theory.  Today she doesn’t.

She knows what the Bible is, in some nebulous way she can’t recall learning.  Maybe one of the workers upstairs was or is Christian.  She knows the Bible is a book that Christians read, and she knows Christianity is a major religion, though there’s nothing in her mind about the book or the faith beyond that.  She doesn’t know its tenets.  She’s never read the Bible, and it’s thick and soft, even without being worn, and she likes the gilt on the text on the side against the dark, thin leather of the binding.  She pulls the heavy book from the shelf.  She sits on the floor and leans it against her bent, knobby knees.  She opens it.  Not carefully — not reverently.  Curiously.  She hasn’t yet had curiosity burned out of her.

She finds Psalms first.  Not intentionally — just turning pages until something feels less foreign than the rest.  The language is still strange in the way she likes, and not technical or corrective in the way she’s familiar with.  Not like the adults who only spoke when something needed fixing or someone needed harming.

This is something separate from that.  Something that stays in one place long enough to repeat itself.  The repetition is the part she notices first, the part she likes immediately.  The same phrases, even when the tenor is different, when the need they express shifts in intensity.  Not instructions, not assignments.  Just the same words, again and again.  About God.  About pleading.  About needing.

The hallway outside shifts occasionally — footsteps, distant doors, the soft rhythm of institutional life and the people who uphold it and then go home and feel nothing at all.  But no one is looking for her.  They know she’ll come back when it’s time to come back.  They trust her, the way that any good doctor trusts a scalpel.  They trust her, or they trust her Father to keep his tool in check.

She reads slowly.  To make sure it doesn’t change when she isn’t looking.

Why art thou cast down, O my soul?

She reads it twice in her head, then a third time out loud, a quiet whisper.  “Why are thou cast down, oh…my soul.”  Testing the words as if the thought might disappear if she doesn’t cling hard enough.  It doesn’t.  The thought stays.  Abigail keeps reading.

She doesn’t understand most of it, rereading every sentence two, three, four times, trying to unravel meaning.  But the tone comes easily, almost immediately, the grief and the guilt and the beauty.  The absense of directive.  The text is…describing something that is already happening, not commanding, simply documenting .

“Why dost thou cast me off…?” She reads softly.  “Why go I…why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?”

Observation.  That’s nice.  The book is heavy and solid in her lap.  She turns a few pages backwards.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?  Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?

“Oh, my God, I cry…in the day time, but thou hearest not; and in — in the night season, and am not silent…”

She stops there.  Reads it again.  Longer this time, slower, each syllable stretching in her mind and mouth.  Her legs are starting to go numb.  Crying out and not being heard.  Outside, someone laughs softly, quietly, like the world and their body is real.  

“Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help…”

Something is already happening, something she can’t or isn’t brave enough to articulate, and the book is simply describing it accurately.  It’s — strange.  A settling.  Not emotionally.  Structurally.  A map when she doesn’t know where she is; it offers no guidance, but it still affirms that she exists in a place, that this has been felt and mapped before.  There is none to help.  It is a relief, to see that another has realized that already.

The pages flip again.  She’s looking for something incorrect, something to offset the familiarity, something to make the words less.  

Something about being in darkness.

Something about a voice that won’t stop speaking even when no one answers.

She presses her fingers lightly against the words without thinking.  She doesn’t realize she’s crying until the thin pages wrinkle under her tears.

—

After a while, she closes the book.  Not because she’s done — because she doesn’t want it taken away from her before she can finish understanding it.  That’s another rule she’s learning quickly: good things do not remain accessible indefinitely.

The child slides it under her shirt when she stands; it’s too big to hide properly, but she’s small enough and no one looks at her long enough to notice unusual shapes.  The doctors and scientists and workers had all adjusted to her presence quickly once Father had brought her down into the depths, and none found it strange for a little girl to be here, doing this work.  No one needs to see her.

She takes the Bible back to her bedroom, next to Father’s bedroom, and she hides it carefully under her bed.  If Father finds out, he will…she isn’t sure.  It’s still early into her adoption, after all.  Mostly, when she disobeys or falters, he has no need to hit her; cruel words, or forcing her to have a more active hand in the next experiment, or threatening to put her under the knife are all typically sufficient.  More elegant, and he detests inelegence.  Sometimes he strikes her, which can be elegant but often isn’t.  He’s threatened worse, and he’ll do worse, in the months and years to come.  For now, she isn’t sure what he might do to her if he finds out that she’s stolen his book.  But she can’t stop herself.  She tells herself he won’t notice.  She reminds herself that he doesn’t see her, either. 

She goes back out and climbs the stairs to the orphanage, to the other children who don’t know she's priming them for slaughter, numbing rapidly, mind whirring.  Father says she is most effective at calming them when they know her, when she spends time with them.  She keeps thinking about the words, her heart beating against her ribs in time to the syllables beating against her skull.  The words are good.  The words sound like someone trying to describe pain without being able to resolve it.  She spends time with the others, and she smiles, and she holds the others’ hands when they ask, and she does not vomit at the sensation like she did the first time, and she thinks about the book, and the steady words inside it.

Later, there will be nights when there’s screaming outside her room, and the words will help; the words will give the sobs something to match, to fit against.  Later, there will be notes in the margins, things she wants to remember, questions about strange and foreign concepts like grace and being - loved.  Later, there will be a woman with a rifle and a dead father, and the rifle and the Bible will be the only thing she takes from the scene.  

The doctor’s voice —— Keller, they were pretty sure —— hit Wyatt like physical pressure.  Their pulse jumped immediately —— they heard it happen, like they felt everything happen, like they could feel their blood sprinting desperate through their throat and arms and their organs working overtime.  Agent was still new as far as titles went.  They thought it was sort of funny to call them agent right now, given the circumstances.  There were several screens around them, almost surrounding, screens currently black, probably not for long.  They sat in the examination chair with electrodes against their temples and wrists and sternum.

Not restraints, technicallytechninallytechnically.  Monitoring equipment.  The leather bands still dug into their skin the same way.  They asked for no restraints because the interview with the restraints made them want to fucking kill somebody.  They'd asked very nicely, even.

“We’re going to begin the next stimulus cycle.”

Somebody adjusted a machine behind them.  Fabric movement.  Rubber soles against tile. Plastic clicking softly together.  One researcher had a damaged cuticle on his thumb and kept rubbing it unconsciously against the edge of his clipboard.  Scratchscratchscratch.

Wyatt wanted to scream.  They smiled weakly instead.  “Quick question.  Have you guys considered simply fucking not doing that.”

Nervous laughter from one of the younger technicians.  Heart rate spike.  Male. Twenty-something, younger side or older with an insanely good skincare routine, but probably not, no smell of any particularly fancy incredients.  Anxious disposition.  Too much caffeine.  Artificial citrus shampoo.

The older scientist ignored the joke.

“Stimulus cycle beginning in three.”

The monitor beside them beeped —— high frequency —— sharp.  It almost aligned with the screaming bird light for a second.

“Two.”

Wyatt’s breathing accelerated automatically.  Stupid and useless.  Every inhale dragged in antiseptic and printer toner and latex gloves and stale coffee and human sweat buried beneath detergent and the metallic smell of the electrodes attached to their skin and

“One.”

The screens lit up.  Not bright, then bright, pulsing in uneven intervals.  They flinched violently before they could stop themself.  The machine forced rapid visual patterns across the monitors surrounding them, shapes flickering too quickly for normal eyes to track.  Faces and places and scenes and colours and a Rothko which should have been funny, all too fast for a normal person to process, faster than the last round but still too easy for Wyatt to turn it off, if they could turn it off which they probably couldn’t.  They got the point of this test, on paper.  Test the limits of the cognition, trace how their brain and heart behaves when they see the twitch, et cetera et cetera.  It still fucking hurt.

Every pulse of light fractured across every reflective surface in the room simultaneously.  Motionmotionmotionmotion ——

The machine emitted another tone. Someone shifted weight six feet behind them.  Heartbeat to the left accelerating.  Pen clicking.  Pen clicking.  Pen clicking.

“Subject stress response elevated.”

“I can hear you,” Wyatt snapped.

The doctor’s pulse sped up slightly.  Fear.  Not of Wyatt exactly, and if it was of Wyatt then they could fuck off and die because Wyatt was the one getting tortured here.  Fear of losing control of the situation.

“We need you to remain still.”

“I am still.”

“You’re trembling.”

“Well observed, Sherlock.”

Another light pulse.  The screens were brighter now.  Wyatt’s eyes watered.  Too much information.  The room refused to stop existing.  The outside rooms, too, four people outside the observation window that looked like a mirror from inside, one at least slightly sedated based on the heart rate.

Every tiny sensory detail arrived at once without hierarchy.  No filter.  No volume control.  Skin against chair.  Electricity humming through the wall conduits.  Somebody’s stomach digesting lunch.  Dust moving through the ventilation system.

There was a water stain above the third ceiling tile to the left

There was a crack in the doctor’s wedding ring.

There was blood beneath the cuticle of the technician scratching his thumb.

There was a fly trapped somewhere inside the fluorescent fixture.

There was a pulse in every throat.

Heartbeatheartbeatheartbeatheartbeat ——

“Increase cognitive load.”

“No,” Wyatt said immediately.

The doctor didn’t answer.  The images changed frequency, and now there were sounds, too, fucking awesome.  Wyatt gasped.  Pain flashed behind their eyes so sharply it bent the room sideways.

“Oh my God,” they heard themself laugh weakly.  “Oh my God, I hate you people.”

“Document verbal response.”

“Document my fucking dick.”

Another pulse.  Another tone. Unbearable detail. The older scientist leaned forward slightly. Wyatt saw sweat beginning beneath his collar before it surfaced. Saw the exact instant concern overtook professional detachment.  Couldn’t stop seeing anything.  Wanted to kill the doctor for just a second, worse to be concerned and not do anything not to be concerned and not do anything.

Their wrists strained hard enough against the leather straps to burn skin.

Not restraints.  Monitoring equipment.  Not restraints.  Not restraints. Not restraints not restraints notrestraintsnotrestraints.

The thought looped wrong in their head.  If they weren’t restraints then why couldn’t they leave?  Why couldn’t they move?  Why did everybody keep saying hold still?

The tones accelerated.

Wyatt made a sound they didn’t mean to make —— small.  Animal.  Humiliating and pathetic and that was fine, that was fine, they could feel exactly how their throat moved to make it, it had probably never done that before or maybe right after Julian died maybemaybe.

The younger technician looked away. Guilt response.  Nice person, probably — good person probably not.  Wrong building if so.  Maybe good person in a Sacrifice The Few For The Many sort of way.  Useless either way.

“Subject entering acute overload.”

“No shit,” Wyatt hissed.

Their vision sharpened further instead of blurring.  Nothing softened under stress.  They could see individual pores in the doctor’s skin.  Tiny contractions in facial muscles.  Electrical flicker in the monitors reflected through their own dilated pupils.

They were crying.  Didn’t remember starting.  The tears distorted light patterns but just made them fucked in different ways instead of more tolerable.  Worse.  Worseworseworse.

“Heart rate nearing two - hundred.”

“Cortisol spike confirmed.”

“Continue observation.”

Wyatt laughed again, too sharp.  The sound and the way their chest made it both hurt.  “You people hear yourselves, right?”

Nobody answered.  Of course nobody answered.  They weren’t cruel —— that was the fucked up part.  Nobody here was a monster.  It wasn’t like these were Connections or Umbrella scientists delighting in carving their subjects up and up and up and seeing how far they could push before they broke.  These people were just learning.  They were just managing risk.  They were just speaking gently and calmly and clinically while they tortured them without restraints because they asked so politely.

The younger technician stepped closer carefully.  His hands shook.

“Agent Harrow,” he said quietly, “try to breathe slowly.”

Wyatt stared at him —— could smell the exact second he regretted approaching a moment before it showed on his face.  Not fear because Wyatt moved.  Fear because their expression did.  Something ugly and blank flashed there before they could stop it.  Panic twisted into anger twisted into the raw instinct to escape at any cost.  They could feel every muscle moving, knew the flat cavernous anger and the heat and the hunting and the ——

The technician froze.  His heartbeat exploded.  Fear scent immediate and acidic in the air.  Wyatt hated themself instantly for causing it.

“Oh,” they said weakly, voice breaking. “No, no, sorry.  Sorry.  I’m not gonna hurt you.”

The room had gone very still.  Wyatt’s breathing came too fast now.  Their own pulse deafened them.  Everything hurt.  The lights.  The sound.  The straps.  The endless awareness.  They wanted it to stop.  They wanted one second of silence.  One second without everybody’s bodies screaming information at them constantly.  One second without being watched.

They wanted not to be a weapon at all.  They wanted not to be frightening.  They wanted not to be in pain a little more, probably.

The doctor said something quietly to another researcher.  Wyatt caught it anyway, almost laughed at the idea that whispering could possibly fucking matter with them in the room.

“Sedative?”

“No. Continue baseline collection.”

Continue.

Continue.

Continue.

Wyatt laughed again because if they didn’t laugh they were genuinely going to start screaming.

“Hey,” they said breathlessly, staring at the ceiling lights hard enough to make their eyes burn, still seeing and taking in and processing the screens from their periphery and the sounds and the heartbeats.  “You know the funniest part?”

Nobody answered.