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“What did he do?” Louis asks slowly. He knows if I’m talking, he should probably ask, but he doesn’t want to make it worse.
“EST,” I murmur. “Electroshock therapy, though it wasn’t therapy. He wanted to see how I would react to extreme pain and how it would affect my brain waves at such an early age. More than anything, it was a test to see if I could endure it. It was this night he told me he was proud of me for the first time, and that I would be his best yet. It only got worse from there.” I go to tuck the picture away, but Nico takes it from me and places it in his pocket.
“To remind me,” he murmurs.
I don’t know what to say, so I flip through the notes. “It’s just his thought processes and findings on some of his early experiments.” I clear my throat before I read his notes out loud. “If we are to expand the human mind and reach all it is capable of, then sacrifices must be made. We have already established a baseline that pain can help trigger these changes. Extreme stress, exposed at an early age, is helpful in unlocking the brain’s secrets.” Shaking my head in anger, I carry on. “I am hoping constant exposure to both fear and pain will develop the brain in further ways, mouldable at such a young age. Coupled with training usually given to soldiers, and learning equivalent to those given with high IQs, we can reach the results we need to prove my theory correct—that the human brain can be changed and expanded. That we can be better, stronger, faster, smarter, and more capable. A new race of beings, unmatched by any. By manipulating the brains of our children and selective breeding, coming generations will be nearly superhuman.” Shutting the journal with a sneer, I toss it to the floor.
“Bullshit. That might have been his aim at first,” I scoff before turning away. “But he began to like the pain he caused and the experiments he conducted. It wasn’t just to make us better, as he called it, but to satisfy his sick urges and theories. It was never as simple as proving that theory. It was to test our humanity and how much we could endure.”
“Nova?” Dimitri whispers.
I shake my head again. “Sorry, I’m okay. I’ll keep looking.”
“Never apologise,” Louis orders. “You are right. Your father might have started as a scientist, but he broke his oath. It was about so much more than creating the perfect human, and we will prove that.”
I hope so.
TWENTY-SIX
Ikeep my eye on Nova as I hack the doctor’s terminal. I have to leave some programs running to try and crack some of the encrypted notes and locked folders, which could take weeks, but I also search the computers and hard drives for anything I can get to.
Minutes turn into hours, and all of us are still working.
We hoped it would be easy, but we should have known better. That doesn’t make us give up, though, because we are destined to stop this once and for all. If not for us, then for Nova and all the children who didn’t make it. None of us deserved what he put us through, but we can make it right. We can’t change the past and what we endured, but we can stop it from happening to another. We just need to find the right pieces of the mad scientist’s puzzle.
Louis forces everyone to take breaks except me, knowing he wouldn’t get me to no matter what. Nova sits with me every now and again, talking and joking, distracting me from the screen even just for a few minutes. She doesn’t get it though. I’m determined to find the information for her.
I need to do this.
It’s all on my shoulders. Even Louis is trying to help, but none of them are as good with computers as I am. I feel that heavy weight until my eyes sting, my hands cramp, and my back aches, but I still keep going late into the night. The others stay with me, and food is brought but it remains uneaten. We all continue to push forward, refusing to stop when we are this close.
Then there’s a ping. We cracked a folder. I quickly navigate to it, saving it in case there’s any kind of virus or trap. It’s labelled with a date, and there are video files inside. I stiffen when I examine them, wondering what they are and if I should play them.
“Louis,” I murmur, and he turns from the screen next to me. “Should I play them?”
It must catch the others’ attention because they crowd us, and I feel Nova’s hand on my arm. “Play them,” she orders.
Louis nods, so I pick one at random. It loads quickly, and we all swear. Nova freezes, and I wish I could protect her. I try to close it, but she knocks my hand away.
On the screen is a screaming Nova. She’s young, an early teen, and her hair has grown back, but it’s stuck to her skin with her sweat. I can’t see what is being done to her, but she’s screaming, and her father is watching her from the corner while making notes. I close it and open another, only to see her at another phase in her life.
She’s curled into a ball, sobbing on the cot.
Another one has my eyes closing. There’s a gun between her and a man on the table.
All of them are of her torture, her experiments, and all the while he’s there, watching and making notes. Closing them, I lean back and scrub at my face. Those images will haunt me now as well.
What she endured . . .Fuck.
I’m more determined than ever to make them pay, but when I look up to her, I find her eyes still locked on the screen. “I-I need a break,” she murmurs and hurries from the room, wrapping her arms around herself. We all track her worriedly.
“Don’t,” I murmur when I feel Nico begin to move after her. “She needs a moment. She will feel raw and weak with us all seeing her pain. Give her a moment alone.” I hate it as well, and he hesitates before sinking heavily into a chair, holding his face.
“How could he do that to his own daughter?” Isaac murmurs sadly. “How—” He shakes his head, looking away.
“Because he believed it was a necessity.” I hate that I think like him. “Love is a useless sentiment, a useless feeling, remember? He never loved her or cared beyond her purpose in his experiments. She was just like us—a thing to use.”
“Save them all and any others you find. We will all watch them so we know what she was forced to survive and to remind ourselves why we are doing this, but she will never see, do you understand me? Not ever again. We cannot protect her from her past, but we can protect her from this,” Louis orders, and we all agree.
