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1 Year Before
“Sit down.”
I stared at Decebal, jaw tight. “Show me.”
“I said, ‘Sit’.”
What did he need me to sit for? He said he’d found the truth at last. The video paused on the screen before us held all of the answers.
The truth of our nightmares.
“Insurance for the organisation who ran the trials?—”
I winced, and he paused.
Trials?
He meant torture. Death. We were nothing but numbers, lab rats, lower even, than humans. Decebal didn’t press play, beetle black eyes pinning me until, finally, I sat down on the couch, nodding that I was ready.
It was the one and only time I ever saw the video. Decebal kept it on a drive, locked away. We hadn’t been recognised on it, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t be.
It didn’t matter, though; every second had stuck with me forever.
The flickering, low-resolution video was a camera feed. It showed a lounge with upper class couches, and a glass coffee table. Across the wall was a huge screen—another video feed—and on that screen was a room of white and metal.
A room I knew intimately.
“What is this?” My voice was rough.
Decebal had seen some shit. He’d grown up in the Gritch District—and he looked like it too, with tattoos to his jaw, and darkness in his eyes, even in the face of the worst we’d uncovered. But right now, I could see how tense he was, pale skin almost sickly. He just shook his head as he glanced at me.
“Whatever you thought this was, Dusk. It’s worse.”
On the screen, three alphas entered the room, glancing around and making themselves comfortable. One began pressing buttons on the remote, and the feed on the screen changed. Each time it flickered, it landed on another room. A black identifying number in the top corner. And each time, the occupants changed.
“What is this?”
“An observation room,” Decebal said.
My heart tripped. “For… us?”
“Yes. For all the subjects.”
Something was stuck in my throat.
“To fund the trials, they ran…” Decebal grimaced. “Bets.”
“Bets?” I asked, voice hoarse. “They're betting on us like… racehorses?”
Decebal nodded. “Which subjects are going to live, which will die. Who will survive with enough strength to be useful for the experiments they’re running,” he said.
My world shook with every word. At the horror of what he was saying.
That place had been my worst nightmare. For them, it had been a game?
“The only good news is,” Decebal went on. “The packs that placed bets were also… benefactors of the trials. This pack—they were the ones who bet on you and Umbra. They were the ones involved in what was taken.”
“And we still don’t know what they were trying to do with the experiments?”
