Defect (3 page)

The women and girls around me begin to undress while the male guards watch, smoking and talking casually at the edge of the room. I hesitate.

Willow pulls her shirt off over her head. “Just do it. We only get to shower once a week.” She strips the rest of the way and tiptoes along the tile floor to the shower head in the far corner.

I glance back at the guards
. They’re watching me and seem to be waiting for something. I quickly strip off the too big cotton draw string pants and shirt they’ve dressed me in and follow Willow’s path across the floor. I feel the spray of the water lick my ankles and hear laughter behind me.

“Susanne, there’s been some mistake – there’s no way this one’s sixteen.” The men laugh, their eyes on my body. I keep my chin high and walk straight ahead. Once my head’s under the water it drowns out their voices
, and I concentrate on the warmth. I wash quickly, and then we’re prodded back into the dormitory.

**
*

 
I jerk awake in the night, suddenly aware of someone watching me. I feel his presence before I see him. But once my eyes adjust to the darkened room, I’m pretty sure it’s Will – the guard I saw right after my mindscan. I gasp and try to sit up before remembering I’m chained to the bed.

H
e brings a finger to his lips. I watch his eyes in the pale moonlight. They are dark and intense and locked on mine. He lowers his finger once he realizes I’ll stay quiet. His eyes have the same serious, troubled look, and he’s just as silent as the first time I met him.

He reaches for my wrist and turns it over
, then runs his fingers along the tattoo there, almost as if he knows his cooling touch will soothe the raised, pink skin.  I watch him silently, and my chest gets tight.

I blink up at him and
– just as suddenly as he appeared – he’s gone.

The next morning, I’m
convinced I dreamed the whole thing, but there’s a thin layer of greasy balm smeared across my tattoo, making me wonder if he really was here. I bring my wrist to my nose and inhale. It smells like mint. I breathe it in again and again until I can no longer smell it.

“They can’t hurt you unless you let them.”

– Unknown

As the days go by, I begin to grieve the life I’ve left behind
: simple days with my mom in the garden; riding my bike to the market; skipping down my tree-lined street with my best friend, Cassidy. The city was utterly safe, and growing up there had been easy. It was divided into many different sectors – each with neat rows of houses, tidy office complexes, shopping centers and of course, happy, normal people.
Sleepers
. I had never spoken the word aloud before, but the term referred to people who had gotten their mindscan. I always thought I would be one, too. But for some reason, I am different. The feeling is unsettling.

Now that I’m here, I have no choice but to catch onto the routine. It’s mostly forced sleep, with occasional tests, but they’ve adjusted my dosage and now in addition to sleeping, I alternate between foggy periods where I
just zone out, staring at a wall for the better part of an afternoon.

The nurse from my first day,
Dorie, returns and my conversation with Willow stops abruptly. She closes her eyes and lets her mouth fall open and slack. Without thinking, I do the same.

Dorie
goes from bed to bed administering more injections to those who are beginning to stir, but when she reaches my bed, she passes by. I peek an eye open and see she does the same for Willow. Once we hear the door click again, Willow peeks one eye open at me and offers a lopsided smile.

“I always skip the afternoon dose,” she whispers, like it’s a secret.

I nod my understanding. It’s her silent defiance at what they are doing to us. It seems impossible to close my eyes and turn my head from the abuse here, but at the same time, a tiny bit of hope stirs inside, like maybe, if I had to, I could figure out a way to survive here, too. With the help from my new friend, Willow.

Willow says once they begin to trust me, I’ll be unshackled a few hours a day
. After a few days, I see that she’s right. I must have slept through it before, but my days take on a new routine. At midday, we eat our one solid meal in a guarded cafeteria, and then get some time in a common room down the hall from the dormitory. Most of the others are too strung out to know what’s going on, and they sit slack-jawed on the plastic chairs staring off into space. Willow and I sit on the floor under the one window to feel the warmth of the sunshine, even if we’re not directly in its path.

I need to know more about what it means to be a Defect. I always had such confidence in the mindscan. I knew I wasn’t a
criminal; I’d never had a corrupt thought in my life. But what I never considered was that I could end up a Defect. “What happened for you to end up here?” I ask, staring straight ahead.

“Same as you.
My future was spotted with holes, and they couldn’t say with certainty that I was cleared.”

I hesitate, wringing my hands. That wasn’t
exactly the way it was explained to me.

“Same for you?” she asks.

“I don’t think so. They said I failed it – they did it twice and …”

She clamps a hand over my lips and looks around us. Her eyes are serious, more alive than I’ve seen them. “You failed it?” she whispers once she’s sure no one’s listening.

I nod. “What does it mean?” I don’t want to tell her that there was some strange connection to my mother, too, that they seemed to know about.

“Failing it means they couldn’t read what was in your mind at all
– that your future was completely blank to them. That’s not possible.”

I register what this means
. Their technology didn’t work on me – I wasn’t sick, I wasn’t a criminal – but rather than admit that I’d somehow outsmarted them, they chose to lock me up and throw away the key. It fills me with rage.

Guard your mind.
My mother’s words echo in my head the first time since the mindscan. Why would she tell me that if it meant getting locked up? Did she know what would happen if they actually saw into my mind? Whatever they found couldn’t be worse than them finding nothing at all. But that seems odd. Certainly there’s no way to keep them out of your mind, despite my mother’s warnings. It’s not something I did – it was just some strange effect.

The door swings open. It’s O’Donovan. “5491.”

I look at my wrist.
5491
.

“Come with me,” he says.

I follow him from the room, glancing back at Willow, whose face is tight with worry.

“Where are you taking me?” I say to his back as I follow him down the hallway.

He glances back, surprised at my voice. It’s as if everyone else here just willingly accepts this fate. The strange thing is, they actually seem to.

“You’re resisting the drugs, huh?” A grim smile creeps over his face, only I know instantly that he’s not to be trusted. A cold chill runs down my spine.
“This way.” He turns suddenly down a hall I’ve never been down before. The floor slants gradually under my feet. This place is like a maze, and I get the sense we’re moving deeper underground. “We’ll be doing some testing. There’s something different about you, Eve Sterling,” he says, as though weary of me, like I’m something dangerous, rather than the small, clueless girl I feel like.

I walk with him for a few minutes until we’ve crisscrossed through so many underground hallways and tunnels that I know we must be in a different building altogether. He stops and presses his finger to the sensor at the door and it clicks open. He pushes it open for me. It’s more brightly lit and open than the place I’m being kept.

We enter a lab with steel counters that hold bubbling vials of liquid. There’s a row of data terminals in the center of the room, along with a desk and two stools.

He sits on the edge of the stool and watches me climb up and plant myself on top of the other. Everything here is designed to make me feel small
– from the oversized clothes they put me in, to the guards laughing at my underdeveloped body, to the tall stool my feet dangle from. I’m not sure why, but it infuriates me.

“How much do you know about this place?” he asks.

“Just that this is where Defects are kept.”

“Let’s have a talk.” He sits facing me, his eyes examining me from head to toe.
“Tell me how you did it,” he says finally. I can see he’s trying hard to portray himself as calm and reasonable, but I can also tell if I don’t do what he wants, this front won’t last long.

“You mean fail the mindscan?”

He forces a fake smile and nods once.

“I really have no idea. It’s not
… common?”

He waits, looking me over while my
skins crawls. “This has only happened one other time in recent history. Your mother.”

“My mother?
She was never here.” I’m sure of it.

“Oh, she was here. She was our first.” He grins, somehow amused that he knows something I didn’t. “Back before we really knew what to do with them. But you won’t get out that easily. You try to pull anything like she did
– be advised – we’ll take care of the problem.”

His comment makes no sense. How and why was she released? Once you’re here,
you don’t get out. Everyone knows that. And why doesn’t she have the tattoo?

His words break my concentration. “You’re wondering why she doesn’t have the tattoo, aren’t
you?”

I swallow.

“As I said, she was our first. We did things … differently back then. We learned our lesson after her, though.”

Though I want to ask him endless questions about my mother and what it means to fail the mindscan, my mouth goes dry, my mind completely blank. My mother’s erratic behavior
over the years, her distrust of the government, the mindscan process, her fear for me is suddenly justified. The only piece that doesn’t fit is why she’d warn me to protect my mind. Maybe she suspected I’d end up here no matter what I did, and her message was meant to remind me to be strong and not let them break me. God, I wish I could just talk to her one more time.

“So, what does this mean? What do you want with me?” My voice shakes, though I do my best to sound calm, strong.
I have to.

“Instead of sitting in there to rot,” his head tips back toward the mental ward, “you’re going to become a side project of mine.”

I don’t know which is worse – laying in Ward A, drugged unconscious or being O’Donovan’s lab rat – but it’s not like I have a choice. Maybe I can find out what he knows about my mom.

He presses an intercom button on the data terminal. “Yeah, come in. We’re ready for you.”

The door pushes open, and a man with rectangular glasses and a white lab coat introduces himself as Dr. Nolan, followed by Will, who won’t meet my eyes.

“I want a full battery of tests, mental, intellectual,” O’Donovan says to Dr. Nolan. “Along with physical and endurance,” he says to Will who still won’t look directly at me. His eyes are focused on my hands that lie still in my lap, or more specifically, at my tattoo. The memory of him visiting me in the night floods my senses
, and I blush involuntarily.

“We can’t seem to get inside your head.”
O’Donovan reaches out toward me, and I try not to flinch as he taps a finger sharply at my temple. “And I intend to find out why.” The look in his eyes says it all. He’ll stop at nothing until I’m a broken heap on the floor. He turns back to Dr. Nolan and Will. “As long as it takes, as much as it costs, find me something. I want a report at the end of each day.” And then he turns on his heel and leaves the room, Will saluting him until he’s through the door.

The air in the room is heavy, too still. I can sense them deciding what to do with me, who should take me first.

“You start,” Will says to Dr. Nolan after a minute. “I’ll go set up for the physical tests.” The heavy door clicks into place behind him, leaving me alone with Dr. Nolan.

I position myself on the stool in front of the data terminal to begin the intelligence tests.

I scan the barcode on my wrist on the blue light at the side of the machine, and it comes to life. I tap my finger against the screen to start the test. A word association test appears, and after reading the directions, I begin arranging the words on the screen, dragging them into different boxes. I do it quickly, my mind barely processing each word before my finger slides it into the right place.

I move onto answering questions about how I would respond in fictitious situations
, then onto a series of questions where I have to choose between two bad things, like being trapped in a fire or underwater. Lastly, I move onto finding patterns in numbers, where I predict which number comes next in a series, while Dr. Nolan busies himself on the data terminal across the lab.

I have no strategy when it comes to these tests, since I have no idea if it will be better or worse for me if I score well.
Regardless, I do the best I can. My eyes burn from concentrating, and I’m hungry after several hours.