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i. spy / 99
The room they put her in is dark. Claustrophobically so. Spy shifts her weight, feeling the slope of the floor. She’s not a detective, but she’s observant on top of being sneaky. Both of those things have kept Gem alive. She’s not going to break that streak now.
Carefully, she steps forward, sweeping her foot ahead of her in case of any obstacles. It doesn’t take long to find a wall taller than her that feels like it’s made of concrete, with two more on either side that make her feel like she’s in an open box. Gem is fretting somewhere on the inside, and she tries to tune it out. This is an unknown situation. Some kind of test. As of right now, she’s the best person for the job.
An intercom squeals as it comes to life, and Spy tenses, ready to run.
“Ninety-nine,” a modulated female voice says, “fetch.”
Ninety-nine. They’ve been calling them “Seventy-seven.” Ninety-nine must be…
A low growl echoes from somewhere nearby. Spy presses flat to the nearest wall. This is the mission. Evade the predator. Stay alive.
Spy takes off at a sprint in the only direction she can.
“Remain where you are, Seventy-seven,” the voice demands, but Spy tunes it out. She knows her job. She’s the smart one. She keeps Gem safe because she runs.
This is still a good plan, even if she runs directly into another wall as soon as she’s out of the room. Then another wall, and another, and another, as she darts down corners with her hand in front of her face to brace on whatever new barrier springs up in her path. Soldier figures it out first, when they come to the first complete dead end.
It’s a maze. She’s running a maze with a monster on her heels. She’s the bait. There’s nothing she can do. There’s no way out. She’s meant to run—built to run, from scraps of magazines Ivana allowed into the institute, invulnerable cartoon characters who always get up. Exactly what Gem needed. A way out. A reprieve. Spy doesn’t know if she’s the oldest of them. But the other two that aren’t Gemma? They’re named for her. Simple attributes. Simple appearances.
Spy hits another wall, and when she hears the wingbeats, she knows there’s nowhere left to go.
There’s still no light, but her eyes have adjusted enough by now to see the edges of Evo’s form. Gemma’s scared of him. Gem likes him because he’s nice to her sometimes. Spy doesn’t care about anything except the mission of keeping Gem safe, and right now he’s a threat. But their powers are useless here, and when she puts up her fists she knows it won’t do anything.
Evo is on her in two seconds.
He bowls her over, halfway perched on her chest. One of his heavy paws digs into the beige jumpsuit they gave her, the other braced on the floor. His wings fold over them like he’s making a tent, deepening the darkness. She can’t even see his yellow eyes.
“It hasn’t been you before,” he says hoarsely, and Spy twitches in surprise at the sound of it.
“What?” She whispers back.
“They’ve been doing this a lot, but it’s only been with Joss,” he says. He’s lisping through his fangs, the way he only does when he’s trying to keep his voice low. He bears more weight down on the foot on her chest and the claws prick her skin. “Last time it was all underwater, and they wanted me to swim. She had a lotta water in her when I got to her and—now you’re here.”
Spy stares up at him. Evo. Michael. He lets Gem call him Michael. She hadn’t considered that they would let one of them die. Kill them, maybe. They’ve threatened to do that. But letting someone die is something different. It means it doesn’t matter how well they perform or what she does to keep Gem safe. If something happens, no one is going to stop it. Gem could choke to death in her sleep and none of them would do anything about it. That’s not how it was at the facility. Ivana wouldn’t have just let them die. She would’ve killed them in a way that mattered.
If they can die here from something as simple as an accident, Spy needs to step up her vigilance.
“I haven’t seen anyone,” she says finally. “I didn’t know who was left. I didn’t know if we were alone.”
“That’s enough. Step back, Ninety-nine,” the voice on the intercom says.
Evo lifts off and back, landing with his hands braced on the ground as his wings retract. The lights turn on, so bright that Spy has to cover her face, revealing the stained concrete floors and the spiked shock collar around Evo’s neck. Five seconds later, she gets to see what it looks like when they turn it on, and he lets out a pained whine as he flinches back from her like she had something to do with it.
They drag him away first, claws gouging at the ground as he tries to find purchase.
Spy doesn’t get to see Evo again. None of them do.
ii. nihilist / 29
There isn’t much point in differentiating between any of the sterile cement rooms they bring them to. This one is no different from all the others, even if it does have one of Gem’s friends in it. Nihilist makes no attempt to struggle as they plant her in front of Goldman.
She looks like she hasn’t showered or slept in days, with grime under her nails and heavy bags under her eyes. Her hair falls in a tangled mess past her shoulders and three of her fingers on one hand are splinted. Someone clearly punched her in the face several times over—and actually made contact. But out of everything, it’s the lack of blue lipstick that makes her nearly unrecognizable.
“Twenty-nine,” the woman standing behind an observation window with a clipboard says, and Goldman lifts her chin in return. “Disable Seventy-seven.”
Goldman looks at her. Emotions briefly flicker across her face—sadness, hopelessness, then a mask of cool indifference. The only emotions Nihilist can understand having in a situation like this. “Which one are you, then?”
“Does it matter?” Nihilist asks, dull. They never seem able to tell them apart, anyway.
“Oh, you,” Goldman says with recognition. “Couldn’t it have been someone more useful? I want to talk to Gem.”
“You’re going to hurt her,” Nihilist says plainly. It’s not like she likes being out. Being out means she’s the one getting hurt. But sometimes it needs to be her, and she just has to accept that. It’s what she’s there for, after all.
“I’m going to hurt you if you don’t let me see Gem,” Goldman snaps.
“Gem’s hiding,” Nihilist says. They try to keep things under control so she’ll be safe, but they aren’t always successful. Sometimes she comes out. These days it’s a rarity.
“Don’t make me repeat myself, Twenty-nine,” the woman says, rapping her knuckles against the window. Goldman flinches like she’s expecting to be hit even though there’s no way for anyone but Nihilist to reach her.
“Fine then,” Goldman says. “Be that way. If you won’t let me talk to Gem…”
She hurls herself at Nihilist, a fist as strong as iron driving into her stomach. She hops back again, pulling into a martial arts stance that Nihilist has no doubt is perfect as Nihilist herself doubles over and wheezes. She looks up at Goldman through a curtain of Gem’s hair and waits for her to strike again.
After a few more seconds of nothing, Goldman scowls. “Well? Aren’t you going to fight back?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Nihilist says. How does Goldman not understand? That’s why she’s the one out. She’s there to get hurt because she’s not supposed to care. She protects Gem and Gemma in her own way, not like how Soldier does. Soldier protects. Nihilist endures. “They’re going to keep hurting us either way. Fighting is pointless.”
Goldman stares at her in shock for a moment before rage seizes her again and she strikes for a second time, punching Nihilist in the jaw before grabbing Gem’s hair and pulling her head down so she can knee her in the nose. She doesn’t change her density this time, minimizing some of the damage. Nihilist wonders if she thinks that’s mercy.
“Come on,” she snarls. “Fight back. They let me have my powers, I know you have yours. Mind control me, make me run into the wall or break my own arm or kill myself or escape or something. Do anything.”
Goldman is right. Nihilist does have access to their powers. She could do all of those things. But that’s not her job. And there’s no point—if she actually did anything with them, they would just turn them off again. They still haven’t figured out what the scientists must have put in them to make them able to do that.
“There’s no point,” she says. “You have your powers. Why can’t you walk through the wall and leave?”
Goldman stares at her, fist raised to hit them again. “...There’s no point,” she says begrudgingly. “They’ll just catch me again.”
Nihilist nods. “Why should we fight and do their job for them?”
Goldman swallows. “Because I need to hit something. I’ve never felt like this before. Like I’m going to break apart if I don’t… If I can’t…”
“Then hit me,” Nihilist says. She wipes some of the blood from her nose off her lip. “I don’t care.”
Goldman doesn’t move. She just stares at Nihilist, seconds dragging out into a minute, before she drops her arm back down to her side. “Gem,” she says, even though she clearly knows which one of them she’s talking to, “I don’t know what to do.”
A sound rings out, horrifyingly loud from every corner of the room. Nihilist can’t resist falling forward, clapping her hands over her ears to try to block it out. Goldman makes an agonized wail, form flickering in and out of sight as she tries becoming intangible to escape the noise. She’s mouthing something to Nihilist, but Spy is the one who learned how to read lips, not her.
The sound only stops when they come to separate them. As soon as they pick up Nihilist, Goldman makes a snide comment about how it’s a lot of armed guards to deal with one little girl. Nihilist watches her ribs get stomped on for that, with no intangibility to save her.
Every time after, it’s Soldier who fights.
iii. soldier / 82
Soldiers protect their own. They don’t leave their friends behind. They fight and they win no matter the odds. That’s what the movies say, anyway.
With all that Gem has been put through, from the project to Ivana to here, Soldier doesn’t know how to do anything except survive. Obey orders and get through the day. Get Gem through the day. That’s what’s important.
Right now, the thing that will keep them alive is following the man in fatigues down the hallway toward the endless screaming.
To a certain extent, Soldier knows what each of her teammates sound like when they're angry or in pain. She’s been in the field with them, lived with them, watched them squabble over meaningless nonsense. She knows how her team reacts under stress. The screams she hears now are clearly furious and far worse than any of that.
“You are expected to perform, Seventy-seven,” the man says as they get closer. “Any use of your powers that falls outside what is commanded of you will result in your immediate termination.”
“Yes sir,” Soldier says. She keeps her eyes trained in front of her as they arrive somewhere—at a wall that can best be classified as “rubble.”
And at Threshold.
Soldier stops short as she takes in the scene. There’s a broken wall and a caved in ceiling above them, leading out into the perfect evening air. Outside. She hasn’t seen outside in so long. There’s corpses on the floor, two dead bodies with missing heads and one with brain matter leaking out their ears. She’s seen Threshold’s work before, and it’d be easy to recognize even if he wasn’t in the middle of it all, the source of the enraged screaming and thrashing like a hooked fish.
He must have been trying to escape, because they shot him clear though the shoulder with some kind of harpoon.
“Seventy-seven,” the man barks, “you will override Eighty-two. Now.”
Threshold’s head swings around and his eye meets both of Soldier’s. It’s burning with something furious and animalistic. If it was one of the others in this situation, they’d start yelling at her. For her. Telling her to help them escape and they’d take her with them. Maybe not all of the others. Not Bliss. Maybe not Evo. But the other four… They would, wouldn’t they? And couldn’t they convince Evo to? They could. They’d escape with them. Not Threshold. Not Matthew. He doesn’t care about Gem.
With their powers back and no gun to her head, even for just a brief window of time, they could run. She could control any of the people around her, cause a distraction or just make them kill each other. But soldiers followed orders. If there was one thing Ivana made sure of when she was breaking them down and rebuilding them again, it was that she was a good soldier.
Soldier straightens and sinks Gem’s powers into Threshold.
It’s like trying to stuff a tornado into a jar. Threshold is powerful and desperate, and much more of the latter than he was the last time she took control of him. But he’s within her range. His psychic abilities don’t mean she can’t hold her own, and she knows his mind now. How to bypass it and fill it completely with herself. There’s only one person who’s immune, and it’s not Threshold.
His face still radiates hate as she locks her body and makes him go still.
The man smiles, stepping around the corpses so he can stand in front of Threshold. He takes his chin in his hand and manually turns his head like he’s inspecting him, forcing Soldier to move so she won’t accidentally break Threshold’s neck.
“Still spirited after all this time,” he says. “And here we’d heard you were Baiul’s bitch.”
Threshold rebels harder against Soldier at that, releasing psychic flashes so strong they make his cybernetic eye spit sparks. Soldier grits her teeth so he’ll grit his, trying to keep him in line. She doesn’t know what Gem would do in this situation. But Gem’s hiding. They’re all hiding. Like they should be.
“Do you have his voice, Seventy-seven?” The man asks. The man. She doesn’t know his name. She reminds herself that she doesn’t need to. He’s her superior officer. Like Ivana. Like Colby.
“I can,” Soldier says.
“I can,” Threshold says, a heartbeat after and fighting the whole time.
“Good,” the man says. She watches him cross the line from someone trying to take control of a dangerous situation to someone enjoying absolute power over another person. His grip on Threshold’s chin tightens, thumb digging in below his lip. “Make him say ‘yes, sir.’”
“Yes, sir,” Soldier says after a brief moment of hesitation. It takes more focus, controlling voices. It comes most naturally to her. Gem doesn’t like doing it, but Gem doesn’t like a lot of things that would keep them alive.
“Yes, sir,” Threshold says, thrumming with fury.
“Make him kneel, Seventy-seven,” the man orders. He hasn’t looked at her once. Not even when he retrieved her from her cell.
Soldier kneels and Threshold kneels with her, coming down in a puddle of blood from one of the people he killed. The man bends down so he can keep holding him like a dog on a leash. With his other hand, he carefully and deliberately grabs the protruding end of the harpoon and twists, violently wrenching the wound farther open. Threshold doesn’t cry out in pain because Soldier doesn’t.
“Let’s see how much fun we can have now that those powers of yours are back under control,” he says. He holds out the hand now flecked with Threshold’s blood, and Soldier feels the first glimmer of true fear she’s ever felt from him when someone uncaps a syringe and puts it in the man’s hand so he can jab it into Threshold’s neck. “That will be all, Seventy-seven.”
Threshold’s fury follows her as she’s escorted away at gunpoint.
Ivana would be proud.
iv. gemma / 43
“Where are we going?” Gemma asks curiously. It’s all too loud inside her head, with everyone clamoring for her to stay back and let them handle this. It’s not fair that they’re being so bossy. They’re allowed to do everything else. Besides, the pretty doctor asked for her specially, and nobody has ever done that before except sometimes Ivana when she had a special secret task for her. Which means she’s wanted. So there.
“We’re going to see one of your friends,” the doctor says, patting her on the head.
Something warm and fluttery fills Gemma’s chest. She likes her friends. She hasn’t gotten to see any of them in forever except for the other ones that live on the inside, and that’s different because they can’t do fun things with her like do coloring books and go on missions. If her ankles weren’t hobbled, she’d be skipping. “Which one?”
“Forty-three,” the doctor says.
Gemma mouths the numbers, turning them over in her head until she figures out who that’s supposed to be. She beams. Now she really wants to skip, because this is the best day ever. The last best day ever was when they got a whole entire sandwich for breakfast, and Gemma hadn’t even gotten to enjoy it because Soldier had said—
“Ma’am.” The man with the gun standing at the door in front of them greets the doctor with a sharp nod. “He’s all ready for you in there.”
“Excellent.” The doctor smiles, as sharp as Ivana used to. Gemma misses Ivana. No one else inside does, but that’s because they don’t understand how nice she was to them. “Come along, Seventy-seven.”
“Gemma,” Gemma corrects, but they’re grabbing the loop around her wrist that they use to attach them to the wall when they get brought back to their cell and pulling it so she has to go inside with them. Gemma happily acquiesces, already scanning the room for a familiar face.
Leon is on one of the cold metal tables, strapped down like they’ve done to Gem a fair few times. The heavy buckles are fixed over his joints, and they’ve added one to keep his head pinned down and back. Gemma bounces up and down a little when she sees him, raising one hand over her head to excitedly wave at him.
“Hi Leon!” She yells. “They said I could come see you!”
“No,” Leon says, voice choked. Gemma doesn’t know what he’s upset about. Isn’t he happy to see her? “No, no, you motherfuckers—look, I’ll do what you want, I’ll—”
“Quiet,” the doctor says. Leon’s eyes snap over to her. “Forty-three. You made your decision already, and this is not a negotiation.”
“Can I go say hi to Leon?” Gemma asks, tugging the doctor’s sleeve. She seems like she’s in charge. Everyone else is paying attention to her. “He’s my best friend.”
Leon makes a noise like all the air has just been punched out of his lungs. Gemma doesn’t understand why. He knows he’s her best friend. She isn’t sure if the others like him as much as she does, but he’s so nice and handsome. How could they not like him the best?
“Shit,” Leon says. “Gem—”
“I have something different in mind,” the doctor says. Gemma doesn’t have time to ask what she’s talking about before something hits the back of her head hard.
She yelps, barely managing to catch herself as she pitches forward. There’s already tears filling her eyes and snot choking her throat, Soldier snarling in her ears that she needs to step back from the body so she can protect them. Shakily, she tries to feel the back of her head, fingers coming away from her hair sticky with blood.
“Why did you do that?” She whispers, trying to twist around to see who—and what—hit her. There’s a man there with a gun, shiny and black except for spots of red. He hit her, and her first instinct is to lash out and make him copy, but too late she remembers the control they have over her powers. The only defense she has is feebly lifting her hands to cover the wound.
Leon is shouting her name. Shouting Gem’s name, over and over and over again, and Gemma tries to twist and look at him before the steel toe of a boot kicks her in the face.
She cries out again, trying to curl up small. There’s blood in her mouth and when she feels the inside of her lip with her tongue she finds a place where she bit through it. Why are they hitting her? What did she do? They told her they wanted to talk to her, not one of the others! They asked her to come with them and she did! She did what they told her to do! They said she could come see Leon!
Another kick. Another. Her back, her hands where they shelter the wound on her head, her thigh, over and over again. Multiple people. All those soldiers and all those boots. That’s not fair. Why are they mad at her?
“Leon?” Gemma tries to uncurl and gets kicked in the gut for her troubles. She whimpers, scrabbling at the concrete floor with her fingers as someone hauls her up by the collar just so they can throw her back onto the floor and kick and kick and kick.
“Gem,” Leon says. Gemma is pretty sure he’s crying. She doesn’t know if she’s ever seen him cry before. She doesn’t like the idea of any of her friends crying, but especially not him. Are they being mean to him like they’re being mean to her? They must be. Why else would he be crying? “Oh, God, Gem.”
Blood and tears taste salty in Gemma’s mouth as she tries to hide. She wants to go to the inside rooms where it’s safe and nobody can hurt her.
It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair.
The hits don’t stop, but Gemma takes shelter, and the body is the only one that stays.
v. gem / 8
“Copycat?” A voice hisses.
Gem sits up, squinting in the red light from the alarms in the hallway flashing. It feels weird to be in the real world again. It’s been Soldier and Spy for so long, with her hiding so the people outside can’t hurt her anymore. But she knows that voice.
“Freestyle?” She whispers, trying to stand.
Jocelyn is there in a second, fingers darting through different combinations for the lock holding Gem to the wall. “You were the first one I found,” she says. “Just a—” It clicks and comes apart. “There. Mine was harder, they used a key lock. Come on, we have to get the others.”
Gem blinks. She can hear distant gunfire and, closer, the sound of people shouting. Now that she’s awake she can recognize the strangeness of all the alarms being triggered. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Jocelyn says. “I haven’t had time to think about it yet. I can’t tell if it’s someone here to rescue us, or—”
Gem shakes her head. “No one cares about us.”
Jocelyn winces. “I know. But we have to go.”
She takes Gem’s wrist and pulls her out of the room—the cell—and into the hall. The yelling is louder now, some of it dissolving into screams of pain. Jocelyn ducks and jumps and hops even though Gem doesn’t see a reason she should be. Maybe she’s just relishing in having freedom of movement for the first time in who knows how long.
“I haven’t seen you,” Jocelyn says, hardly breaking a sweat as Gem starts panting. “They’ve made me fight everyone else ‘cept Threshold. I thought you might’ve been… But you’re not.”
“I haven’t seen anyone,” Gem says. She knows the others did, especially as they shift and mutter in her head. Michael, Rachel, Threshold, Leon. Not Jocelyn. For all Gem had known, she could’ve been dead. Once Spy had framed Nihilist’s noncooperation as wanting them to be “dead like Freestyle…”
Gem had agreed with Nihilist that they might have been better off that way.
“We’ll get them,” Jocelyn says fiercely. “I know Roach has been trying to escape. We’re all getting out of here, even Bliss and Threshold.”
As they reach the door at the end of the hallway (has it always been this close? Has Gem always been a frantic burst away from the exit? A stone’s skip from freedom?), hope against all logic starts to trickle into the back of Gem’s mind. They might make it. They might actually make it. Gem doesn’t know how long it’s been since she was present—days, weeks, months, years. All of it is a blur. But this might be it. They might—
The sky is dark, with dawn barely peeking over the horizon, but the man who puts himself in their path and crushes all of that precious hope burns as bright as the sun.
Jocelyn is already letting go of Gem so she can attack, finding footholds Gem doesn’t even see with nimble grace. It’s like watching a shooting star on a collision course. Gem has seen Jocelyn in action. She might not have the same martial training as Rachel, but she’s slippery and with her precognition she can move out of the way of a retaliation before anyone sees it coming.
Despite that, the man catches her like she weighs nothing. Jocelyn twitches and jolts, but he’s there at every move she makes, keeping her folded up and held firmly against him. Gem feels frozen. She should do something—if Jocelyn can use her powers, surely Gem can find hers. She feels like she’s thinking in slow motion, watching Jocelyn live out all the paths to escape until her hair pales in the thin light and she goes so, so still. Blood from her nose drips onto the ground. Gem can’t even see if she’s breathing.
It couldn’t have lasted more than five seconds.
No. No, no, no. This can’t be happening. They were so close. They were so close. Gem can hear the other parts now. Spy says she can take over and make a run for it. Soldier says she can get them out of this. Gem shakes her head and reaches out with her powers, trying to find someone, anyone.
She can feel the snippets of thoughts. Quick and birdlike, fluttering and with Rachel and Leon. Harsher, roiling, with someone muted—a sedated Threshold? Nicole and Hector’s familiar minds go along with what they think is some kind of rescue, following something Gem can’t read at all. Michael snarling like a wild animal in his own mind. The people who have been keeping them captive dying in pain.
She could technically use all of them, except anyone dying or unconscious. But none of them are close enough to be useful except the man in front of her now holding Jocelyn, so Gem stares up at him with all the tiny defiance she has left and tries to make him bend to her will.
He’s not expecting it. Maybe nobody told him what she can do, or maybe he doesn’t think a little girl can beat him. Either way, it takes him a second to react, and that’s all the window she needs.
Unfortunately, right at the moment of contact, Jocelyn stirs, white fading from her hair. Spy’s urgent warning comes too late—Gem’s powers ricochet, the psychic backlash snapping her back into herself like a broken rubber band.
The last thing Gem remembers is falling.