CHAPTER 4

ARTEMIS

I couldn’t breathe. The thick smog of smoke was suffocating me no matter which way I twisted and turned. I didn’t know how much longer I could hold out before I fell unconscious, or how long I would be trapped down here if that were to happen.

I no longer knew which way was up and which way was down. To say I was discombobulated would have been a major understatement.In my blind rage I hadn’t been thinking straight, and I’d stupidly blown up every recognisable landmark in this underground labyrinth that could have shown me the way out. Instead, I’d blasted everything to hell and back and was stuck under countless storeys of rubble. Not to mention the only light I had at my disposal was from my own implants, and I was running out of energy to use them.

My inhalations became shorter, sharper, jagged and painful. Spots of light danced in my vision and my head spun despite the fact that I was lying prone beneath the collapsed cement, metal and cinderblock structure.

I hoarded the air in my lungs for one last attempt to scream for help, but all that came out was a weak whistle followed by wracking coughs.

And then there was no more air, and I let sleep take me.

???

Beady, mud-brown eyes, perpetually reddened from lack of sleep and stress stared down at me from above. I was strapped to that damn metal table again, and my brand-new personal nightmare was in charge of my bodily autonomy.

He liked to use it in ways not even the other scientists dared. Ways that caused more damage to my mind. My body healed easily. My memories did not.

‘Good. You’re awake,’ he said, his smooth voice slightly muffled by his surgical mask.

‘Who are you?’ I asked, despite already knowing he wouldn’t answer, my words slurred.

‘I am your master, and you are my subject,’ was his infuriating answer.

Rubber fingers caressed my skin. Nipples pebbled. Core wept.

No, no, no… Make it stop. Not like this. Not with him.

An unanchored voice trickled down through my rising panic. ‘I can’t wait to have you..’

???

A crunching, grinding noise breached through the silence and dragged me from my unconscious state. At least, I thought it did. I lay there immobile, listening for any sign of movement, but there was nothing.

I must have imagined it.

But just as I closed my eyes to save them from the sting of the dust, I heard it again. And this time it was closer and followed by faint voices.

I breathed in preparation to shout, but all I succeeded in doing was inhaling dust and choking on it. My coughs were weak and quiet, more like a whisper. My energy was still depleted, and I wondered if my lungs were too damaged to work properly now.

The voices sounded clearer now, and I thought I could make out them calling my name. I tried to make noise by banging on the rubble, but they pinned me too well to move. So I tried shouting again, but there was still no air.

I coughed and I coughed until I eventually passed out again, unable to breathe.

???

‘Good. You’re awake.’ His smooth voice was slightly muffled by the blindingly white surgical mask.

‘Who are you?’ I asked despite already knowing he wouldn’t answer, my words slurred.

‘I am your master, and you are my subject,’ was his infuriating answer.

I scowled at him as much as I could manage with the drugs coursing through my veins and paralysing my muscles. ‘You’re nothing… to me.’

He only chuckled, his amusement dark and cruel. ‘You must move forward from your delusions, Subject A-173. Here you lie at my mercy. You may have escaped once, but there is nowhere we can’t find you.’ He ran a rubber-clad finger over my brow and over my cheek. Further down it went, flicking my earlobe and caressing the tender skin of my neck before finally coming to rest at the hollow of my throat.

‘You’re mine, don’t you see? Mine to do with as I please…’

???

‘…mis… Art… emis… Artemis… Artemis!’

The voice was familiar. Though her tone was filled with panic and I hated it when she sounded like that, I took comfort from her presence regardless.

‘A, wake up. Come on, Artemis. You need to wake up now,’ she begged, and then a repetitive sharpness whipped across my cheeks followed by the sound of flesh hitting flesh. She was hitting me.

Why?

‘Please, A. Please wake up. I need you. Please.’

My eyelids fluttered as I attempted to move them, but as soon as they cracked open my senses were flooded with a bright, burning light and I squeezed them shut again.

‘Oh, thank fuck. Yes, that’s it. Come on, A. You can do it. Wake up for me. Open those big brown eyes.’

I tried again, this time with a little more success as the nanites helped my eyesight acclimate to the sudden change in brightness. When they finally blinked open enough for me to see, the first image in my line of sight was the blurry form of a person. The blurriness quickly sharpened and I found myself looking up into the haggard face of my best friend.

‘Libby?’ I croaked, my voice scratching my throat as it exited.

‘Hey, A.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘You levelled the entire fucking facility with yourself inside it, you crazy bitch,’ she chastised, and though I knew she was trying to make light of it she couldn’t hide the shake in her voice.

‘Sorry, not sorry,’ I said while she helped me into a sitting position.

Her resulting laughter was weak and half-hearted, and I suddenly remembered the events leading up to my destructive actions.

‘Oh, L,’ I cried, immediately wrapping her in my arms. I wished I could pull her in tighter, but my strength had still yet to fully return.

She buried her face in my neck and cried while I stroked her back in soothing circles. I knew it wouldn’t bring Bal back, but it was all I could do in that moment.

‘They took him, A. They took my baby.’

‘We’ll get him back,’ I told her and meant every word.

She pulled away from me then, fury and frustration twisting her features into something almost unrecognisable. ‘How? How are we going to do that? They’re them, and we’re just… useless.’

I thought back to how that metallic substance had encased my body in a protective layer, preventing the darts from penetrating my skin. How the plasma from Demari’s gun couldn’t breach that invisible barrier that had randomly and shockingly appeared. A smile slowly spread across my cheeks reminiscent of the same smile I’d had when the realisation hit that they couldn’t touch me.

But Libby had been unconscious. She didn’t know what I was now capable of. She didn’t understand yet.

‘Libs…’ I began, but she cut me off.

‘He’s gone, A. There’s no way of knowing where they took him. And even if we did find him, he’d be under so much security that getting to him would be impossible. Fuck, A. I’m never going to get my baby back,’ she wailed, falling in a heap into my arms again.

‘Shh, Libs. We’re getting him back, I promise. I can get him back.’

She sniffed and looked up at me from underneath tear-clumped lashes. ‘How?’

The smile I gave her then was less manic and more compassionate and knowing. ‘Because they fucked up.’

Her brows dipped low enough to touch her eyelashes, wetness transferring onto them and turning them a darker blonde. ‘What do you mean?’

I pressed a kiss to her forehead before answering, needing the connection to her after remembering the fear I’d felt when trying to protect her unconscious form. ‘The experiments. They did something to me.’

She sat up then, her attention laser-like in its intensity. ‘What did they do?’

I raised a hand and studied it contemplatively. I didn’t know how it worked, but I knew that it did work. I just had to figure out how.

Except merely thinking of it made it happen. Libby’s jaw dropped to her chest as she watched the metal spread from my newest tattoo to encompass my entire hand, though it stopped at my wrist. I figured it was the lack of energy that prevented it from spreading further, but that was easily remedied.

‘What’s that?’

‘I’m not sure. But I do know that it acts as a sort of shield.’

‘A shield?’

I grinned at her then, pleased with the information I was about to impart. ‘Their darts can’t get through.’

Her eyes widened even further. ‘Just the darts?’

My grin stretched so far I imagined the corners touching my ears. ‘Not just that. I was also able to erect some sort of invisible shield from a distance. The plasma guns couldn’t get through that, either.’

Her eyelids pulled back so far I feared her eyeballs would pop right out of her head. ‘A,’ she breathed. ‘Do you know what this means?’

I nodded.

‘They can’t touch you.’

‘They can’t touch me, L.’

‘What else can you do?’

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted with a shake of my head. ‘But I do know that I can get Bal back.’

Her breath stalled and her face turned an alarming shade of purple. ‘Don’t tell me something if it’s not true.’

I cupped her face in my hands and pinned her with my gaze. ‘I promise, L. I’m going to get him back.’

‘What about our babies?’ an unfamiliar voice called out from somewhere behind Libby.

I glanced over to see a small hole had been dug out of the rubble for me to be pulled out, and a crowd of around two dozen women surrounded us. I vaguely remembered freeing the other prisoners before I smashed and burned everything I could get my hands on, but I had been so lost in my own fury that I hadn’t paid attention to their faces.

The Program kept us in pairs until they started the breeding program in which they separated those pairs to make room for the babies with their mothers. Libby and I were an exception, my circumstances a little different from the others.

I was also the only one here who didn’t have a child and, from the looks of it, wasn’t pregnant. Varying stages of rounded bellies surrounded me from all angles, and I followed them up to the myriad emotions displayed on the multitude of faces. Some were angry, some confused, and others were still panicked. A few gazed down at me and Libby with concern, but all of them were generally uncaring when it came to anyone but themselves and their partners.

Our pairs were our families, and anyone outside of that didn’t matter. Not here.

But as I stared at the other women, counting the possibilities in my head, I knew I wouldn’t get away with only freeing Baldr. I would never be able to come back here and face them if I didn’t have their children, too.

But there was only one of me and… if each woman only had one child, twenty-four babies. And that was the bare minimum. I was going to need some help, but I couldn’t allow these mothers to put themselves in harm’s way while they were still growing new life inside themselves.

This wasn’t going to be good.

‘The first thing we need to do before we can even think about saving them is find somewhere safe to lie low,’ Libby spoke up, saving me from the awkward silence that had ensued when I didn’t immediately have an answer.

‘Why can’t we just stay here?’ one of the more heavily pregnant women asked.

‘Because they will come looking for us here, you dumb bitch,’ answered someone else from the opposite side of the circle.

‘They’ll discover what happened here sooner rather than later,’ agreed another. A red-headed woman with an abundance of freckles and a barely protruding bump. She I vaguely recognised as the woman I’d handed Libby to before I went back in to burn shit down. ‘We need to move.’

‘I don’t know where the ‘we’ is coming from, but there’s no way I’m sticking around with you lot,’ said a darker-skinned woman with large curly hair and a prominent bump. She was holding hands with another woman with a similar complexion, and I wondered if skin-tone was a factor in how we’d been paired.

‘Especially not with that Wack job,’ her friend said, pointing at me.

Harsh…

‘No one’s stopping you from leaving,’ Libby interrupted in an attempt to de-escalate the tension before a fight ensued. ‘You’re welcome to go your own way, no one will get in your way, but I think it’s best if we stick together. Working together can only end up in our favour.’

‘If you leave now, how will you get your children back?’ asked a different woman, though she was behind me so I didn’t see who spoke.

‘If I leave it up to this psycho, I’m definitely never seeing them again.’

‘And what about if we don’t want them?’ one woman asked, an Asian woman clutching onto a female that shared the same features. Sister? No… They looked too similar. Twins, perhaps?

Her words finally registered, and the group collectively gasped in shock. ‘But they’re your children,’ the redhead reminded them as if they didn’t already know.

‘We didn’t choose to have children. We never wanted them. They were never going to let us keep them, anyway, so why should we want to now?’ the other twin argued.

It was a fair point, though I didn’t think I could ever imagine abandoning my own child. Even if Bal wasn’t mine biologically he was still mine. And even if he had succeeded in knocking me up, I would have loved that child regardless.

But at the end of the day none of these women had a say in the matter, and the choice was further taken from them alongside their children. If they chose to protect their hearts by rejecting their unwanted offspring, who was I to judge?

But that then raised the question of what to do with those unwanted children. If I was saving one, I was saving them all. I didn’t know how, yet, but I would figure it out.

First, however…

I stood, pulling Libby up with me. ‘We need to move. If you’re leaving, go now. Otherwise, let’s find somewhere relatively safe to sleep until we can find somewhere more permanent and secure.’

‘She’s right,’ the redhead agreed. ‘If we’re going to get our kids back we’ll need somewhere to bring them back to.’

I took that as my cue to take in our surroundings for the first time. I had arrived here unconscious and this would be the first time I got to see outside.

There was no sign of civilisation. Not even my enhanced senses could pick up any evidence of a settlement, only the local wildlife. On one side there was nothing but golden grasslands as far as the eye could see, the stalks tall and waving gently in the cool breeze. On the other side was a lush forest filled with colour and life. The trunks were a vibrant purple and occasionally oozed with a green sap. The leaves were a myriad of brilliant colours, from pink to orange to purple. Surprisingly it was the flowers that were the least vibrant, ranging from a drab grey to a deep black. They blended into the shadows as if hiding from the sun itself.

‘I think we should head for the trees,’ Libby suggested. ‘More cover and more wildlife for sustenance.’

‘Or more wildlife to worry about,’ someone mumbled, but I didn’t bother to see who it was.

‘Well, I’m going with the forest. L’s right. The trees will provide more cover and we’re more than capable of fighting off any predators. Just don’t touch any of the plants if you can help it. We don’t know which ones are poisonous.’

The majority of the women agreed without any more arguments and followed as Libby and I led the way from the crumbled underground facility towards the treeline. The two darker women and the twins went in separate directions. One pair headed for the grasslands and were quickly engulfed by the tall strands while the other headed for the trees like us, only the opposite way. I was saddened to see them go, but I respected their decision. They were not my concern. Libby was. Bal was. The other children were. These mothers now, too, if we were about to build a community together. But in order to do that we needed to find a place to do so first. Somewhere The Program would never find us.

And that wasn’t anywhere near here.