Page 21 of Call of the Fathoms

Finally, she paused in front of a mirror that didn’t have her own reflection. Instead, she was staring into dark, swirling eyes and a wide open maw that spread wide the moment their gazes met.

“Good job finding me,” the undine snarled. “Now show me more.”

She was spun out of this memory and thrown deeper into the recesses of her mind. She tried to push him toward memories she didn’t care if he saw. Memories that were easy enough for her to live through again. Training where she fought other genetically enhanced soldiers. The mundane parts of her days where she didn’t have to think about Harlow or anyone else. The commissary, or the other guards. Anything he could see other than the reality of her life.

She didn’t like to think about the times when she was a child, but that was immediately where he took her.

Alexia stood there and watched as she was pulled out of the test tube where they grew the children. Tubes that were filled with a viscous liquid that was breathable, but not really. It was enough to keep the specimens alive, but she remembered waking up from it. The small version of herself, still nearly five feet tall at only six years old, landing on her hands and knees.

She vomited up all that yellow goo, watching as it splattered onto her hands where she crouched on the ground. Not a single scientist had helped her. They just left her on her hands and knees as they moved to the next genetically enhanced child, and the next. They were all disposable. No one had cared that there was a little girl in front of them. Because to them, she wasn’t a little girl. She was a product they had designed.

“I wondered what was different about you,” the undine murmured in her ear. “They made you, didn’t they?”

“I am not having this conversation with you,” Alexia snarled, turning away from the sight of herself that still stung. “Get out of my head.”

And then... She could feel it. A power in her that he didn’t control. This was her mind. Her memories. If she didn’t want him to see what he was seeing, then she could make him get out.

She thrust against the presence in her mind, shoving at him with all her might until she felt him move. The bulk of him wasn’t knotted around her mind as much now, and she could at the very least change the memory. It was still warped, still felt like striding across sand, but it worked.

Suddenly, they were back in Harlow’s room. The Original was prattling on about something to do with her hair, and that was better than watching herself as a child.

“No,” the undine snarled, and the tension around her mind knotted yet again.

Then she was standing in the med bay. She had been a little girl at this point too, although she was fourteen and over six feet tall at that point. They’d sat her down in a chair and strapped her arms into it.

“Just for protection,” the doctor had said. She didn’t remember who it was that administered her first shots, and as such, all she remembered was a faceless man in white who had injected her.

She turned her eyes away from it. It was the first time she hadn’t felt like a person. Even when they were training her, brainwashing her, telling her who to be and how to protect, she had still felt like herself. Alexia. An individual with thoughts and desires and hopes and dreams.

This memory made her remember that she used to draw on her arms. Weaving patterns that looked like waves. She’d steal pens from the doctors and redo them every time they scrubbed her skin clean of the black etchings. She’d always wanted to tattoo the patterns onto her skin. She didn’t know where the thoughts came from, only that she liked to look at them.

“What are they putting in you?” he asked, his voice deep and cajoling. “What do your people give someone like you to keep you under their thumb?”

“Get out of my head!” she cried out, crouching and putting her hands over her ears.

Her heart was racing. She could feel her breath sawing in and out of her lungs, and some rational part of her mind remembered she was still underwater. She couldn’t keep breathing like this. Her air was finite and soon enough, she would run out of oxygen. She needed to control her emotions.

She needed her medicine.

Struggling to get through the memory, she turned away from the sound of her own struggles. Back then, she’d fought it. The memory warped into the next time they’d given her the drug, and she could hear herself begging to not have them put whatever it was in her body.

“Please,” she had screamed. “Please don’t. Don’t do this!”

The doctors never listened. She was injected, and then all her struggles disappeared. Memory by memory, she argued with them less and less each time until finally they handed her a box of needles and told her to take them back to her room.

And she’d done it ever since. It had never changed. Every morning she injected herself with the medicine that kept her quiet and composed, no feelings to interrupt with the job that was meant to be done.

“How strange,” he muttered in her ear. “You have never sought freedom on your own.”

That wasn’t true, though. She’d been seeking it lately, and no one knew it yet.

The moment she had the thought, she was suddenly sitting in front of Doctor Barker again. Not watching the memory as she had with those older ones. Time had given her the ability to see all those old memories through another lens. Or perhaps she had simply become a different person since then.

This memory was new.

Fresh.

Aching.

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