It was an unbearably long shift at work today. And while long shifts weren’t necessarily a first, it was made even longer by the fact it started so early in the morning and went so late into the night. Normally, Lyra’s work had her at the research center just before 7 am and arriving back home around 7 pm. As if the prospect of daily 12 hour shifts wasn’t grueling enough, today she had been called in even earlier - arrive just before dawn, no later than 4 am. That’s an order, Hyles.
It was never difficult to figure out why the extra hours were being added on, as after years of working for the same man the two had come to know each other more intimately than she would have liked. They knew all each other’s secrets, all their tells and different behaviors that spoke of certain hidden feelings. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that General Hadley knew all of her tells, and she, herself, was just a damn good guesser. It was a far-from-cordial type of feeling, more like familiarizing yourself with the enemy. Then again, the two weren’t necessarily enemies either. Not by Hadley’s standards, that is.
Normally, whenever Hadley required her at the office earlier than usual, it meant there was a new “shipment” that needed to be sorted through. A shipment, in this case, meant a new supply of test subjects. Freshly picked off the streets or out of the hospitals, whichever had more to offer. Gone, now, were the days when the hospitals had flourished… Not that there was any less sick and needy in the world now, but rather, there were less people who felt they could turn to others even in their greatest time of need. They’d rather suffer than take the risk, and could one even blame them?
It was the same types of hospitals that Lyra had worked at before being re-assigned to research; the same hospitals that were becoming less and less frequently used these days, because more and more people nowadays were coming to no longer trust the doctors who worked there. Ever since the kidnappings had begun and it had first come out that it was fertile, young pregnant women being snatched off the streets, a lot of women had turned to back-alley abortions, afraid for what might become of their babies or themselves if they let their secret be discovered. Even more women, unwilling to sacrifice, took on the risk of delivering at home instead: in unsterilized environments, with little or hardly any help — often forgetting the issue of what might become of those children after they were finally out of the womb and into the world. Assuming either one survived childbirth in the first place, that is.
No one felt they could trust the doctors anymore, because rumor had it that that was where the leak was — and yet, little was it known that the doctors weren’t the ones who had betrayed everyone in the first place. The doctors, they were just doing their jobs, delivering babies and taking care of mothers, trying to help the sick and needy. This is what they had been trained for all their lives, why their ancestors had been rescued and kept in special bunkers throughout the war, and why even centuries later families that had been doctors in the past were still doctors now. Betrayal, abuse of power, anti-humanitarianism — well, that just wasn’t in the job description.
When the government had first come knocking at the hospital doors demanding names and addresses of the fertile, it wasn’t the doctors who had turned those records over. It was the administrative staff, those whose jobs it was to input the records in the first place. It was the patients primarily, but also the doctors, who paid the price in the end. Some paid with their lives… and some paid with their freedom. Unfortunately, even more paid with the lives of their own children.
Lyra was lucky to have been motherless, fatherless and childless at a time like that - something she never would have thought she’d say before - but though it was with good fortune that she’d had less to lose than the average person working as a doctor in that time, it didn’t make her any less vulnerable. See, the thing is… it was true, she might have been an orphan, might not have been capable of caring a child to term herself, but there was one little catch: she did have a brother. A brother who had disappeared just 2 years prior at this time, who still remained unaccounted for. That was their threat, what they had used to get at her: Come with us, or we will kill your brother. We know where he is, we can get to him at any time. Is that a risk you want to take?
And so here she was, years later, still working research for the government. Not that she had any choice in the matter. Even if they might have been lying about knowing where Alan was, she couldn’t take that risk. He could have been dead already for all she knew, but also he could have still been alive, and the last thing she wanted was to lose another family member - let alone Alan, a second time - after having already lost her humanity, and everybody else that had mattered to her at that time.
Lyra was sore, weak, and tired when she returned from work later that night. The transport vehicle that took her between the ugly prison-like structure she called home and the equally ugly prison-like structure she worked out of was just as heavily guarded as everything else in her life. It was far from a picture-perfect image of “home.” But then, what else could be expected of communal living? Honestly, could you even call it “living” when in fact all you were doing was just scraping through day-by-day, trying to make ends meet and keep from falling apart? No, not by Lyra’s standards… This wasn’t living. This was survival.
The only reason Lyra had a room all to herself was because of the fits she so often threw in the middle of the night. It was an issue that had plagued her since children, but one which had become even more troublesome over the course of the last 8 years since she had been forced into research. See, on the surface calling her work simply “research” could confuse things to seem innocent enough, but in reality, that was all a ruse. If one peeled back the layers, they would find that her work was actually more akin to human experimentation, like the kind that certain sects of the military had performed in the olden days.
Her subjects were not just dead, but also sometimes alive… Not always adults, but also occasionally children… And hardly, hardly ever willing.
And that’s why, with little else explanation being needed for the cause of increase in recent years, she sometimes had night terrors. Terrible fits of screaming, intense fear and flailing while still asleep. It was no wonder she’d been relocated to a separate part of the building to sleep in a room all of her own, away from everybody else. No one wanted to listen to her screaming bloody murder every single night. No one, not even the guards.
Most of the staff on site slept in one large room, with cots all spread out on the floor and a single attached bathroom area to be used by all. Lyra wasn’t the only one who had a room to herself, but she was one of the few.
She’d turned in early after arriving back from work, escorted by a two-man guard team from the transport vehicle to the front doors of the building, a key-card swipe and keypad lock the only method of entry into the building. Once she was inside, the doors were locked shut behind her, and there was no other way in or out unless you had prior authorization or a key for all the different locks throughout. The building was so heavily guarded on the outside, there was hardly any need to staff it on the inside. Of course, there was still the occasional patrolman, but mostly it was just custodial - aside from the inhabitants, of course.
She’d skipped dinner, heading instead for the showers, a piping hot soak under the nozzle-head sprayer one of the few remaining comforts she had left in this world. Her work clothes, blood-stained and ragged as they always were upon returning from a shipment day, discarded into a bin off to the side of the locker room for thorough cleaning. She was never alone in the showers being that she lived in such a large communal housing type, but even so she couldn’t help letting loose beneath the hot water. Her skin was always raw-red and sensitive from over-scrubbing after days like these, dark circles under her eyes, lids rimmed red like she’d been crying for hours. It left her even more exhausted than she had been beforehand.
If she hadn’t been so exhausted, she might have been more likely to fight sleep. Even so, regardless of the impending night terrors that so frequently plagued her, she couldn’t help dozing off. It was something she had come to live with these days, like a cross she had to bear. For a long time she had suffered from insomnia too, but after years and years of things never getting better, what was the point of fighting it anymore?
Tonight’s double-feature stretched on for what felt like hours. Her skin was soaked to the bone with sweat, through her clothing and the sheets of her small makeshift bed. Really it was just an old mattress topper with a few blankets thrown atop for cushioning, a single pillow the only thing that kept her from banging her head against concrete every single night. It wasn’t just a regular sweat though, it was a cold sweat - one which left her shaking, full-body tremors racking through her body despite the thick blanket atop her narrow frame. Dark eyes flitted back and forth between thin eyelids closed against the stream of moonlight drifting in through a nearby window.
Inside her subconscious, there was blood coursing down the walls like a river, filling the entire space of the small room she occupied. She was belly-deep in the thick ooze when she felt a brush against her ankle and something wrapped tight around her leg, tugging and pulling her underneath. She struggled for a few minutes, nearly drowning, when at last the grip released and she could swim freely once more. Bubbles in the red liquid drifted up from just beside her, and a few seconds later a shape emerged. A mottled corpse, small like a baby’s, then another. Hundreds more drifted up ’til at last the whole room seemed to be filled; not just with blood but with the corpses as well, corpses that were achingly familiar: chests cut open, then sewn back together by a needle and thread of her own hand.
Her lips peeled back and let loose a terrible, agonizing scream that permeated her dream straight through to reality. She felt something brush against her arm again, something separate from the corpses floating about, and then she went under. She screamed again, longer, louder, it was choking her, she couldn’t breathe —
And then her eyes burst open. She was in her bedroom, covered in sweat, still shaking, and she wasn’t alone. There was a figure nearby, just inches from the edge of her makeshift bed. It was dark, but she could just barely make out the shape of another human body through the shadows bouncing off the walls from the moonlight streaking in through the window. Vibrant green eyes were wild, cutting this way and that like she couldn’t focus no matter how hard she tried. It was all she could do to wrap her fists tight in the fabric of her sheets and attempt to steer her mind back to reality. Was she still dreaming?
“H-hello?” Her voice was weak, shaky, the tired expression on her face fraught with raw emotion - mostly fear. The person was dressed in all black up to their face, she could tell that much, and that was unbecoming of a guard. The only explanation was that it wasn’t a guard come to check on her. But then what —
Then it clicked.
She’d heard about the killings, the revolution movement, the breaking-ins that had been going on lately in nearby and neighboring villages, political figureheads and doctors alike being slaughtered, their bodies left as a message to others: you're next.
Lyra ducked her head, knees drawing up against her chest, a few strands of damp, dark hair falling across her forehead as she knocked her head against her knees and drew her arms around her legs. Her voice was small, vulnerable, full of guilt and remorse alike.
“If you’re here to kill me… just get it over with already.”
