The Condemned (4 page)

   She had managed to doze fitfully on occasion before fear had urged her on, never staying in one place for too long. At the first opportunity she had stolen the horse but she didn't really think it made a difference in the long run. It might prolong the chase but she was starting to realise that the intensity of their relentless searching meant she could not,
would not
, outrun them. She was tired and in pain and running on pure adrenaline caused by fear. The only thing that was keeping her going was the dreadful certainty that she would be killed upon capture and though she was not really afraid of death, there were things she wanted to do before she met with it.

   Then, suddenly, the horse stumbled. She never really knew exactly what happened, maybe it was shot at, maybe it put its foot into a hole or maybe it tripped on a hidden rock
, perhaps she had simply run it to the point of collapse
. Whatever the reason, it went down and she went with it, crying out as the bulk of the animal rolled over her legs, crushing them. Alecia
passed out from the pain.

#

When she awoke the first thing she noticed was that the agony in her legs was gone. She no longer felt drained and exhausted and her hands didn't sting or ache.

   The next thing she noticed was the person bending down over her. Their face was hidden behind a strange mask fitted to an odd, bulky suit that denied any clue as to the gender of the
inhabitant
. A pair of heavily gloved hands were held over her, radiating a gentle blue light and she felt a curious warmth spreading through her, her various aches and pains vanished as the sensation spread and she was aware she was receiving some sort of physical healing through powers of the mind. She'd heard about that kind of thing, but never experienced it.

   Her healer suddenly noticed that their subject was awake, muttered something that was muffled and completely lost to Leci within the folds of the suit, and backed away out of her line of sight. She tried to lift her head, her arms, tried to sit up but found herself unable to move. A strip of metal across her forehead, one over each wrist and ankle secured her firmly to the table. She could feel the cold steel against her back, could see and feel enough to know she was naked and she
became afraid.

   Why hadn't they killed her?

   A few seconds of pointless writhing told her she wasn't going to get out of this so easily and she fell still again, defeated, her terrified mind attempting to make some sense of what was happening to her.

   The masked healer returned with a syringe and plunged it into her exposed arm.

The world went dark again.

Chapter 4

The small, windowless room was tightly sealed. Not a single shaft of light penetrated the perfect blackness that was her existence.

   Not unless they wanted it to.

   Sometimes they kept the lights off as punishment; if they felt she had performed to a lower standard than they wanted or if she had misbehaved, displeased them in some way. Sometimes they left them off for days at a time to disorientate and confuse her, they would tease her with such a simple power, allowing her light for an hour and then taking it away again cruelly for an indeterminable amount of time.

   The games worked both ways. If she had disappointed them and been sent back to her cell weary, exhausted, wanting nothing more than to embrace her
eternal blackness and to sleep
they would deny her this; flooding the room with glaringly bright light and making it impossible for her to rest.

Their toying with her had many purposes she was sure.

   They did not like her.

Their cruelty was amusement for them.

   It made it all the sweeter that they were able to torment
the little blonde renegade, add misery to an already pitiable existence.

   She knew nothing of the place she was held captive in, had no idea where she was but she knew that she was in the hands of Officials. No Renegade structure would ever be so organised, so well built and technically advanced, so clean. The people she came from lived underground in old sewerage systems or in ancient bunkers built in previous times of panic; there were no polished marble floors or shiny reflective walls where she came from. She was being held by the agency that liked to think they were in charge and she was everything they stood against, which made her a direct target for the general disgust they felt for the whole of the anarchic portion of civilisation that she represented.

But it was more than that.

   If it were based on hate alone they may have tired of it by now,
become bored with
their games and left her alone. The men who watched her, who guarde
d her and brought her meals... T
hey were afraid of her.

   They knew who she was and what she was capable of and they were driven by the
indignation
expected of a full-grown man finding himself the weaker of the two when faced with an antisocial teenage girl as his adversary.

   Then there were the others; the ones beyond the guards.

   The ones in the suits who poked and prodded and took her
blood, the ones who ran the tests and made notes while they observed. The ones who drove her, taught her, attempted to harness her and mould her into some tool for their own twisted purposes.

   They knew about the treatment she received during the times they were not experimenting with her, with how far they could push her.

They tolerated it, allowed it even.

The combination of frustration, anger, depression, hatred… Whatever other emotions she might experience as a result of the treatment of the guards; in the eyes of the researchers it gave valuable insight into how her emotional state would affect her performance.

   The guards were not encouraged to continue, but they were not reprimanded either.

   The room in which she was kept was large enough to serve one sole purpose and that was to act as her holding cell, the place they kept her when she wasn’t doing their bidding, wasn’t jumping through their hoops.

   Along the length of one wall ran a narrow bunk and affixed to the opposite wall were a sink and a toilet. The door was thick, heavy metal. A hatch high up in it could be opened and closed from the outside to allow her to be observed and a second hatch at floor level was wide enough for a tray of food to be hastily pushed in to her once a day.

   A couple of months into her imprisonment she had sat one morning, waiting patiently for the tray of food. When it was brought she had ignored it and quickly focused her attention on the flash of skin she glimpsed as the guard slipped his hand through the hatch momentarily.

   She had grinned at the scream of pain as his fingers set alight.

Her self-satisfaction had been short lived.

   As punishment she had received no tray of food for 6 days and when the meals did resume, the hands she saw from then on were always protectively guarded with the flame resistant material she had come to loathe.

   The walls themselves were very similar to the door. Thick heavy metal, coated with some thin layer of... something, she had no idea what it was but it bounced the flames from the walls and made setting her tiny world alight an impossibility.

   Several times she had considered concentrating hard enough on herself, starting the very last fire she'd ever start... but found that she lacked the courage, was not afraid of death but of dying with unfinished business. The only thing that made her time easier was the thought of perhaps one day tasting freedom again and being able to resume the search for the men who had taken her brother from her.

   On a daily basis the door to her cell would open and two guards, wearing the strange suit she had originally seen on
the unknown healer who had cured her upon her arrival here, would first blindfold her and then cuff her hands behind her back. Her first few days in the facility had seen her attempting to run every time the door was opened
, a foolish endeavour, where would she run?
She had been easily restrained and subdued but they continued to take excess precautions. When their testing had allowed her to realise why she was here and what she could do she had stopped trying to
escape
and had instead tried to burn the men who came for her, only to find that the suits made them somehow untouchable.

   She was powerless against her captors.

   She had submitted easily upon this realisation. There was nothing she could do, and trying only caused more pain to herself and more enjoyment for the simple minded, cruel men who relished being able to fill out reports of misbehaviour and watch her suffer for her actions.

   Now when the men came for her she would obediently comply and be led to the observation room.

   This room, like all the others she ever spent any time in, was fully flame resistant. Every one of the people working on or with her; observing, testing, prodding, poking, taking blood, would always be fully protected from her. When the testing sessions were in progress she would be strapped firmly into a metal chair, secured at the ankles and wrists.

   For the first few weeks they had focused solely on
determining how much she knew about what she could do. When they realised she had been as surprised at the discovery of her power as they were, they concentrated on teaching her how to use her 'gift'. They explained to her that the ability to start fires was linked very closely to her emotions and that the intensity of her feelings would affect the intensity of the heat she was able to generate.

   She was taught how to overcome the debilitating headaches that, in the beginning, resulted from the concentration she required to set off even the smallest spark. Initially they brought her small animals; rats, mutated spiders the size of her head, snakes, and then larger subjects; coyotes, pigs, dogs. A few times she was brought human corpses and instructed to burn them.

   The first time a living human was brought to her she had refused. She had cried, pleaded, begged them not to make her do it. She had shouted, screamed, raged and tried to set them alight through their suits regardless of the knowledge that she could not harm them. The woman who had been led into the room cowered like a frightened animal, unsure why she had been brought to this feral creature, this young girl who seemed wild and angry and was throwing a pretty hefty temper tantrum.

   Alecia's refusal had been observed, commented upon and even tolerated for a short time while they apparently found an interest in her regard for human life. When they had gleaned
all of the information they could from this they sent electricity through her chair, shocking the girl into silence. Her tears dried on her cheeks and her hair singed at the ends.   Each time she denied them what it was they wanted she received another jolt of electricity until, with a cry that fell somewhere between self-disgust and self-pity, she set the other inmate ablaze.

   Using the hatred she felt for her captors, she concentrated the heat, refining it as best she could, the passion exceeding any she had managed thus far in a bid to end things as quickly as possible for her victim.

The observers were pleased.

#

Day after day men and women were brought to her and day after day she ended their miserable lives, at first hating the men and women who made her do this, then hating herself; not only for being able to do it, but also for being weak willed enough to submit to their bidding.

   After a short amount of time the smell of burning flesh became something she no longer noticed and she found she was able to construct some sort of mental barricade that protected her from caring about what she was doing. They were prisoners,
the same as she was. They had undoubtedly done something terrible to end up in such a place and though they were people, they were not people she knew.

   Life had become nothing more than existing, but even if that were all she had, she wanted to cling to it and if it meant killing these people to make her own existence more tolerable, then so be it.

   The only other thing that caused her to falter during the experimentation process was the morning the man was brought to her. She had blinked, frowned and struggled against her restraints in a bid to get closer to him, to see him; there was something about him...

   She had stopped paying attention to them a long time ago; found it was easier not to view them as individuals but just get it over with without wondering what their names were, if they had family, people who loved them and missed them... Still, that didn't mean she didn't see the look of terror and confusion in their eyes as they were led to her, didn't remember the faces of every single one, wasn't haunted by images in her sleep...