ELLA
JULIETTE
First, I see light.
Bright, orange, flaring behind my eyelids. Sounds begin to emerge shortly thereafter but the reveal is slow, muddy. I hear my own breath, then faint beeping. A metal shhh, a rush of air, the sound of laughter. Footsteps, footsteps, a voice that says— Ella
Just as I’m about to open my eyes a flood of heat flushes through my body, burns through bone. It’s violent, pervasive. It presses hard against my throat, choking me.
Suddenly, I’m numb.
Ella, the voice says.
Ella
Listen
“Any minute now.”
Anderson’s familiar voice breaks through the haze of my mind. My fingers twitch against cotton sheets. I feel the insubstantial weight of a thin blanket covering the lower half of my body. The pinch and sting of needles. A roar of pain. I realize, then, that I cannot move my left hand.
Someone clears their throat.
“This is twice now that the sedative hasn’t worked the way it should,” someone says. The voice is unfamiliar. Angry. “With Evie gone this whole place is going to hell.”
“Evie made substantial changes to Ella’s body,” Anderson says, and I wonder who he’s talking about. “It’s possible that something in her new physical makeup prevents the sedative from clearing as quickly as it should.”
A humorless laugh. “Your friendship with Max has gotten you many things over the last couple of decades, but a medical degree is not one of them.”
“It’s only a theory. I think it might be po—”
“I don’t care to know your theories,” the man says, cutting him off. “What I want to know is why on earth you thought it would be a good idea to injure our key subject, when maintaining her physical and mental stability is crucial to—”
“Ibrahim, be reasonable,” Anderson interjects. “After what happened last time, I just wanted to be sure that everything was working as it should. I was only testing her lo—”
“We all know about your fetish for torture, Paris, but the novelty of your singularly sick mind has worn off. We’re out of time.”
“We are not out of time,” Anderson says, sounding remarkably calm. “This is only a minor setback; Max was able to fix it right away.”
“A minor setback?” Ibrahim thunders. “The girl lost consciousness. We’re still at high risk for regression. The subject is supposed to be in stasis. I allowed you free rein of the girl, once again, because I honestly didn’t think you would be this stupid. Because I don’t have time to babysit you. Because Tatiana, Santiago, and Azi and I all have our hands full trying to do both your job and Evie’s in addition to our own. In addition to everything else.”
“I was doing my own job just fine,” Anderson says, his voice like acid. “No one asked you to step in.”
“You’re forgetting that you lost your job and your continent the moment Evie’s daughter shot you in the head and claimed your leavings for herself. You let a teenage girl take your life, your livelihood, your children, and your soldiers from right under your nose.”
“You know as well as I do that she’s not an ordinary teenage girl,” Anderson says. “She’s Evie’s daughter. You know what she’s capable of—”
“But she didn’t!” Ibrahim cries. “Half the reason the girl was meant to live a life of isolation was so that she’d never know the full extent of her powers. She was meant only to metamorphose quietly, undetected, while we waited for the right moment to establish ourselves as a movement. She was only entrusted to your care because of your decades-long friendship with Max—and because you were a scheming, conniving upstart who was willing to take whatever job you could get in order to move up.”
“That’s funny,” Anderson says, unamused. “You used to like me for being a scheming, conniving upstart who was willing to take whatever job I could get.”
“I liked you,” Ibrahim says, seething, “when you got the job done. But in the last year, you’ve been nothing but deadweight. We’ve given you ample opportunity to correct your mistakes, but you can’t seem to get things right. You’re lucky Max was able to fix her hand so quickly, but we still know nothing of her mental state. And I swear to you, Paris, if there are unanticipated, irreversible consequences for your actions I will challenge you before the committee.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“You might’ve gotten away with this nonsense while Evie was still alive, but the rest of us know that the only reason you even made it this far was because of Evie’s indulgence of Max, who continues to vouch for you for reasons unfathomable to the rest of us.”