She is acutely aware of a steady beep, of the dull pain of an IV inserted into her hand. She looks at it, grimaces, and looks at the things around her. She’s studied enough of medicine to know none of it is fluid, none of it keeping her alive. She is convinced she can rip it out with no real consequence, except possibly bringing someone running. Better to look around first, she thinks. Better to get her bearings.
The room is very white, very clinical. She doesn’t think for longer than a second that it’s a hospital room. For one thing, there’s no window. For another, there’s a mirror, something not exactly common in the room. And, on top of that, there’s a very obvious camera in the corner. The red light is blinking constantly: she’s being watched.
She remembers, now, beyond the haze of sleep – it’s shaken off, now, nothing for her to worry about. There are needle marks in her arm, a line of them chasing the veins of her left arm. She remembers, now – injections and blood draws, one after the other, in rapid succession. The day before, she’d woken in a room and pushed to test the limits of what she was capable of.
It’s why she’s vibrating slightly now. She can’t feel each individual molecule – that would be exhausting, crippling her before she opened her eyes – but she knows she isn’t quite in sync. Yesterday was pushing something beyond her body to vibrate, first some sand, then a stress ball, then a rock. It felt pointless, and at the end of the day they gave her food and sent her to rest, to repeat it over again the next day.
Only she’d spent her time doing something else, and now she was vibrating slightly out of sync with the rest of reality. She’d set this up last night, after days of practice – nine days, to be precise. Now she could vibrate out of sync, and, when she’d tried, she’d been able to push her hand through the blanket on the cot she’d been provided with. It was tiring, of course, and it felt off, like passing her hand through a curtain of slime. Still – it is more important that she get out.
So Oly rips the IV out and is out of the bed in an instant, a little too fast to be standard. She doesn’t think about it, just walks to the door, stares at the frosted glass window. She passes a hand over it, and the glass shifts, letting her see through to the empty hallway beyond. There is no handle on her side, but she pushes nonetheless. It doesn’t budge, of course – but she takes a slow, deep breath, and focuses, and through she goes, one segment at a time. She theorises that she could flit through in an instant if she had enough practice, but she doesn’t have the time for that, not now, not when she doubts they’ll leave their experimentation at the easy pace it’s been set at. She’d be tempted to push the limits, in their shoes, and they don’t seem to have the same kind of restraint.
So she pushes a finger through, solidifies it, then a palm, on and on until what feels like an eternity later, she’s out.
That, of course, is when a guard appears, which is typical; Olympias doesn’t give him time to react, stumbling into a sprint and laying him out with a punch to the face. She’s always been a little bit faster than others, but like this, it’s more, more noticeable, more effective, now that she’s beginning to understand it’s in the molecules, and that she has control, as much control as she is willing to fight for. So the guard goes down and she swipes the keycards from his pocket, and heads up and out, guessing at pathways based on mandatory emergency exit diagrams pinned to the end of the hall.
-
She gets back to campus faster than she should be able to. She wants her father, she thinks, but this is closer, and safer, and she’s drenched to the bone in thin white cotton provided by the scientists. She hasn’t said a word in over a week, but she finds Travis easily anyway. He’s on the basketball court in the drizzling rain, with Vince and Mood and Sun, and Morgan and Pandora and the girlfriend Pandora claims is drawn to life, Gale. Oly is starting to believe it, now.
They aren’t playing anything, but sitting in a circle, huddled over something Olympias cannot see. She’s been tense this entire trip, constantly in motion, but she stops here, at the edge of the court. The tension seeps from her body, and her shoulders shift from near her ears to a slump. She kind of wants to cry, and before they notice her, she’s fighting the urge. If she cries, she admits she’s terrified. If she cries, they’ll see.
It’s Vince who spots her first, jumping to his feet quickly. The others look at him in surprise, as he rarely acts quickly, registering the horrified look on his face, and turning to see her. She doesn’t know what she looks like, but she knows Travis looks horrified and ecstatic, all at once, because that’s where her gaze drifts, after she sees Pan say her name.
“Hi,” she says, feeling stupid for saying something so meaningless after being abducted and, for lack of a better term, experimented on – after discovering she can do something she shouldn’t be able to do. After all, Travis is the different one, not her.
She feels like she’s still vibrating at the wrong frequency as Travis launches himself to his feet, too fast to be human, and approaches her quickly. He slows a little, once he’s close – “Oly?” he says, uncertain.
“Hi,” she says again, quieter. She feels the vibrations stabilise as he lunges for her, grabbing her shoulders, kissing her mouth immediately and eagerly, quickly and desperately. She grips his waist, then as he pulls her into a bone-crushing hug, she hugs him back, limply, then tighter, clinging as if to let go is to disappear.
The vibration might have stopped, and she might be drenched, but she feels unclean. She feels tainted. She doesn’t know how long it is going to take to wash away the stain of it all.
