Countd0wn

Chapter 20: What Doesn't Kill You

I had gotten counting the minutes that I was alone without any grasp of time down to a science. I could now somewhat accurately measure how long it was in between visits from my least favourite psychiatrists. Judging by my scale, it had been somewhere between 5 and 6 hours from when I had finished up my meeting with Mossberg.

I thought back to the promise she had made about my sister. Could I really trust her that easily? After the so-called "hospitality" she had shown towards me, I didn't really know if she was doing the same towards Ivy. Reservoir, government agency or not, clearly didn't care about screwing with people's minds, especially if it was for their own benefit. For all I know, Ivy could be dead and they could be using recordings of her as leverage to make me do what they wanted. I tried to push that train of thought out of my head.

Then, my cell door opened somewhere around the mid-7 hour mark, and the guards ushered me out, only this time without any sort of blindfold or restraint. I warily followed them, wondering if this was part of Mossbergs "reward" for complying with her orders, or if they were making me lower my guard so they could knock me out and torture me.

As we walked down the long hallways of the facility, I looked around, taking in as much as I could, trying to figure out where exactly I was. The walls and floor looked to be made out of the same gunmetal grey material, that was something like solid steel, but seemed like something more. The ceiling provided the bright, artifical light that appeared to be the only source in the entire place.

The guards were wearing the large black armour that was apparently the standard uniform for everyone here, and looked like some sort of futuristic SWAT armour, but more bulky around the shoulders and chest. Each soldier wore a helmet and a facemask that obscured their expressions from view, and all of them carried modified M4 assault rifles, that I guessed could probably fire both tranquilizer darts and bullets.

Keeping all this information buried behind the nursery rhyme in my head, which had been practically engraved into my brain by now, we turned down into a hallway, and one of the guards used a small keycard on the gauntlet of his armour to open the door. Inside was rows of glass panels, with the small belt-like devices I had seen on the other metahumans inside.

One of the guards stayed behind me so I wouldn't run, and the other one opened the glass panel. As I looked closer, I saw that the belt was more like an exoskeleton, with small arm and leg grips on it. The guard opened up the belt portion, and wrapped it around my waist. Almost instantly, it clamped onto me painfully, and the arm and leg grips grabbed onto me as well. 

It felt like I was wearing a small and light body brace, and there were planks of wood strapped to my arms and legs. Then, the guard played with a few buttons on the back of the belt portion, and then small wires from the arms and legs snaked up my skin to the leads on my body. They clamped onto the ones on my neck, calves, and elbows. A small electric tingle ran through my body, and suddenly I found I could move much better now, like my body was much more fluid.

Before I had time to get used to it, the guards moved me again, and we walked down another hallway to another door. The guard opened the door and pushed me in. I stumbled a bit as I walked in, and recognized the room. It was a place similar to the training ground I had been placed in before, but was much more empty and bare, except for a few barred doors at the end.

Then, I noticed a few more doors open on my side, and two other figures step through into the room. One of them was the curly brown-haired boy that I had fought before, and the other was a thinner girl with black hair pulled up in a ponytail. She was a few years older than Ivy...my hand clenched up into a fist.