The room they had dumped him in was smaller than the medical room he had woke up in. It was the absolute average of every jail cell Sirius had ever seen or been in. There was an uncomfortable looking bed, a jail sink and toilet, and even a mirror embedded behind some sort of clear shatterproof panel that was probably meant to prevent him from using the mirror’s glass as a weapon. All the furniture had been cast as a single form and bolted down, there was nothing that could be disassembled for him to use as a weapon or tool.

The door was different from the one he and Dima had cracked. This one was reinforced and there wasn’t a service panel on the interior side. The only opening in the door was a small flap that Sirius soon found out was for Them to shove a food tray through. In absence of any proper names, he settled on calling his captors Them.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been in the room for, the only measurement of time was when They would push food through the door. At first, he would try to catch glimpses of Them as they did, but They must have had a camera in his cell, because the food would only be pushed through when he wasn’t looking.

On top of that, They seemed pretty insistent that they got their trays back, to the point of withholding the day’s food if he didn’t return the tray. The longest he went withholding the tray was three, maybe four, mealtimes after which They seemed to lose patience and he got gassed with the same stuff they’d used on the lifeboats. When he woke up the tray was gone, and mealtimes proceeded as normal. They felt, for some reason, it was important that he didn’t starve himself.

The first few days he spent occupying himself with the questions of where he was, what was going on, and who was behind this, but with the minimum of information that he had there were just too many possible explanations and he often found himself falling into dark and disturbing thought patterns as a result.

He settled on not thinking about it too hard.

Eventually boredom began to set in. He was acclimating to the higher gravity slowly and soon he started doing body-weight exercises, if only to occupy himself with some sort of goaled task. He eventually remembered that they hadn’t confiscated the metal piece Dima had given him, and resorted to scratching figures into the walls, one wall was for his drawings – which tended to be crude, and another he used to track how many mealtimes had passed – each one denoted by a tally mark. Eventually he settled into a ‘schedule’ of working out, drawing, eating, sleeping, and lying on the bed letting his thoughts take over.

Most of the time he’d think about the Captain, the first mate, and about Dima. No matter what kind of stuff they did that lead up to this, none of them deserved what had happened.

I wonder if the captain ever made it off the boat alive, he thought.

Probably not, the man had been comatose for over 10 minutes without significant medical care and he was older. If he survived it wouldn’t be much of a life with the kind of brain damage that likely followed.

The first mate had been picked up with them, so he was probably in a similar cell as Sirius, facing the same levels of boredom and anxiety. And Dima, Dima was dead. It was obvious when they passed his body on the way to Sirius’ cell.

I wonder if he had anyone waiting for him back home…

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Sirius hoped he didn’t. If Dima didn’t have anyone to miss him, Sirius could feel less guilty. Sirius found it easier to go without the restrictions that attachment required – he’d tried it once or twice and hated feeling like he had to account for everything he did. He liked being free to go where he pleased when he pleased. Of course, that wasn’t going to happen now.

After what felt like forever, things started to change. Every so often the room would be gassed for no obvious reason. Like the other times, Sirius at first tried to resist by holding his breath, but they kept the gas pumping until he eventually had to inhale, then he would pass out. When he woke up, he found marks on his arm, needle marks – they had injected him with something. Whatever it was its effects weren’t immediately apparent outside of minor irritation at the injection site. It made him anxious, but at least he knew what they wanted now.

Medical experiments.

All the secrecy, the technology, it made sense if this was some sort of secret medical experiment. Sirius wondered how the drug they were giving him was going to work - or more accurately – kill him. If this experiment was too sketchy to be done in broad daylight, it didn’t bode well for his chances of survival. At least right now, it didn’t seem to be doing anything much. This new pattern only lasted for a little while.

It eventually became more frequent.

It didn’t take long for him to start feeling a little bit warm, which soon turned into outright feverish. After feeling feverish for a few days Sirius noticed an odd discoloration around the injection sites. A trail of slightly darkened tissue followed his veins, and slowly advanced day by day. The tissue around it was inflamed and tender to the touch.

They must be experimenting with a bioweapon, Sirius guessed, some sort of disease.

Now that he was becoming symptomatic, Sirius started to feel more dread about the coming weeks. Maybe the reality of the situation was finally settling in, maybe he was finally realizing that he was going to die here – he hadn’t needed to think about that before. The dread gave way to despair as the symptoms advanced and it settled into a sort of dull ache in his stomach on top of the very real dull ache that had manifested. Sometimes he would spend the day lying on the bed, frozen with anxiety. Other times, he would be spurred into action, ranting and raving himself hoarse, beating the wall, the floor, the door – whatever he could reach because he needed to feel like he was fighting this, like he had some sort of choice in the matter.

Eventually he would tire himself out and sink to the floor, sometimes he would cry, more often he would be too tired to cry and fall asleep crumpled in a little bruised pile and wake up to start the cycle of despair again. The ache in his stomach would grow, a little every day, and now he was starting to feel a dull ache in his head, like someone was inflating a balloon in the back of his skull.

He tried not to look too often at the injection sites on his arm, they had developed a nasty-looking infection that was spreading upwards. When he did see it, it was irritated and blackened flesh, interspersed with painful white pockets of infected matter that burst on occasion and then seeped reddish clear fluid. The worst spots were an angry red, almost glowing and they burned every time his flight suit rubbed against them. The inflammation had reached past his shoulder, and there was definitely a blood infection.

Sirius’ headache was getting worse by the day, perhaps even by the hour, on top of the near excruciating pain in his stomach. Sometimes it felt like something was moving, slithering about his insides. His ears were ringing, and every new noise stabbed at his ears with deafening aggression. He would sweat, and the normally cold room felt like a furnace. Every day, a tray of food would be shoved under the door, the sound grating on his nerves, and he would stare at the food unable to bring himself to eat it, then he’d be gassed and wake up to an empty cell.

Then one day, They stopped with the upkeep.

They shoved the food through for the last time, he spent the day staring at it in disgust, waiting to pass out and start the day again. But he didn’t pass out, and the tray didn’t disappear, and he wondered at that. He wondered if that was a good sign, but he sensed it was more likely a bad one. He must have reached the point of being too far gone for regular meals to matter. At least now there was silence.

A few hours later, the screaming started.