That first night was hell.

Forever seared into your memory you can remember that night in stark and violent detail.

It is the night that haunts your nightmares harder than the Nameless Thing.

They woke you early, lined you all up outside your apartments and took roll with military precision. Everyone was used to it by then, that was just how things were in the Facility. They woke you up, they counted you, then they sent you off to breakfast.

There was no breakfast that day, just two straight lines of groggy children being led deep into the bowels of the Facility to be weighed and measured again and again.

Samples taken, things swabbed.

The Keepers disappeared and it was just you and the scientists with their cold faces and white coats and suddenly everything felt like it had before the purge.

Something told you to run but there was nowhere to go.

They stuck you with needles full of strange liquid and locked you away in a tiny concrete room with only a cot and a drain in the floor to keep you company.

And then the screaming started, white-hot noise ricocheting off of the cramped walls and down the twisting hallways to join the choir of voices raised in indescribable agony.

You lay there soaked in vomit and sweat.

Unable to find solace in familiar nightmares, let alone dreams.

Every inch of you throbbed with unfathomable pain, even parts of you that had lost feeling a long time ago.

You were metal, not meat, the serum couldn't find anything to regenerate so it sank into your wires and nerves and brought them to life until you could feel the weave of your cotton jumpsuit scrape against your plating as if it were skin.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

You gripped the edge of your cot, feeling the steel frame bend beneath your trembling fingers, teeth gritted so hard that they shattered, fell out, grew back, and shattered again in the span of seconds.

You couldn't move, each micro twitch of synthetic muscle was like a gunshot wound.

You couldn't even scream.

You wanted to die, you wanted to get up and smash your head against the wall over and over and over again until everything stopped and you were at peace but you could barely roll over in time to be sick on the ground instead of the cot.

Your vomit came out pitch black with tiny points of neon blue bioluminescence, almost like stars. It squirmed and writhed and slithered until gravity and the drain claimed it and it vanished from sight.

You fell from your cot and lay on the cold floor, watching the shadows thicken like pudding until you felt like you could reach out and touch them like living things.

Your fever climbed to dangerous heights but the pain refused to let you rest.

You stayed like that for hours and hours, curled up and trembling on the cold cold floor.

Blood seeped from your eyes and nose and threatened to drown you but you were denied even that small mercy.

All around you, children screamed and cried. The meaty thuds of tiny bodies throwing themselves against the walls and doors of their cells reverberated through your aching skull.

Your ability to see sound meant that you got a fairly clear picture of whatever a sound bounced off of, so you were an unwilling spectator to the suffering of the other children in the immediate vicinity.

You have no memory of when the screaming or the pain stopped, just of hazmat suited science people opening your cell the next morning, scraping gunk off of your face and the floor to put into vials and taking you away to get cleaned up.

You tried to ignore the terrible rainbow smears that oozed from beneath some of the other cell doors, or the body bags wheeled away in silence.

You were too tired to really care.

You were washed and weighed and measured just like before. They took lots of pictures and gave you a mug of hot nutrient broth to sip and some pills for the pain before sending you back to your cell.

It was clean now and stank of bleach, you collapsed onto the cot without a word and slept for a full forty hours.