We followed the old man lead, all the way until that moment. He turned, and the guards came over and offered a greeting with him. The group with the old man and the guards began moving together, heading down the corridor.
I kept pace three steps behind the old man's good shoulder.
"Young ones," he said without turning. The word didn't fit any of us, but it didn't matter. "You ask what strength is and you point at your arm. You flex. You lift. You show teeth. You are wrong. Strength is what the self can hold without breaking. Strength is how much truth you can endure when it is not the truth you asked for."
No one answered. 399's jaw bunched and released like he was chewing on something unkind. 10 watched the old man's shoes the way a dog watches a hand that may or may not feed it.
We pushed through a door with rubber at the edges, and the air changed. Cooler, cleaner. A taste like metal sat down on my tongue. The corridor widened, then narrowed again, thick glass along one wall showing an atrium two floors below: a square of pale greenery under a skylight the color of frozen milk. A woman in scrubs moved across it like a wind-up thing, a tray balanced on one hand.
The city lived somewhere above this, with its markets and closed faces and uniforms that smiled with their teeth but never with their eyes. We were under the city now, or beside it, or in the seam between the city and something older.
The hospital had been grafted to an old: brick and limestone under white tile, history domed over with plastic shine. The building faced the street like a saint with glass eyes; inside it had the machinery of a confession booth and the appetite of a factory.
We came to a junction guarded by two slumped statues of men with guns. The guns were awake even if the men seemed not to be. A panel hummed on the wall. The old man lifted his hand without looking. A nurse with a face like an unlit match hurried forward and gave him a small rectangle of paper which he pressed flat to the panel. The panel blinked green, then blue. The door sighed open as if relieved to let us go.
No one whispered, but the group breath found a single rhythm, a slow tide going out, coming in. The floor here was tile, white and weary, hairline fractures filled with grey grime that looked like handwriting in a language.
Žinot, kaip atmintis veikia? Mes prisimename ne patį prisiminimą, o tada, kai paskutinį kartą prisiminėme. Ironiška? Logiškai pagalvojus, jeigu noriu savo atsiminimais galiu manipuliuoti, juos sukurti arba pakeisti , kaip yra patogu.... (Eng. Do you know how memory really works? We don't actually recall the original moment itself, we remember the last time we remembered it.Ironic, isn't it? If you think about it logically, it means memories can be manipulated. They can be created, reshaped, or altered to fit whatever is convenient...)
I didn't know if the others understand these words. The letters looked different from the language of this colony. But I understand them.
Those words jolt me, and a cold certainty spreads through me. I already know where this test is leading. It's about dragging out the memories I'd rather keep buried, the ones I've spent my whole life trying not to face.
"Exams," he said, as if the word itself were a room we were about to enter. "You worry because you imagine a test is a trap. A trap is only a trap when you refuse to see it for what it is. Today you will be shown yourselves. Do not look away."
He looked back then, just long enough to let me know he'd measured where I stood. The whites of his eyes had filmed over with age, but the center was still sharp, a splinter of dark that missed nothing. He could have been someone's grandfather once, or a priest, or a surgeon. Not because he was kind, but because none of those roles require kindness, only endurance and a taste for precision.
At the next door, our escorts fanned out. A strip of flooring glowed, a rectangle of light that asked to taste our soles. We were told to step through one by one. 10 went. The light flared and faded. He passed. 399 followed. The light did the same. When it was my turn, the light hesitated, pulsing once as if it were a living thing considering my shape. Then it went dark. Something stamped inside the wall like a rat's heart.
"What does it look for?" 10 asked.
"Consent," the old man said softly. "And courage."
"Consent to what?" 399 asked.
"To be measured," the old man said.
He led us into a lobby that wasn't a lobby: too large, too empty, no chairs, no paintings to suggest this was a place for waiting instead of deciding. The nearest thing to art was a wall of glass against which a preserved tree pressed its pale corpse of limbs. The bark had been peeled and lacquered. The branches forked like broken fingers, each pointing somewhere that wasn't here.
Three doors faced us, all alike. The old man's cane tapped left, right, middle. He chose the door that didn't flinch. It opened to a corridor with a low ceiling and a soft-lit curve that reminded me of intestines. A clock without numbers watched us pass. Its hands moved, but not at the same speed.
We met another pair of guards at a final threshold: tall, masked, their black uniforms absorbing the light instead of reflecting it. They smelled faintly of oil and winter. One lifted a flat wand and swept it along the length of each of us without touching. When it passed my chest I felt something inside me answer, not with sound but with the pressure of a memory trying to find a way out. The wand went on. The feeling receded like a wave that had only thought about coming in.
"Do you know what they'll do?" 10 breathed, not to anyone, but a question floats until it lands.
"Judge," 399 said.
"Reveal," said the old man, and his voice made reveal sound like dissection.
He ushered us into a chamber that had no windows and more light than any room needs. The ceiling was a grid of fluorescent strips, some buzzing, some holding their breath. Cabinets lines the walls, pale doors with small inset panes like watchful eyelids. Machines dozed in the corners, green dots blinking to the rhythm of a slow metronome. At the center, a stainless table held a constellation of glass vials nested in foam: a glow lived in them, a bruised blue like the inside of ice. The liquid inside moved not like water but like thought: slow, purposeful, almost self-aware.
The old man trod to the front of the room and turned. The guards fanned into an angular backdrop. The nurse with the unlit-match face came forward carrying a tray. A second nurse joined her, and then a third, each with the same almost-face and the same almost-hands. I wondered if the hospital made them here, or only chose the ones that already looked this way.
"The first test measured what you show the world," the old man said. Echoes tried to form in the room and the room killed them. "The second measures what you show yourselves. Strength is not how hard you strike, but how long you can stand in the truth without asking for anesthesia."
He gestured with his hand, and the tray slid closer, the vials chiming softly against one another like a muted choir behind glass.
"This is memory liquid," one nurse said. It could have been any of the three: their voices were identical, calm like the last words a person hears before the mask lowers. "Titrated against resistance, stabilized against rupture, distilled to reveal. A measured dose and you will sleep. Your memory will project. We will observe. If you are a threat, it will be known. If you are not, it will be known."
10 was chosen because he was nearest to the tray. He stepped forward like he'd been rehearsing obedience all his life. The nurse swabbed his arm with something that smelled like mint trying to kill a fever. The needle winked and went in neat. 10 breathed out. His eyes closed without a fight. His head tipped.
A screen that had been a blank black square on the far wall flickered. An edge of light, a smear of color. Then a field under a cold sky, a fence repaired a dozen times with wire and stubbornness. A woman's voice rusted with tobacco, humming. The memory moved like a slow hand turning the pages of a book, careful not to tear. There was a boy who was 10 before he was 10, a man whose anger never chose anything smaller than the whole room, a departure, a lie that was almost merciful.
399 took his turn the way a cliff endures wind. The needle found him. He fell into the dark like he'd memorized the shape of the fall years ago. His screen breathed open to show marching legs, boots wearing a groove into the same length of road. An alley with rain that never washed anything clean. A knife too beautiful for the work it did. A betrayal that was only surprising the first ten times it happened, then became a habit the body expected. He had killed, but the screen did not name those killings sin or survival.
I watched theirs memories, but I felt nothing: no dread, no curiosity. Just the sound, and the silence that followed it.
I knew it would be my turn before anyone spoke. The guards had already been watching me the way men look at a deep pool: not afraid of drowning, just aware that depth is its own kind of hostility.
The old man's hand traced a small circle in the air, as though he were offering a blessing—or marking a target. Then he stepped aside, out of the light. "Do it," he said.
I said nothing, because consent here wasn't a word they needed to hear from my mouth. I held out my arm. The nurse swabbed, and the cold burned like mint on a wound. The needle slid in.
Nothing came.
The nurse didn't change expression. She changed syringes. The old man did not move. The guards held their breath as if breath was a resource the room had a limited supply of.
The second dose went in, measured against whatever resistance they thought I had, and again the screen waited politely and was not rewarded.
A murmur made itself and died. Even murmurs needed permission here. The nurse's hand trembled once then remembered itself into stillness. The third dose stung, a little cold electric thread unspooling inside my vein. My head did not soften. The room remained a room.
"Again," the nurse said, and was surprised to hear her own voice.
"Wait," said the old man, and it was not a contradiction. He lifted his face toward the light as if listening to the hum had told him something about how long a silence could be made to last.
By the fourth injection, the air felt thick, like something I have to chew before I can swallow. Sweat gathered in neat beads along the nurse's hairline. Someone at the back shifted weight: a boot squeaked.
By the fifth dose, I felt… not loss of consciousness, exactly, but a weightless edge, a frame wobbling before it found its center. The screen was still and bright, a blind eye.
"Again," the nurse breathed, with less ritual in it now, more plea.
The sixth dose took.
I lost consciousness.
***
A door taken off its hinges.
The room fell away with the economy of a rug pulled from under a table without disturbing the plates. The brightness collapsed inward and then exploded outward into a night that smelled like wet leaves and panic.
I was running.
Bare feet finding every unfriendly thing the ground had to offer: stones, thorns, the secret teeth of broken bottles. Skin slick with sweat, hair a wild snarl down my back. Half-naked because someone had decided that was a kind of power and I had decided it was a costume I would peel off in the first place that would let me grow teeth. The air gutted my lungs with each inhale, the forest style of breathing that makes me understand how a deer must feel when its body is a bell rung by fear.
"You little slut, come back here!"
The voice cut the dark into obedient pieces. It belonged to a man who had never learned the difference between wanting and owning. It had friends. Laughter. A joyless joy.
I could have run. I had been running. But the word hooked me. Slut is less a word than a net, it tries to pull me into a shape I didn't choose. Rage has its own oxygen. I stopped. I felt the stop like a kind of standing prayer.
Branches raked my shoulders when I turned. The first man came in too fast, sure of himself, sure of me. He smelled of beer and old leather and a kind of boredom that makes cruelty look like entertainment. His hand closed on my forearm. Fingers dug. He pushed me down, knee finding the small of my back with a practiced ease that told me this wasn't new for him.
Something inside me that had been waiting stood up.
I let my weight go dead the way a body does right before it wakes its predator. He faltered a hair's breath. I twisted into the space his certainty had left open. My elbow rose and fell. Hard. The crack traveled up my arm and found the tiny hairs at the base of my skull. His jaw gave way a little, not a break, a promise. He swore, annoyed instead of afraid.
My hand found a rock. Heavy, friend shaped. I swung and felt the world agree with me. The rock kissed his cheekbone and then loved him harder, the way a hammer loves a nail. Bone is a sound before it is a break. Blood sprayed my chest, warm enough to knead through the cold on my skin: it salt slicked my lip. He gagged on a chunk of himself. The second strike silenced the complaint.
I stood, breathing a little too hard, throat lined with iron. The night had paused to watch. The dark is not a judge.
The second man came on a new view, careful where the first had been eager. He had learned something, but not the lesson. He hit me with his shoulder low, a tackle that would have impressed a coach in another life. We went to the ground together. He thought weight was argument enough.
I let him think it.
He went to pin my wrists and found my thumbs in his eyes. Soft meat admits truth without debate. He screamed, high and unfair, the kind of sound that makes neighbors pull curtains lower because now there is responsibility in hearing.
He flinched away from the pain and that was all the space I needed. My knee came up fast and decided the question of his breath for him. He folded. I rolled, ended astride, one knee at his ribs to keep them honest. My hand found his throat and closed like a story told too many times to end any other way.
He hit me, but I was somewhere softer than his fists could find. I squeezed. He clawed, but pellet wounds of his nails were just the cost of choosing to finish a sentence. He bucked, and bucked again, and I let him waste what he had left in the part of fighting that looks like hope. I moved my grip a fraction lower to crush the words and keep the artery open. His eyes, wet and gouged, tried to tell me his name.
"Animals kill to live," I heard my voice say, and the calm in it was obscene. "People do it to sin."
His last breath had a whistle in it like a kettle that had decided against boiling. His heart knocked against the heel of my hand one more time and then remembered it had other work. I let go. The body became a thing to be put somewhere else so I could stand up.
The night took a new shape around me, wider. Sound came back in with the shapes: the wind, the itch of leaves, the fact of my own lungs.
I tasted for fear and found none. I waited for guilt and it was late, or it had sent a proxy: a small flare of shame that looked like a child in the corner pulling a blanket over her head, then peeking, then pulling it down again.
And then, all at once, it stopped.
Light. The room. The grid of fluorescents. The old man stood still. The nurse with her hands folded so tightly the knuckles had their own weather. The screen, black again, as if it hadn't just been the mouth of a forest eating two men in whole, slow bites.
Silence developed a spine and stood between me and everyone else.
The all room had seen me. The core under the facade. The part of me that had discovered a law: if I stop running, I turn from prey into something that hunts.
Shame arrived whole this time: not a flare, but an object with weight. It settled beneath my sternum like a stone I hadn't swallowed so much as grown. And beneath that stone, something else stretched, baring face. Playfulness - that was the word that came, and it embarrassed me with its accuracy. The same part of me that had watched him run and felt a bright, clean line burn through me. not unlike joy, not unlike a cat in the doorway letting the mouse believe in escape.
I looked up. The old man refused to meet my eyes for a full second before finally taking me in directly. The blink he gave made it hard to tell whether it was cruelty or the last trace of kindness retreating from his face, but whatever it was, he wasn't surprised.
"Strength," he said, voice unhurried, giving the word a place to breathe. "Is not innocence."