A Secret Power, Perhaps?

Jason could hear Iris’s screams coming from the room down the hall. He had only been here for three weeks and he already knew the horrors that happened behind the closed doors of the laboratory. They had quickly discovered his amazingly fast rate of healing, having broken one of his arms in the first week, and it having been healed before the start of the second. This seemed promising to Dr. Anderson, deciding to inflict great amounts of pain on him, and seeing how fast his body could heal.

Iris’s ear piercing screams came once again into his chamber. He was getting worried. It had been three days since they had taken Iris from her adjacent cell, they normally brought them back within an hour or two. What ever was going on, it was big.

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Iris screamed when Dr.Anderson pressed the blade against her leg, producing a large, deep cut. She couldn’t understand why he kept doing this to her until she gained enough nerve to look down at the cuts blanketing her legs. She gasped when she saw that her blood ran black.

“Ah, so the little lamb sees what’s so interesting. You truly are remarkable, Iris. I can’t wait to find out what other kinds of properties your blood holds.” Dr.Anderson placed a vial of her blackened blood into the carrier and Iris couldn’t help but notice that the tray was full, very full. What could he possibly think that he can find in my blood? 

“Take her back.” He motioned to the two guards beside her and they started removing the straps that held her down to the table. Once the straps were removed, Iris tried to sit up and was overcome by a bout of dizziness, before blacking out.

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Jason jumped to his feet when he saw the two guards dragging Iris’s limp, lifeless body into her cell. 

“What did you do to her!” He screamed at the guards who didn’t even so much as glance in his direction. If only they knew just how powerful she really was, they would never treat her like this if they knew. But I will never tell them, if they know, then I will never get her out of here alive.

Jason looked at Iris laying on the floor of her cell, the guards didn’t even have the decency to place her on the bed. He was worried, very worried. He watched her breathing, and got even more concerned. They were very shallow, uneven breaths. Something was wrong, very wrong. That’s when he saw it, the blood staining her pants. The blood covering her arms.

“Oh my god.” He said aloud to himself. “They tried to bleed her.They tried to take her power by altering her genes.” He went berserk, grabbing onto the sole chair in the room and slamming it against the plexiglas barrier. It was no use. 

All the commotion brought the attention of Dr.Anderson, who had just finished dropping the blood samples off at the lab on the second floor. He saw Jason, bashing on the unbreakable barrier with all of his might. Dr. Anderson chuckled.

“Well well.” He walked over to the door to Jason’s cell and stopped outside of it. “Looks like somebody’s got a bit of separation anxiety. Does the big bad wolf miss his little lamb?” He mocked Jason. 

Jason turned, abandoning the impossible task and lunged at the door that Dr.ANderson was standing behind. 

“What did you do to her you monster? Are you trying to kill her?” He yelled and started banging on the glass of the door.

“Oh, did I hurt the wolf's feelings?” He laughed as he pressed a button that protruded out from beside of the door. As he walked away, the room filled with a thin smog, and Jason felt himself become tired. The next thing he knew he was hitting the floor. 

Jason slowly started opening his eyes, the wait of his eyelids feeling like a thousand pounds. He was groggy, but he couldn’t quite remember why.What had he been doing? Why was he on the floor? He just couldn’t remember. 

“Iris?” He sat up and called out her name, trying to see through the darkness of their rooms. He stood up, suddenly remembering what had happened. “Iris!” he ran over to the partition, searching frantically for her. Sure enough, she was lying in her bed.

“Iris!” he called out again, hoping that she’d answer. 

“James?” She blinked, as if she couldn’t see him. “James, what happened?” she sounded hoarse, as if she’d been crying.

“Iris, they used some kind of gas and put me under. Are you okay? What did they do to you? When they brought you back you were unconscious and covered in blood.”

“James.” She almost sounded relieved. “I thought that they had taken you back there, back to that room. You never answered me and I thought that you were gone.”

“I’m not. Look, I’m right here. They didn’t even take me out of the room, I’m fine.”

“James,” She whispered.”I can’t se.”

“What?” He didn;t understand. “You can’t see what?”

“Anything.” She rolled over in her bed so that she faced him. He gasped.

“What, what happened? His eyes were fixated on hers, trying to figure out what could have possibly happened to cause such a change. Her eyes, that were once a beautiful shade of violet purple, strikingly bright, are now the palest shade of blue he’d ever seen. She had the eyes of a blind man, dull, focused on everything and nothing at the same time.

“I woke up, and the world was dark.” She let a few tears springfree and flow down her cheeks, reaching up to whip them away, she gently rubbed her hands over her blinded eyes. “They’re still there, I can feel them. So what happened to them? Why can’t I see?”

“Iris,” He started slowly, “Your eyes, they're blue. You have the eyes of an old blind man.”

“How?” she whispered it, as if to only ask the question to herself.”I could see when they brought me here, I saw the ground be fore it all went black again. They didn’t touch my eyes, I’m sure of it. They only took my…..” She stopped, realising that that must be the answer.

“Your what, Iris. What did they do to you back there?”

“My blood is black.” she whispered it at first,then louder. “My blood is black. And they took it, they took so much.” Her voice faded out, as if she was reliving everything that had happened.

“I’m going to get you out of here Iris. I won’t let them do anything else to you or me.”If her blood was already changing, then she was coming very, very close to embracing. Her powers were preparing to blossom and appear. This was either going to be really, really good. Or really, really bad. If they figure it out and take her somewhere under lock down, then it’s all over. He won’t be able to get her out and she won’t know how to get herself out. He needs to be able to take her back before they realise that her powers are coming in, before they realise just how powerful she really is.

“Okay, we just need to stay calm and come up with a plane, some kind of distraction so they’ll open the doors, then we’ll need to be ready.” He started pacing back and forth along the glass barrier.

“That won’t work. Trust me, last time I tried to get out I ended up flat on my back only a foot away from the door. When I woke up, I was in the solitary confinement room. It’s just a solid concrete box with a metal door, no lights, nothing. It’ll drive you to madness.”

“No. We can get out, I know that we can. I’ve just got to come up with something that you never thought of, that’s all.” 

“Believe me, I’ve tried everything. Why can’t you just leave it be and except the fact that you're stuck here now. You’re going to be here for the rest of your life, just like me. The only thing you can do is decide just how long that’s going to be. You start defying the doctor and upsetting him, and your stay here might just be shorter than you expected.” She looked at him with cold, calloused eyes. She was telling him the truth.

“What about you? You said it yourself that you’ve tried to get out many times, they never killed you.”

“That’s because I’m too important. They want something from me, that’s why I’m the only one they’ve let live this long. Most where failed projects or rejected from the program. In the end, they were all terminated. All of them but one, me. They don’t need you for research, you’ve been tainted. All the other times they brought people like you in, people from the woods, they got rid of them at the first sign of trouble. They don’t like to deal with the wild ones.”

“Is that what you think I am? Just some wild person raised out in the woods, no family, nothing. Do you really believe everything that they tell you? And I thought that you were smarter than that.” He looked away, almost as if he was ashamed of what she had said.

“No, I don’t believe everything,”She whispered. “Just what comes across as common knowledge.”

“Life outside the city's “Safe and protective” walls is not just jungles and wild animals. We’ve started our own civilization out there, and we’re getting stronger. We’ve built buildings hidden among the trees, way high up in the sky, and deep down underground. We’ve amassed an army of people like us. The rejects, the ones that weren't good enough for the government's perfect standards. We will rise when the time is right. BUt we are not, under any circumstances, this uncivilized community of people running around and living like some kind of wild cave man.”

“And that is exactly what I wanted to hear.” Dr. Anderson waltz into James’s side of the the cell. “You should know by now that I’m always listening.”

“Great. You can just go running to your precious little leader and tell him all about the army we have ready to destroy him. BUt he’ll never find them. We’re hidden too well.”

“Oh, but I will find them. I can assure you of that.”

“And how do you plan on doing that?” James said sarcastically.

“WHy, you are going to help me. You are going to lead us straight to this little town of yours. And it would be all you fault that all of your little friends were killed.”

“What makes you think that I would ever help you? You can’t make me do anything because I will never help someone like you hurt everyone that I care about.”

‘Well, what about her?” He pointed over towards Iris who was standing pinned to the glass, one of the massive guards pulling her wrists up above her head, leaving her defenseless. “What would you do to protect her? I know that you know about her, and about the power that she holds. If you didn’t then you wouldn’t have walked right into our trap, knowing good and well that we were waiting on someone to walk by. You wanted to be captured. We had something that you wanted, something so very powerful, and you knew that you had to get inside in order to break her out.”

Jason gasped.

“Did you really think that I would have kept her alive for so long if I didn’t know about how powerful she would become?”

“You won’t kill her. You just said that you kept her alive for her power. You won’t let it all go to waste.”

“Really? Because what if I told you that the only reason I’ve kept her alive is because I knew that your little group needed her powers in order to defeat our government? What If the only reason she was kept alive was so I could have leverage over someone like you? SOmeone who would break and show me where they were hiding?” Dr. ANderson motioned at the guard behind him who preceded to pull a knife from his belt and place it under Iris’s chin.

“All it takes is one motion, and I can have her on the ground dead in about thirty seconds. DO you really want to try me?” Dr.Anderson lifted his hand, as if to tell the guard to get it over with and be done with this.

“Fine!” He yelled out when he saw a thin line of blood form along Iris’s neck, the guard slowly pushing harder against her fragile skin. “Fine, I’ll help you. I’ll show you where it is.”

“Smart boy.” Dr.Anderson motioned for the guard to release Iris and he did, allowing her to drop unceremoniously to the floor. He stepped away and out of the room.

“Now, where do we start? Outside of which gate?”

“The east gate, the one with all the golden lions lined up along it. Then out and into the forest.” James sounded defeated as he started into the slightly scared eyes of Iris, but he saw something else flash across her face. He couldn't quite tell if it was anger or curiosity.

“Good. Let's get going then, shall we?” Dr. Anderson walked over to James and pricked his arm with the tip of a tranquilizer dart.

Jason swayed for a moment before blacking out and hitting the floor.

Iris didn’t understand what was going on. She had heard them talking, then a loud thump. What o n earth was going on? What was all the talk about a group in the woods, and what does Dr. Anderson want with them? Most importantly, what did James know about her that she didn’t? What was all this about her being so all powerful and being the key to winning an upcoming war? Why would he keep[ this kind of information about her from her? And what did they mean by the fact that the only reason that James was here was to take her back to the resistance. Did he really get himself caught and dragged into this horror house to try and break her out? What does the resistance whant with her? What could she possibly do to help them win a war?