THE GIRL SAT ON THE cold, white floor, fluorescent lighting shining off the slick surface. Ropes of permanently matted hair hung over her face. Electric burn marks blistered across her arms and legs, visible around the tears in her stained jumpsuit. The wounds would heal by nighttime, ready to start fresh again in the morning.
If she closed her eyes, she felt the memory of straps running across her forehead and chest and legs, and the strange pulling sensation of being caught in a gravity trap, so she kept them open.
Scratching a spot on her shoulder, she leaned into the feel of fingers against skin. Her hand felt nothing, dead and senseless where the nerves had been stripped away.
A solid bench functioned as a bed in the opposite corner, an open latrine the only other furniture in her small cell. The monitoring station was clearly visible through the fortified, full-length permaglass wall, and she observed them as much as the soldiers observed her.
The researchers didn’t know what she was, not really, so they tried to bring it out, while she fought to keep it in.
She made a list of things she knew to be true:
Name: Sarrin. ID code: 005478F. Female. Born on Earth. Nineteen or twenty years old (as well as she could count, there were lapses of time gone from her
mind). She was a prisoner of war—a forgotten remnant of a darker time.
Each day was the same: guards woke her, only to fill her small cell with sedative gas as she laid down and simply gave in to now. When she woke again, she would be strapped to a cold metal table, held down by a small-range artificial gravity well for
extra security.

They would run the day’s experiment protocol, sometimes speaking into a little microphone. She would distract herself with figures or facts until they gave up, injected sedative and returned her to her cell. Later, they would bring her a meal—too little and the minerals artificial—and prepare for the next day.
She counted now the numbers of things:

Guards: eleven. Cameras: twelve. Prisoners: one. Objects that could be used as lethal weapons: in here, zero (they'd learned the hard way) but in the observation room, thirty-eight.

Possible escape routes: three.
But where would she go?
She had escaped once, early on. Through the ceiling, across the roof, the lawns, and over the nine-metre barrier wall. But there was nothing beyond. The planet—identification unknown—was barren. Its red-purple, dusty surface blended into the hazy atmosphere, the horizon invisible and unchanging. She had run for hours without so much as a hill or crater. Even hardy brome grasses could not grow. There was nowhere to hide, no way to survive.
Eventually, the soldiers in their hovercrafts had dropped enough gas bombs that she had succumbed and awoken in her cell, as though nothing had happened. The routine resumed, day-in day-out, the only differences the dose of sedative and the meals which became less and less.

Her stomach rumbled. After three years, her body had become finely tuned to their schedule, and the United Earth Central Army soldiers ran like clockwork. The meal was never late.
A minute passed, then five, then ten. The seconds ticked off in her head.
She started to shake. Sweat beaded on her back. In the monitoring station, all but one guard had disappeared. Her breathing quivered. Something had gone astray.
Her pulse pounded in her veins, each thump shaking her core. Then the beats came further apart, slowing.
No, that wasn’t right. She looked at the single guard—he had slowed too. She was speeding up.
The trance, the monster she fought to keep caged within, called to her. A change in routine was unusual, dangerous. Darkness clouded around the edges of her vision threatening to take control.
She shut her eyes and started to count, reciting Fibonacci sequences to distract her brain. 1-1-2-3-5-8... She couldn’t let it take hold, not after
all these years. Not for a late meal. 233-277-610-987—. She lost count and her breath came in rags.
Her finely tuned instincts screamed at her to stand and run. To fight.
She refused. She had to keep making them believe they had been wrong all these years; if they thought she was normal, maybe they’d let her go.
But normal people couldn’t do the things she could, she was certain. What would it be like to be normal? To live without the trance? To be somewhere not here? What would she do? Would they leave her alone?
Her eyes squeezed harder. She would read. Yes.
About engines. She liked engines. They spoke to her, purred and hummed, soothed her mind. Impulse thrusters were driven by controlled fusion reactions. The FTL drive worked based on gravity mechanics.

Gravity was a particle easily controlled. Grav-wells could be used to control her.

Her eyes flashed open. A man stared back across the permaglass, stroking his finger along the scar that ran across his right eye and curled wickedly down to his mouth. A scar she had given him.
Luis Guitteriez. He ran his tongue over his lips, the corners turning up in a grotesque imitation of a smile. He leaned forward, resting on the ornate
walking stick he always carried with him, as though he were about to come through the permaglass barrier.
Her feet pushed against the floor, scrambling, but her back met the cold, hard, white wall of her cell.
Trapped.
He grinned, a predator toying with its prey, his eyes beady and dark like the demons in her dreams.
She swallowed down her scream and hoped irrationally to demolecularize and disappear into the solid steel behind her. Why now? Why after all this
time?
There had been no doubt in her mind that Guitteriez orchestrated this series of experiments. But after three years of the same tedious work, she had let herself hope, even believe, that he had lost interest.

Foolish hope.
The head researcher joined him at the permaglass, standing crisply in his grey dress uniform. She barely noticed him, fixed instead to Guiterriez’s dark hair and leathery scowl and gleaming white medical coat, her every sense finely tuned to the doctor.
Without shifting his gaze, he spoke to the researcher beside him. The permaglass deadened all sound, but she had a perfect view to read every word from their lips. “No response?” Guitteriez asked. “Even with the increased protocols?”
“Nothing, Doctor.”
Instead of responding, Guitteriez rubbed his chin, cracking his jaw side to side.
“Perhaps if you told us more definitively what you’re looking for...,” tried the researcher.
“You would know it if you saw it.” The doctor's eyes drilled into her, hunting for the thing he had never been able to discover.
Even she didn’t fully know what they had opened in her mind. She didn’t want to know. Didn’t want any part of it. She pressed herself deeper in to the
corner against the wall.
“I’m just saying, it would be easier—"
Guitteriez turned abruptly to the researcher. “It is not for you,” he frowned. “We will have to push harder.”
The researcher paled. “Are you sure? She’s just a girl, Doctor, less than a hundred pounds. We did 30,000 volts today.”
“I am sure.” He clenched his fist and turned his gaze back to her. “She is the answer. She is the Gods’ gift and our Path to salvation.”

But it was in his eyes: he no longer saw her as a mission for the Gods; this was personal. He hunted her and would not relent until he had taken the thing he wanted.
He wiped the stray saliva that pooled where the scar left a jagged hitch in the corner of his mouth, and his eyes gleamed with deadly certainty. “She will change everything. We just need to break her open first.”
Sarrin pulled her legs in tight to her chest.
Possible escape routes: zero.
Probability of survival: zero.