Prologue
"Kill me, please."
It was barely above a whisper, so small she had wondered if she'd even said it, or if it had only been a fragment of her own imagination, a cruel illusion making her sense her cracked lips pleading for her own death.
A tear rolls down the side of her delicate cheek as she slipped out of the realm of reality and back into the darkness that held her consciousness hostage, and she is left with only the thought of death freeing her body from the torment they have conflicted, from what they have done to her, and all they have taken from the young girl.
Even in the darkness that her mind has retreated to, she still can't escape every individual nerve in her body, and the fire that scorches the very fibres that makes her being, leaving only twitching of the girls body on the cold, metal table that holds her malnourished figure down.
They have broken her.
The girl lets her thoughts wander through images of her mind, seeking out any memories of her childhood before they had taken her; before the pain, because that is all that is left of her soul now, the endless waves of anguish that harbour within her, never-ending, and the hunger that's eats at her.
An image surfaces, the touch of it is filled with so much warmth that it spreads tingles through her, pushing the overbearing stench of bleach away from her new place of sanctuary.
A woman stands a few meters away, her lavender scent wafting through the warm breeze that blows her golden locks around her, somehow seeming like a radiating aura surrounding her tall, slender figure.
The woman's lips pull upwards into a welcoming smile, "my darling, let go."
The young girls heart arches at the sight.
"Mother?"
It burns.
"Let go, you don't need to hold on anymore."
Her skin is alight with an invisible flame that is burying itself within the thin layer of her skin, never stopping and only digging deeper.
"Mom, please, help me!"
It's eating her.
"Let go." The voice is deeper this time and not of the woman she once cherished so closely to her heart.
The very heart that now beats like deafening drums in her ears, pounding against the cage of her ribs, as though it no longer belongs there.
The sea pours down her cheeks as the suffocating heat scolds every inch of her mind, her muscles, her nerves and the bones that once belonged to her.
"Let it take over."
***
With a clipboard gripped tightly in his hands, he gazes over the young girl as a coal-coloured sweat drenches her.
"Which patient is this, Doctor Cordell?"
The person beside him mutters the number 172; he tries to ignore the way they fiddle with the sterilised equipment, as though they have never touched anything like it before.
"Do you think she'll be able to endure this one?" a small voice slips in between the cracks of the girls consciousness.
"She has to, they're tired of waiting."
And let there be death to the old world, to pave a way for the New Order and it's full commence.
