The Weight of Silence
The Nursery didn't smell like childhood. It smelled of disinfectant and cold metal and the particular quality of recycled air that had never been near a window.
Subject 077 stood with her hands clasped behind her back, fingers interlaced exactly as she had been shown. She was seven years old. She had been here long enough to stop counting.
Beyond the reinforced glass, a girl stood in an identical posture. Same hands. Same dark eyes. Same hairline. The girl was looking back at her, and her chest was moving with the quick, shallow breath of someone who was frightened but trying not to show it.
Jing knew, because her own chest was doing the same thing. She's doing it too. The breathing trick. Someone taught her that too.
"The bond of blood is a leak in the system." The Director's voice came through the overhead speakers with the flat authority of a fact being stated. "Today you will learn to plug it."
Beside her sister, a man in a white coat was holding a small silver device. It hummed at a frequency Jing felt in her back teeth.
"Subject 077. Recite your purpose."
"To observe. To analyze. To neutralize." The words came out in the right order. Her voice didn't sound like hers. It never does when they ask for it like that.
"Again. With conviction."
"To observe. To analyze. To neutralize."
"The specimen behind the glass," the Director said, "is an anchor. Noise in your frequency. The Protocol has no room for noise."
She's not noise. She's Alora. She's the one who used to give me the bigger half.
The lights on the other side went red.
The device's hum climbed into something higher, something that passed through the soundproofed glass as vibration rather than sound. On the other side, her sister's face changed. Her hands came up and pressed against the glass, and her mouth opened, and the room was perfectly silent, which meant Jing could see every part of it and hear none of it. A silent movie was what it was. A silent movie with her sister's face. At least I don't have to hear it. At least they left me that. She hated herself for being grateful for it.
"Do not look away, 077."
Don't look away. If I look away they'll know it means something. If it means something they'll take it too.
Every instinct she had was a single, unanimous instruction. She felt it in her throat, her sternum, the backs of her hands. It had no language, only direction.
She didn't move.
The neural link sat at the base of her skull like a cold thumb, monitoring. She had learned what happened when her pulse spiked, when the sensors detected what they were designed to detect. She had learned it the first week, in a room much like this one, with a device much like this one, pointed at her instead.
The only protection she could offer was to become unreadable.
So she watched her sister's hands slide down the glass, and she took the thing in her chest that wanted to scream, and she found the place behind her sternum where she had learned to put things — the same place she'd put the sound of her own screaming, once, in a room much like this one — and she pressed down on it, and she held it, and she held it, and she held it until it stopped being a scream and became nothing at all.
Her sister folded to the floor. White fabric. Dark hair. One hand still loosely open, as though waiting for something to be placed in it.
Get up. Please get up. I don't know how to be the one who's left.
The device went quiet.
"I am 077," Jing said. "The noise is silenced."
Her voice came out flat. Not performed. Flat in the way a surface is flat when everything has been removed from it. Somewhere underneath it, a single thought moved and then went still, like something drowning that had stopped fighting the water: I will remember this. Whatever they take, I will keep this.
"Excellent," the Director said. "The training begins now."
On the other side of the glass, her sister's fingers curled slowly closed around nothing.
