It wasn't always like this. Not long ago--two or three months, I think, though it's hard to be sure of time in a place like this--I was just an ordinary kid. Seventeen at last count, living with my parents in a house in the city. Going to school like every other girl my age. I even had a pet cat.
It all seems kind of weird, looking back on it. So normal and safe that it might have come from a film, instead of real life.
What happened? I got involved with the Academy, that's what.
The first time I saw Ingleman was at a school assembly. It all sounded perfectly innocent; he gave us this long talk about his program for "gifted" children. Like a summer camp, he said, where they could go and explore their ideas, realise their potential. And he was looking for candidates. Stupid, stupid kid that I was, I thought I would apply.
My parents were so proud when I passed the entrance exam. And then when I passed the physical test they were pretty much ecstatic. Perhaps I should have realised then: what kind of summer camp required you to pass a physical exam? But pass I did. I used to go running every day.
The only thing left was an interview, this time with Ingleman himself. I turned up at the offices with my parents, excited, hopeful, so innocent and dumb it makes me sad to think of it.
There was no interview. The last thing I remember is walking in through the automatic doors of the offices. After that it's a big old blank until the moment when I woke up in my cell, dizzy and cold and dressed in a shapeless overall.
It was tough at first, of course. Don't think I didn't miss my mum and dad. Don't think I didn't cry about them every night for a month. But stuff like that fades fast in a place like this. Thinking of home hurts, and so you don't. You just get on with the everyday business of surviving. It's not as easy as it sounds.
Each day there's something. Either I'm hauled off to the lab for another set of injections, or taken to an observation room and hooked up to a bunch of machines while I run on a treadmill or lift weights or some other stupid thing. The best you can hope for is an exam: a day spent sitting in an empty classroom answering one maths question after another. Scratch that; the best days are when they don't come at all. When they just leave you in your cell and let you sleep.
I don't know what they're looking for. I don't care. All I know is that it's killing me, sure as it's killing Syra, sure as it's killing all of us. I figure I've got three months at most before they stick me with something fatal.
