BOOK OF DEVENDRA: 2081

(Present Day)

Chapter 3: Soldier
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"Well, well, well. Look what the storm dragged in." Dr Hill's cold voice slithers into my ears in a quiet garage skirting the compound of her laboratory base. It's where her lackies have me held for several hours now, without clearance, ever since I stumbled into the surrounding area and triggered an intruder alert. After all, I have been MIA for close to three weeks now. They have no reason to trust me wholly. 

"Lieutenant Devendra Shah. You're not dead." Gooseflesh ignites across my skin more at the combination of Hill's detached voice and the sharp clacks of her heels on the concrete floor as she draws near. Together, they are more frigid than the wind lashing outside the open door. Thankfully, none of it she can see as I'm dressed in the full gear of her lab security. Long sleeve, long pants, complete with my busted camera on my bulletproof vest, flecks of dried blood caking my uniform as well as some parts of my hair—parts Mia had the most fun dirtying—and a torn comm system no longer working. My excuse as to why I couldn't radio in my location all this time.

"No, doctor." I try not to sneer at Hill. "I am not." This woman who stole my youth and hunted my niece. Made me hunt my niece. A swirl of hatred tornadoes in my chest but I stare dead ahead, as unmoved as she'd programmed me to be once. Or at least, that is my hope. "I wish I could say the same about the others, ma'am." My voice is weary with unshed tears. They were men like me maybe, men whose youth Hill stole from them. Dreams. Family. Freedom. Gone. "They're dead."

'Act as if not a day has gone by since the ambush,' Billie's voice echoes in my head now. 'Act as if you woke up in an undisclosed location and have been wandering the wild, heading south in search of her and her lab. As far as she knows, you were a POW for a short before your targets abruptly cut you loose.'

"We were ambu—" I clear my throat and stand ramrod straight like I'm back in the early days of my army training, when the world was falling apart and I needed to do something, something other than grieve the loss of mother and sister. "We," I begin again. "We thought we had the girl and her friend ambushed, caught. Done deal, and then..." my voice wavers a little as flashes of that day springs back to mind. I may not have chosen to work with Hill or her men, but they were my brothers in arms. What if they were like me, stolen youth and dreams?

I was supposed to watch their backs. I was supposed to die with—

"And then?" Dr Hill, standing an arm's length from me, peers dead into my eyes, as.if bored. As if those men were nothing. "What happened out there soldier?"

"The girl"—I close my eyes like I practiced, before my anger boils over. 'She must think you're still haunted by it.' "The girl—she—I don't know how to explain it, ma'am. It's better if you see it for yourself." I glance down at my busted bodycam, which Billie assured me still had a working chip, a chip she manipulated enough that Mia's entire take down of my unit has stayed intact up until she charged at me. Then it's blank, as if to indicate my fall, and not reveal the truth. That, like a coward, I begged for mercy and someone, heavens above, got it.

Dr Hill's eyes go straight to my bodycam, a curious brow rising. "You're telling me an untrained little girl fought ten trained men and only one lived to tell the tale?"

"You have no idea, do you?" I let out an unhinged scoff and my candor echoes in the space. "Nine of my men were slaughtered, Dr Hill. Slaughtered. I don't know what she is, but I wouldn't call her an untrained little girl."

Hill blanches a little despite her efforts to seems unbothered, unafraid. She studies me a while, perhaps considering whether shooting me now or later would be of benefit.

"Take him to the holding cells and process him. I want to see this footage myself." She turns around abruptly and starts walking towards the corridor connecting straight to the lab area and not the residential corridor. "And do keep him cuffed until I've had a look at his systems."

"But, ma'am..." I protest as practiced as men I once called friends slap on heavy electromagnetic cuffs on my wrist and shove me towards the holding cells, a two metre by two metre windowless concrete box designed to hold weapons in the belly to this beast.

Here we go. I close my eyes and picture Mia. Somewhere on this land, at some place I've never been, she's probably also getting cuffed and dragged to a holding cell like me.

I hope you're safe, Bug. And I hope Billie is right—that this will work.

"Are the cuffs really necessary?" I ask, still playing the part I'm supposed to, the returned soldier, still grieving the loss of his pals. "Come on. We bunk together, we eat together. We—" I nudge the arm of the guy astride me, a unit of a man who came to us as a scrawny, sickly kid. "Wombat. You know me."

"Sorry, Dev. Doctor's orders."

A sliver of dread spikes in veins as I'm reminded of how much her orders used to mean to me too, how willingly I'd upheld it in the past, how blindly I'd chased innocent children escaping a massacre across the fields, or running away from her madness at her 'orders'. To bring in, alive or dead.

And that's when I realise, all these men, all these soldiers, their eyes don't twinkle when they laugh—they rarely laugh.

My god, they are all robots. All—

Bile rises up my throat before I can control it and I throw up whatever edible bush tucker Billie had procured specially for me I had managed to swallow, all 'in case' Hill checked my story far more thoroughly than we imagined. After all, I was a man who claimed I'd been walking around aimlessly, without food or water the past few weeks. Now, I didn't just look gaunt and dehydrated, I felt it.

"Water, please." I manage just as the boys stop me in front of a cell.

Word count total: 6040