It wasn’t the first time Lauren dreamt of that day, the last time she had been free. But this time, when the dream ended, her eyes opened to see the sky.

  Lauren awoke huddled on the warm desert ground. She was hidden in between two scrub bushes. On the horizon, between thin branches she could see the sun setting over a tall mesa.

  It had been morning when she escaped. At least, that’s what she thought she remembered. Chunks of her memory were blocked out, just static in her mind. She remembered falling, plunging into a river. She swam, then ran, then climbed. All of it beyond her control, something else moving on pure instinct. She didn’t remember settling down here, in this sheltered crevice between sparse vegetation. She didn’t remember falling asleep. She didn’t know how long it had been since she had awoken on that hospital gurney, her restraints not tied down nearly tight enough. Since she had lashed out and attacked all of the guards and attendants surrounding her.

  Lauren sat up and took stock of herself. She was still wearing the clothes they dressed her in in the lab: sweatpants and a simple gown. The gown was now torn and stained dark red, crusty in some spots. Her arms were covered in dust and dirt. Her feet were bare.

  Panic struck her heart. She had to go back. They still had Rachel. How could she have left without Rachel? The survival instincts that had kicked in and forced her to escape must not have included her sister. She had to go back.

  She climbed to her feet and looked around, only her head and shoulders being taller than her makeshift cover. It was only thorny plants and uneven ground in all directions. She clutched her head, forcing herself to remember the direction she had come from.

  “C’mon… c’mon…”

  Something came to her. An innate sense of the direction she had traveled. It had to be right. Something in her remembered. She sidestepped the bushes and immediately broke into a full sprint back the way she had come.

  Night fell as she traveled. The desert cooled quickly. Lauren hardly felt it. She sprinted for over an hour, her muscles barely burning. The moon was plenty bright enough to see by. When she reached obstacles, she bounded over them. Nothing could stop her from getting her sister back.

  Eventually, she reached the cliff that she had fallen from. Some fifty feet below, a river flowed past, filling the night with a rushing sound.

  Lauren turned and grabbed the cliff’s lip with her bare hand. Her grip was firm as she descended on hands and feet down its face to find the grate she had used to escape.

  . . .

  “Sir, there’s movement in the hallways. Cameras are picking up a lone figure moving deeper inside.”

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s hard to tell. They’re moving fast and evasively. They appear to be heading towards the main chamber. Do we move to intercept?”

  “No. Maintain silent presence. Have units circle in and stand by for an ambush. Cover all exits.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  . . .

  Lauren landed crouched in a hallway lit by evenly-spaced sterile lights, now dim for the evening. The corridor was long and empty. Doors with electronic locks lined up at regular intervals to break the pattern of white-paneled walls, along with rectangular observation windows.

  It was a familiar sight to Lauren. She had been wheeled up and down these hallways countless times. Just seeing them again made her heart pump loudly, but she forced herself to focus.

  If this was the same hallway she had escaped from, there was no sign of her bloody confrontation. She checked behind and in front of her. No one was coming yet. There were certainly cameras, but she didn’t know how closely they were monitored. Surely the facility must be on high alert after her escape. She didn’t have any time to waste. She took off running down the hall, hopefully in the direction of the main laboratory.

  She made left and right turns as she sprinted, again following her instinct, which seemed to for now be mostly unconscious. At every turn she expected to face a blockade of security pointing guns at her. But the halls remained eerily empty. Was it possible they were all out hunting her? It seemed careless to leave everything here unoccupied.

  She rounded another corner and found them: the double doors that opened into the multi-story main lab. As she ran toward them she was prepared to slam against them, to use all of her strength to claw them open if she had to. But to her surprise, when she got within feet of them they whispered open without protest.

  She braced against the railing of the walkway that surrounded the lab a floor below. She half expected to find Dr. Smythe there, working even now. The doctor kept odd hours, and surely wasn’t one to let a disaster disrupt her work. But the lab was empty. Lights rose to full as they detected Lauren’s movement.

  Lauren vaulted the railing and landed ten feet below on cold linoleum. The lab looked emptied. The stations that surrounded the central work area, stations that were usually alive with bubbling chemicals and whirring computers now contained only empty beakers and dark screens. Shelves were cleared of files and binders.

  And most importantly, Rachel’s containment cell was empty.

  “Rachel!” Lauren cried as she rushed over to look for her twin. She was nowhere in the transparent glass box near the back of the lab, right next to Lauren’s identical cube.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Lauren pounded in vain on the glass, willing her sister to appear. She turned around.

  “Rachel!” she screamed, no longer caring about being found. She’d rip the throats out of anyone who appeared and force the few survivors to tell her where her sister was. She had to be here somewhere.

  “Rachel! RACHEL!”

  The lab only echoed her cries back to her.

  Lauren fell to her knees. Tears welled up in her eyes. She started sobbing.

  Time passed. Tears pooled on the ground in front of her.

  Then, without even the squeak of a shoe announcing their presence, a voice spoke.

  “What’s your name?”

  Lauren’s head sprung back up. She was immediately in fight mode, muscles tensed. But seeing the man in front of her made her pause.

  The man was middle aged, maybe slightly younger, with close-cropped blonde hair fraying into white at his temples. He wore a very official-looking dark suit with a black tie. His face was wrinkled with serious lines that overrode his true age. He looked at Lauren with watery blue eyes set in a neutral expression. He certainly didn’t look like he worked at the lab.

  Lauren looked beyond him. Up on the walkway were dozens more figures, each dressed in sleek, dark body armor with face-concealing masks. They held advanced-looking rifles and pistols, not yet trained on Lauren, but certainly at the ready. They weren’t lab security.

  The man in the suit slowly kneeled so that he was level with Lauren.

  “My name’s Agent Hogan. I’m with BASTION.” He took out a laminated badge from inside his suit and showed it to Lauren. “I’d like to find out who you are and what you’re doing here.”

  Ten minutes later, Lauren was sitting in a room in the facility she had only been in once or twice before. Or at least a room like it. It was a plain interview room, with a one-way mirror on one wall and a camera in the corner. The lab’s owners were still nowhere to be found. Apparently these BASTION people weren’t concerned with running into them. Something must have happened after Lauren escaped.

  Agent Hogan sat across the table from Lauren. A younger man in a suit, who Agent Hogan briefly introduced as Agent Ramsey, stood in the corner with a notepad. He seemed anxious. Hogan, on the other hand, was calm and serious.

  “Lauren,” Agent Hogan said, “Do you know who we are? What we do?”

  Her name was the only information Lauren had volunteered so far. Her head was still spinning from her wild escape and reentry into the lab. As for BASTION… she had a vague idea. Memories floated up from her life before coming here. They were that huge government organization that dealt with superhumans. Lauren heard about them on the news sometimes, when news happened to be on. She was never one to care much about heroes and the like. There weren’t many heroes where she was from.

  “Yeah,” she answered simply.

  “Good,” Agent Hogan said. “Well, I hope that you know we try our best to be the good guys. We want to protect the world. My assignment right now is dealing with rogue super-scientists, and their creations.”

  Creations? Lauren recoiled at the word. Is that what she was? Some byproduct of an experiment? The thought shook her. Her and her sister were more than just experiments. They had a life to get back to.

  She tried speaking up, though her voice felt weak. They were wasting time. “So… you guys raided this place, right? Is that why no one is here? Did you find my sister? She looks like me, and—”

  Agent Hogan held up his hand to stop her. He seemed tired, underneath his professional exterior.

  “I’m sorry, Lauren. This lab was empty when we arrived. We were searching for the last scraps of any evidence when you broke in. I’m guessing that means you were held here? You and your sister.”

  Lauren nodded. Hearing her sister was still missing broke her all over again. That meant she was God-knows-where with the monsters who took them.

  “Who brought you here, Lauren?”

  Lauren sniffled, and wiped her nose on her wrist.

  “I don’t know exactly. We were kidnapped from our hometown, Callis. Rachel and I. It must’ve been years now. We were brought here. A team experimented on us. Some woman who called herself Dr. Smythe led them.”

  Agent Hogan ran a hand over his chin, which had a hint of stubble.

  “I don’t know that name. I was hoping I’d find out who we were tracking when we got here. This whole mission we’ve been chasing ghosts. And now they’re gone.”

  “You have to find them,” Lauren begged, leaning forward. “They still have my sister. She’s my only family.”

  “We will, Lauren. We will.” But his face didn’t look hopeful. “Any information you can tell us will help us find them. What were they doing to you here?”

  The hair raised on Lauren’s arms as she thought about her imprisonment. The needles. The scalpels. The treadmills. All the damn lights.

  “They… they tested us. Over and over again. My sister, she’s sick. For a long time she was getting worse. Some sort of genetic thing. We didn’t have access to a doctor. We didn’t have any money. We haven’t had any family since we were young. I think that’s maybe why they took us. They knew we were alone, and that she was sick.”

  “What did they test you for?”

  Lauren shrugged. “Anything they said in front of us, it all went over my head. They tested our endurance. I think they injected us with things like viruses. They wanted to see our limits, I guess. They were making Rachel so much worse. She was close to dying.”

  “But they changed you, didn’t they?” Agent Hogan prompted. “Is that how you were able to escape?”

  Lauren nodded, her head low.

  “It was recent. They put something in me. It… it hurt. It went under my skin. It felt like it was crawling around inside me.”

  “And you have no idea what it was?”

  Lauren shook her head. “It settled inside me after a while. And then I couldn’t get tired any more. They couldn’t make me sick. And I was strong. And…”

  She almost told them about the other part of her. The part that took over, that hurt, maybe even killed people to escape. But they didn’t seem to know about that. Her escape must’ve been cleaned up before everyone left. She held back.

  “And their meds didn’t work on me for very long. I woke up from being put under and broke out. I went into the vents and found my way to the surface.”

  Agent Hogan nodded. He clearly had a lot on his mind.

  “And when was this escape?”

  “This morning, I think? I was so overwhelmed, I just kept running and collapsed eventually. I think a night didn’t pass, though.”

  Agent Hogan leaned back, scratched his neck, and let out a deep groan.

  “Missed them by a fraction of a day. I can’t believe it. They must’ve known we were coming somehow.” He seemed to be talking more to Agent Ramsey than Lauren.

  “Or maybe Lauren’s escape spooked them, they figured the game was up sooner than later and cut their losses,” Ramsey suggested.

  “Maybe…”

  Lauren stood up and put her hands on the table to refocus the men.

  “We need to find them,” she said as firmly as possible. “Rachel is my family and she’s sick. They weren’t helping her. Let me help you find them. I have powers now.”

  Agent Hogan fixed her with a steady gaze. “Yes. Yes you do. I know you want to help, but we need to keep you safe until we understand the full extent of what they did to you.”

  Lauren was quickly growing frustrated. These men weren’t listening.

  “I don’t have a home. I don’t have anyone to go back to. I’m coming with you.”

  Agent Hogan stood from the table and adjusted his tie. “You are coming with us. But you aren’t hunting in the field. Not yet. We need to contain this situation. And quite frankly, we need to contain you. For now.”

  “Contain me?” Lauren balked at the words. “I am not going back into some facility for more testing.”

  “Not a facility. Not like here,” Hogan said. “We’re trying something new. I think you’d be a good fit for it.”