Chapter one: In the Beginning, There Was Silence.

Silence is one of the most deafening sounds. There is no such thing as nothing. Even deaf people can still feel the roar of fluids in their ears and the pump of blood in their veins. The silence that she tapped into was the only thing that kept her sane, yet it threatened to unhinge her all at the same time.

Somewhere down the corridor there was a crack in the ceiling through which water leaked with its incessant plinkplinkplink. A faulty fluorescent tube fizzed to itself several turns away. Even the very, very distant hum of all that water added a voice to the supposed silence. She could hear the molecules beating against one another, drumming on the wall of the dam that stemmed their flow. If she listened hard enough, she could almost hear them singing to her. There was a soothing steadiness to their noise, like dipping your head beneath the surface of a pool. After the initial shock to the eardrums, the rumble of water seemed to take a voice of its own with cadences and intonations just like language. She often had conversations with the water in her mind, imagining it answering her in a friendly human voice. She hadn't heard too many of those in her short life but she had overheard enough television to know something of what it sounded like.

She lay there on her metal slab, staring at one of the thick chains that fixed it to the wall. Even though she was covered by a threadbare blanket, she knew that it was cold from the way the fog erupted from her nose with every breath. But she couldn't feel it. The pain in her body gave the illusion of warmth. The only good thing about the blanket – so inconsequential in its substance – was that it covered the blood.

To say that every breath hurt was a gross understatement. To say that every joint burned with a lifetime's experience of agony was almost a fantasy. The pain that she felt hadn't ever been experienced before so there were no words. All the men in the lab had toasted one another as if she was some kind of success. She'd heard them concern themselves briefly with the fact that the last two subjects had died during the process. That should have made her continuing life seem something of a miracle, should have transformed their opinion of her, but nothing had changed. She was still nothing but a piece of meat on a slab. Well, she was a lot more than a piece of meat now.

Slowly and painstakingly, she commanded her arm to move. It shuffled out from the cover of the blanket as if it was somehow disconnected from her. That was how her body felt now; disconnected. She knew that it would become empowered beyond all comprehension, but right now it didn't feel like it belonged to her. She gritted her teeth against the protestations from every fibre in her arm and eventually brought it out so that she could look at it. At least the blood had dried now so she looked less like a carcass hung in a butcher's window. Her eyes traced the sinews in her hand, the veins with their bluish tinge and the protrusions of her knuckles. They all looked the same as before. Her fingers straightened out of the fist they had formed after the procedure. Out of everything, she expected her fingers to look different – malformed, even – but they, too, looked the same as before. They were crippled by pain but on the surface they looked the same. The burnt red stains on her fingertips were the only telltale signs that something evil lurked underneath.

She had been awake through the whole thing. Many times she had hoped that she would lose consciousness and subsequently block out the agony and injustice. The previous two subjects had volunteered for this. She hadn't. She had been blackmailed, coerced into proceeding. She wondered whether they had lain on this same bunk, under the same blanket, scrutinising their wounds and had second thoughts now that it was too late. She barely had the energy to think beyond just listening to the silence. She certainly couldn't think about what had happened only a few hours ago.

The guard stationed outside her door scraped his chair against the floor and his face flashed into view at the barred window of her cell. His eyes met hers for the briefest of moments before he stepped away again, resuming his position. The tray that he had brought her with her evening rations on was sat exactly where he had left it. He'd been considerate enough to bring the cup of water to her lips to let her drink a little but that had been the extent of his kindness. They knew that she would never die of starvation anyway so uneaten food was never a worry of theirs. She couldn't die of dehydration either but at least a few sips of water kept her blood from turning to sandpaper in her veins. She hated being treated like a baby but she also hated being nothing more than an experiment.

This is what you get for trying to do the right thing, that irritating voice in her head said, rising above the din of silence to strike her good and hard. This is what you get for playing the hero. I hope it's been worth it.