A/N: While this story mostly follows the books, I've blended in a few things from the movie as well. I hope you enjoy!

Katelyn Townes and her brother, Calvin, were only six. They had just been taken away from everything they'd ever known. Strange people in strange suits had come and taken them away. Katelyn remembered how sad her mother had been, but she hadn't stopped the men from taking her and Calvin away.

Katelyn did not like the new school she and Calvin were in. The grown-ups there never smiled, and no one wore anything colorful—even the dress she wore today was very bleak, all white with black buttons. She missed her mom and her older brother. She missed her cat and her friends—what little she had had in the small community she had lived in before.

But the absolute worst thing about this new place was something that Katelyn did not understand no matter how hard she tried. Nobody called her or her brother by their real names. No matter how many times she corrected them, people still called her Diana—she had never even met a Diana before in her life, and they called her brother Apollon. The only thing that seemed good about this new place was that she and Calvin were never separated, save for bedtime.

It was currently lunchtime. The cafeteria was full of kids almost all around Katelyn's age. She and Calvin stood with their metal food trays in their hands, looking around for a small, open table. They were still new here, and they had not made any friends yet.

"Are you going to stand there all day?"

Katelyn automatically slid closer to Calvin before looking at a boy who was sitting at the table closest to them. He had blonde hair and brown eyes, and he could have been one or two years older than them.

"You can sit here if you want," the boy continued with an accent.

Calvin nudged Katelyn, trying to get her to uproot herself from the spot she was standing.

"Thanks," Calvin told the boy as he and Katelyn sat down.

"I'm Daniel," the boy told them, biting into a granola bar. "'Cept they call me Newt."

"I'm Calvin."

Katelyn picked at the stem of her apple and remained silent.

"This is my sister, Katelyn," Calvin added once he noticed that Katelyn was not planning on talking to anyone but him. "We're twins."

"Let me guess," Daniel/Newt said. "I bet you're the oldest."

His statement was obviously directed towards Calvin, and this made Katelyn snap her eyes up at him. She wanted to correct him, but she kept quiet.

Calvin and the boy talked for a long time. Katelyn had finished her food long ago, and she sat as quietly as ever, occasionally looking down at her shoes and wishing she were home again.

When Calvin finally left to go ask an adult where the bathroom was, Katelyn shifted in her seat, uncomfortable with the silence but still not wanting to really say anything.

"Are you scared?"

The question was so sudden and out of the blue that Katelyn wondered at first if she had been imagining things. Looking up at the boy let her know that he did in fact ask her that.

Katelyn wanted to say, "no," but she still could not bring herself to speak to anyone but her brother, let alone lie.

She nodded slowly.

"So was I," the boy said. "It gets better. I promise."

And for the first time since she had been there, Katelyn smiled.

Eight Years Later…

"You so have a major crush on Thomas."

"I do not!"

The two girls walked down the long corridor towards their shared room.

"You do so!"

"Shut it, Diana," said one of the girls to the other that had been teasing her.

Katelyn Townes had long since given up her real name, as had most of the kids at the facility she was in. It was too hard, living with two different names. There was only one person that still called her by her real name, and that was her brother.

When the girls reached the door to their room, Diana rolled her eyes.

"Oh, come on, Jenny, you should've seen yourself at lunch today. Every time he talked to you, you looked like you were going to float off your seat."

"Whatever," Jenny said, walking into the room and sitting her book on her nightstand.

Diana fell onto the bed on the right side of the room and sighed. She pulled out a notebook and pen from under her mattress and flipped it open to a long list of at least over a hundred names. About seventy of them had a strike through them.

"Anybody new missing today?" Jenny asked.

Diana shook her head, but still looked at the notebook, eyes lingering on some of the names that had been marked through. A sadness sort of seeped into her chest, dripping onto her heart, making it ache for her lost friends like Harriet and Sonya and Nick and Newt.

"After the first group went missing, things have slowed down. Now, it's just one boy and one girl every month like clockwork," Diana said, twirling her pen in her fingers.

"Then, watcha looking for?" Jenny asked.

"Well, if I'm correct, tomorrow marks a whole month since Frankie and Alice were taken. I'm just wondering who's going to be gone tomorrow."

Jenny shrugged as she fell onto her bed, but the worry that flashed in her eyes was unmistakable.

It was quiet for a long while.

"What do you think happens to them?" Jenny finally asked.

Diana had put her notebook away and rolled to her back to stare at the white ceiling.

"I dunno. I hear rumors every now and then."

"I heard they have this machine that sucks out your brain from your ears," Jenny said.

Diana wanted to roll her eyes, but she shuddered instead.

"That makes no sense. Why would they want our brains?"

She had tried to make it sound silly, but doubt had crept into her voice. They did a lot of weird experiments on them there at WICKED.

"You finish all your puzzles on time today?" Diana asked, changing the subject.

"Almost," Jenny said. "Spent too much time on the first one. Time had run out by the time I got to the last one. What about you?"

"Yup," Diana said, "but only barely today."

"Wow, three days in a row. Good job. What about Apollon?"

"He finished before me…again," Diana said. "He's just better at this. You know he's been finishing all his puzzles on time for a whole week now?"

"Pftt, show off," Jenny said, making Diana smile a bit.

"I heard two Lab Coats talking today," Diana said, remembering the weird conversation she had overheard.

"My brother and I were in our puzzle room just waiting for them to come let us out because we'd finished. And we could hear them on the other side of the door.

"They said something about it being 'time,' whatever that means. And one of them said that I didn't seem ready but that my brother was. And then, the other one said we had to go at the same time or it'd be harder to compare the killzones or something like that—"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa! Slow down," Jenny said, and Diana stopped talking only to realize she was shaking. "What the hell is a killzone?"

"I don't know, Jenny, but it didn't sound good."

"You don't think…you don't think they'll take you like the others? Do you?"

Diana let out a shaky breath.

"I think they are," Diana said truthfully, letting the whole weight of the situation finally crash down on her.

With tears in her eyes, she turned her head to look at her friend.

"I think they're killing us."

Diana woke up on a cold metal table in a rather bright room. The last thing she remembered was laying terrified in her bed, trying to calm herself by humming the song her mother had sang to her when she was younger. She did not remember how she had gotten there.

She sat up, realizing that her clothes had been changed. She now wore tan shorts and a light blue shirt with brown hiking boots all laced up nice and tight. It looked odd on her. She had worn nothing but white and black and the occasional gray for the past eight years. This was the most color she had seen anyone here ever wear.

Her heart pounded. They had done it. She had been right about them taking her. She hopped off of the table and walked slowly towards the door. She turned the doorknob and pushed it open just a bit. There were a couple of Lab Coats just outside the door.

They seemed caught up in their own conversation. They did not appear to notice her, but surely she would need all the luck in the world to actually leave the room without them noticing her. She looked back around the room for another way out. A window, a vent, a trapdoor, anything.

She sucked in a quiet breath before silently slipping out of the room. Everything was going okay for about two seconds.

"Miss Diana," said one of the Lab Coats, a woman with a severe looking face.

Diana looked from the Lab Coats to the empty corridor on the other side of her.

"I would advise against that," said the woman again, as though reading Diana's mind.

Diana sprinted down the empty hallway anyway. She could see another corridor coming up on her right. But before she could reach it, she smacked into something like a glass wall and fell down.

She looked up, putting a hand out. It stopped, but she did not understand why. Nothing was there, nothing at all. She looked behind her. The Lab Coats were walking towards her.

Diana got back up and pushed on the invisible wall as hard as she could. And finally she saw them, talking to each other not too far down. Diana pounded on the wall with her fists.

"Thomas! Teresa!"

Her two friends looked at her. Diana panicked when she felt one of the Lab Coats grab her.

"Help me!" Diana screamed at the top of her lungs.

She felt a sharp prick on her arm, and something like ice seemed to spread through her body. Her strength weakened rather quickly, though she still tried to pound on the invisible wall.

"Help me!" she yelled again, though her voice was getting smaller. "Help—"

And as she felt herself being pulled up by her arms as she drifted away, she witnessed something terrible. Thomas and Teresa both turned away from her and started walking in the other direction.

Her mind woke up before her body did. She felt paralyzed, tried to move her arms but could not. She could not even seem to open her eyelids.

"Is the subject prepped?"

The voice seemed far away and muffled, Diana had only barely understood it.

"Yes, but we're a bit confused as to why Subject B39 is being put in Group A. Where is A39?"

"There's been a change of plan. It was a decision made by the Chancellor herself just last week. As of now, she is Subject A39; her brother will be put in Group B."

Calvin. They were talking about her brother. Diana tried harder to move, but she just could not. And she was terrified.

"But—"

"There are no objections. The Chancellor knows what's best for our experiment. This girl and her brother are but new Variables, giving us more killzone patterns to study. Besides, it has been decided that Group B is showing a bit more advancement than Group A. Apollon will be best suited for Group B, as he is more advanced than his sister. As you recall, we almost had to delay putting them in the experiment this month because of her ineptitude."

Had she not been so frightened, this would have made Diana angry. Sure, Calvin was a bit smarter than her, but she was not an idiot. How she wished she could move.

"These are important subjects in their own right. We'll be able to study the killzone area of twins, which is something we haven't done before and won't be able to do again as they're the only ones we have."

"Are we ready?"

This was a new voice.

"Yes, Chancellor."

"Well, let's get started."

Diana did not like the sound of that. She could feel her heart pounding. She could hear blood rushing in her ears. She wanted to scream, kick, cry. But she could do nothing except feel absolutely helpless. And her brother was not there to come to her rescue; no one was.

She felt tears well behind her eyelids as she thought that this must be happening to Calvin too. If her body could just wake up, maybe she could get away. Maybe she could find him.

Suddenly, Diana felt something being lowered onto her face, something like a mask. Her heart pounded faster as it emitted weird clicks and beeps. And then, she felt something like ropes or wires slithering over her face, finding their way into her ears, and she freaked out, thinking about the brain sucking machine that Jenny had heard about.

It was painful, and she wanted to cry out. She felt her left arm twitch violently at her side before falling limp again. She felt a small tear run down the side of her face. It traveled across her temple before joining one of the tubes in her ear.

And that was when it happened. Diana heard a hiss and what sounded like a kind of electrical zap. And that seemed to wake her body up. Her eyes snapped open, and she shot up into a sitting position on the table. She could register nothing but pain as she screamed into the mask and tore at the tubes in her ears.

The doctor and nurses in the room gave her a look of horror. And the Chancellor barked orders at them.

"Turn it off! Turn it off! Get her sedated!"

Diana felt something warm ooze from her left ear, and she just knew from the pain of it all that it was blood. She felt someone grab her arms, and she flailed about, kicking and hitting and scratching as much as she possibly could.

The Chancellor quickly picked up a syringe and plunged it into Diana's shoulder with a painful jab.

And before she knew it, the pain subsided, and she was drifting away once more.

"Test her vitals, and find out what the hell just happened, and ensure that it doesn't happen again. And for the love of all that's good, make sure she's still functioning and not brain dead."

"What do we do if she is?"

There was a small pause.

"Euthanize her and her brother."

Those were the last words Diana heard before blacking out completely.