193 Welcome to the Box
193 Welcome to the Box
Amelia mounted me without a word, her weight pinning my shoulders to the ruined asphalt. Her fist came down hard, once, then again, then again, each punch landing on my face with a wet, cracking sound. I didn’t raise my arms. I didn’t try to roll away. I just lay there and let it happen, my head snapping side to side as blood filled my mouth and my vision blurred.
She kept hitting me, breath ragged, knuckles splitting as her rage poured out through her fists.
Finally, she stopped.
Her arm trembled above me, frozen mid-air, her face twisted with emotions that didn’t know where to go. Anger, grief, betrayal, and love… Everything colliding at once. I spat blood onto the ground and looked up at her through swollen eyes.
“That’s not enough,” I said through broken teeth. “You know it.”
Her jaw clenched. She hit me again. Once. Twice.
Then she recoiled as if burned and staggered to her feet. “Never again,” she said hoarsely.
I coughed and laughed weakly. “There needs to be variation to the injuries you inflicted,” I reminded her. “I just killed two of your people.”
Her hands shifted, bones reshaping as talon-like claws emerged from her fingers. She slashed at me, raking lines across my torso. I sighed, caught her wrist, and guided her hand lower, forcing the wound deeper than she intended. Pain flared white-hot, and I gasped, clutching myself to keep what was inside from becoming outside.
Blood spilled from my mouth as I laughed again, softer this time. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a thought surfaced uninvited. I used to say I wasn’t a psychopath. Now, even I wasn’t sure anymore.
Frankly, we were lucky. The rest of the escort detail had run, choosing survival over heroics. That worked in our favor. Amelia apprehending me alone, after losing two of New Vanguard’s most valuable capes, made for a convincing story. Emotions affected powers. Everyone knew that. A rising star losing control and still managing to subjugate the Monster of Markend? The narrative practically wrote itself.
She helped me up gently, her touch careful now. The contrast made my chest tighten.
“You should break one of my legs,” I said. “Sell it.”
She shook her head immediately. “No.”
“So I have to do it myself, then,” I muttered, snapping the bone with biokinesis. “What else are we missing?”
“That’s not enough,” she said quietly. “I can’t be unscathed.”
“Don’t ask for more than we can afford,” I warned. “What if you pass out?”
“I’ll be fine,” she insisted. “I regenerate.”
I phased her arm and pulled it free.
Her scream ripped through the air, raw and animal. Unlike me, she didn’t have layers of powers to dull the pain. It hit her full force. She sagged, shaking, then lifted her head again, eyes glassy.
“Still not enough,” she whispered.
“Just because a healer can fix you later doesn’t mean we can get reckless,” I snapped, breath wheezing. “We’re both bleeding out here.”
She didn’t stop me. I broke the bone in her remaining arm, tore away fingers she would later grow back, and blinded one eye. Electricity crackled as I scorched her suit and skin in uneven patches. My chest burned sharply, every breath shallow and painful, like something inside me was puncturing where it didn’t belong.
“We should finish this,” I rasped. “Either of us could die before this works.”
She nodded, wrapped her arms around my waist despite the pain, and spread her hawk-like wings. With a powerful beat, she lifted us into the air, heading toward the rendezvous point where her allies would be waiting. It hadn’t been long. The road below still smoked from the fight.
As the wind tore past us, she leaned close and asked quietly, “Do you want to die that badly?”
I didn’t lie to her.
“I don’t really know,” I answered. “At the very least… it’s one of my fantasies. I guess my survival instinct is just stronger.”
The entire ordeal resolved itself messily, the kind of mess no amount of official statements could really clean up. When Amelia reached the rendezvous town with me barely conscious in her arms, the escort detail erupted into shouting and threats. The capes from Forward were the loudest, demanding my execution on the spot. Frankly, the escort had failed so catastrophically because the SRC’s intel on me was laughably outdated. After a prolonged containment effort that involved far more manpower than originally planned, reinforcements poured in from surrounding city-states. By the end of it, there was no more arguing. I was designated for immediate transfer to the Box, the black-site prison reserved for capes like me.
I felt them long before I saw them. There were more than a dozen flyer capes escorting the aircraft, their minds brushing against my psychic senses like distant lights in a fog. I was sealed inside the aircraft itself, locked within a secured null-metal box engineered for the worst-case scenarios. My legs and wrists were clamped into restraints that fed directly into machinery, and the collar around my neck pulsed steadily as it pumped null liquid into my bloodstream. A sedative flowed alongside it, a generous dose meant to knock out a normal cape.
“Don’t bother,” I muttered to myself. “That won’t work.”
The Enhancer rating shrugged off the drug easily. I could have played along and pretended to sleep, but Guesswork’s warning echoed in my mind. If I lost consciousness naturally, I’d be subjected to a procedure tied to the prison’s internal control systems. That was something I didn’t want to test blind.
Infiltrating the Box had always been a brutish plan. There were cleaner options on paper, such as posing as a guard, a technician, or even a visiting cape, but none of them held up against the Box’s evolving security protocols. The only viable entry was as a prisoner. That was why we had spent so much time researching intake procedures, restraint methods, and behavioral conditioning. This was the only door that opened all the way.
A resounding thud shook the box.
I tensed instinctively, realizing the null container had been released from the aircraft. Seconds later, another heavy impact followed as the box struck something solid. The vibrations rattled through my bones. With a mechanical hiss, the walls and ceiling began to retract, panels sliding away with clinical precision.
I blinked.
An endless desert stretched out before me, pale sand shimmering under a bleached sky. I frowned. “That’s not right,” I murmured. Heat distortion rippled in the air, bending the horizon until the light itself seemed to fold inward.
The distortion expanded slowly, deliberately, until the outline of something massive emerged. A giant black box loomed before me, impossibly smooth, swallowing light rather than reflecting it. It made the container I’d arrived in feel like a toy.
An irregular opening formed along its side as panels slid apart. From within, figures marched forward in perfect formation. They wore black-and-white uniforms, crisp and identical, their movements synchronized down to the smallest detail. At first glance, they looked human.
They weren’t.
I felt nothing from them. No minds. No emotional residue. Their bodies didn’t read as organic at all. They all shared the same face, the same dark hair, the same proportions, and their eyes gleamed with a metallic chrome sheen that caught the light unnervingly.
One of them stepped closer.
Without a word, it pressed several syringes into my neck, one after another. The fluids burned cold as they entered my system, unfamiliar compounds spreading fast.
“What are you doing?” I demanded, my voice slurring despite my resistance.
The world tilted.
The desert blurred, the black structure stretching into infinity as my thoughts slowed against my will. The last thing I registered was the sensation of falling inward, deeper than sleep.
Everything went dark.
It frankly caught me off-guard.
When I opened my eyes, I found myself suspended in a vast white space that had no discernible edges. Every limb was restrained, metal bands biting into my wrists, ankles, shoulders, and hips. My jaw was forced shut by a gag, thick and intrusive, pressing my tongue down. As awareness settled, I looked down and felt something cold twist in my gut.
My chest had been pried open.
My lungs rose and fell in the open air, slick and glistening, my heart beating steadily where it should never have been seen. Long, precise incisions ran along my torso and limbs, skin folded back to expose muscle and sinew. There was no pain, just a distant pressure and a clinical awareness of how wrong this was.
“Hm,” a voice said lightly. “You’re remarkably calm.”
I shifted my eyes toward the speaker. A man in a white lab coat stood beside me, green hair neatly combed, hands tucked casually into his pockets. He gestured toward a heart monitor nearby, its steady rhythm matching the thud I could feel in my chest.
“I admit,” he continued conversationally, “most subjects panic when they wake up like this.”
I tried to speak, to snarl, to say anything at all, but the gag reduced it to a muffled sound. The man chuckled softly.
“Oh, right. That won’t do,” he said, though he made no move to remove it. “Allow me to introduce myself. You may call me the Warden.”
He picked up a syringe from a tray and tapped it thoughtfully, watching the liquid inside swirl as he expelled a small air bubble. “Your biology is extraordinary. Truly. Even in this condition, I estimate you could survive with ninety percent of your organs removed.”
He leaned closer, eyes bright with fascination. “Of course, that would likely trigger your powers in unpredictable ways. Power psychosis is a real risk. You’d be… a terrifying existence.”
Frankly, I should have been terrified. This was far beyond anything I had expected. I had underestimated the Box, and now it was laid bare in front of me. I tested the restraints subtly, gauging tension and resistance, calculating angles and force. I could probably break free if I committed fully, heal myself just fast enough, and make a run for it. The margins were thin, but possible.
The Warden straightened. “I don’t know why you’re here,” he said casually, as if discussing the weather. “But I suggest you cooperate. I have no desire to hurt a precious subject like you.”
My Empathy brushed against him, searching for deception. There was none. His words were sincere, in the way a collector speaks fondly of a rare specimen.
He injected the syringe into my arm and watched intently. Seconds passed. Nothing happened.
“How curious,” he murmured, already reaching for another. He injected that one too, frowning as the results failed to meet his expectations.
I made a decision then. I let my body slacken and simulated sleep, my breathing evening out, my gaze unfocusing. Beneath the surface, my telepathy and empathy stayed sharp, mapping every movement, every shift in his mood. If I sensed hostility or imminent danger, I would break free without hesitation.
Time stretched.
The Warden worked alone, humming softly to himself as he moved around me. Occasionally he laughed, delighted by some new observation, or whispered notes under his breath about tissue resilience and neural response. I watched everything, committing each step to memory with my Researcher-rated instincts. Gradually, a pattern emerged. He was building something, carefully stitching it into place.
A collar.
By the time the operation ended, I was wheeled away without ceremony. When I finally felt safe enough to open my eyes again, I found myself inside a metal box. There were no doors, no windows, only thin seams between the walls where faint light leaked through. The collar sat heavy around my neck, stitched directly into my flesh, cold and invasive.
I tested my powers.
Intangibility didn’t respond. Neither did most of the others, at least not properly. Everything felt distant, muted, like trying to move through thick syrup. The collar was designed to interfere directly with power expression, and it was effective. Not perfectly so, though. My ratings were too high, my abilities too numerous. The tertiary powers slipped through the cracks, weakened but alive.
I exhaled slowly, cataloging what I still had access to. It was enough. Not much, but enough.
Carefully, I shifted my focus inward and felt along my skin, deeper than muscle and bone. My fingers brushed against something familiar, hidden where no scanner had looked.
The tarot cards were still there.
The Warden hadn’t found them.
That, at least, was something I could work with.