Where the Roots Begin

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

-William Ernest Henley

Her training began the next day. "We can't just drop you over there", Nikolai had said. "We don't even know where over there is. You need all the training you can get". But Alessandra suspected that was what they told themselves to feel better. "At least we train them". It made her feel sick.

She got a kind of uniform, it was mostly white and light grey, as everything here, it had a strange symbol, probably the Lab's logo, and it was, she had to admit, unbelievably comfortable. It was soft and elastic and it allowed her to move as freely as she wanted.

She decided to play along with their plans. If not, they would probably force her into it. But if she escaped, where would she go? She couldn't go back to Onixyade. And anyways, if she was sent through the portal, she may find her parents.

But she couldn't help wondering.

If there had been so many people here as they had told her, did they really train everyone? Wouldn't it be easier to just push them, drop them on the Portal?

But maybe they were closer to making it work, and they wanted to know when it did work, maybe get whoever it was they had sent to come back and let them know.

But who would come back after being kidnapped and forced to go through a Portal?

After a few days, she was taught how to roll when she fell from a high place, how to make a fire from sticks and rocks and how to see if a fruit was poisonous. So many different people taught her, she couldn't recall any names, just faces. A blond and very tall man, a frail looking woman who talked loudly, a stocky tanned man, a younger girl, and so many more. But those people were the only ones she saw, asides from Nikolai. Something else bothered her. If they said to have had so many people, why would they train them separately?

After a few days they tried to teach her how to disarm someone, how to fight, block, hide, blend. Even if they didn't tell her directly, she realized they thought the place on the other side of the Portal was no advanced civilization. She pictured a desert, a beach, a forest, maybe some abandoned town, but definitely not a place with many commodities.

She did best in hiding, since she learned with Atticus how not to call too much attention to herself, her posture, the way she walked and talked. But still while training she got punched and bitten and pinched and scratched and thrown and stabbed a lot. The first time she almost had a heart attack, when she felt the dagger going in her shoulder. She screamed her head off.

"ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL ME? IS THAT IT?"

They had calmly explained over and over they had a security system, installed in their bodies, through the chip in the back of everyone's neck. They could switch themselves into safety mode, which meant they would stop when they were about to kill someone. When they were just one step from taking a life, and only then. They could stab and cut as long as the victim wouldn't die. If they tried to stab someone -say in the heart or cut their throats- these mechanisms stopped their bodies.

"It allows us to practice more freely," Nikolai would explain. "We don't have to worry about accidently killing someone".

Great, Alessandra had thought. How fantastic.