Chapter 3 I Was No Longer a Person
Grace's Pov
An elevator.
It dropped so fast my breath caught. My ears popped painfully. Someone next to me muttered about depth levels and containment seals. The words meant nothing to me yet.
When the elevator stopped, the hood came off.
Bright white lights stabbed my eyes. I blinked slowly. We were in a wide tunnel with gray walls and thick pipes running along the ceiling. People in dark uniforms moved past us without looking. Cameras watched from every corner. Somewhere far off I heard shouting and the clang of metal on metal.
One of the men holding my arm spoke into a radio.
“PACKAGE DELIVERED. FEMALE. EIGHTEEN. PRIORITY BLOOD TYPE CONFIRMED.”
I turned my head and looked back the way we had come. The elevator doors were already closing. There was no sky. No street. No way home.
They had brought me underground.
And the doors had locked behind us.
They marched me down the tunnel without saying another word. My legs still felt weak from the drug, so I stumbled more than I walked. Every time I slowed, one of them shoved me forward.
“You sick little thing. Move forward before I strike you to death,” he commanded.
We turned into a brighter room with white walls and a long metal table. It looked like a doctor’s office that had never seen sunlight. A woman in a gray coat stood waiting with a tablet. She did not smile.
“On the table,” she said.
I stayed on my feet. “Where are my parents?”
She did not answer. The men lifted me onto the table like I was a bag of laundry. Soft straps went over my wrists and ankles. I pulled against them, but they held.
The woman wiped the inside of my elbow with a cold pad.
“Blood first.”
The needle went in. I watched the tube fill with dark red. She labeled it and set it aside like it was the most important thing in the room.
Next came the scans. A machine moved over my body from head to toe. It hummed and clicked.
Another device pressed against my finger and took a drop of blood. A third one shone a light into my eyes until tears ran down my temples.
The woman studied her tablet. Her eyebrows lifted a little.
“PRIORITY-LEVEL COMPATIBLE,” she said to the men.
“HIGHER THAN THE LAST THREE. The director will want her moved to observation immediately.”
I turned my head toward her. “Compatible with what? What are you people doing?”
She finally looked at me. Her eyes were tired, not cruel.
“That is not my department.”
They unstrapped me and pulled me off the table. My arm still bled a little where the needle had been.
No one offered a bandage.
As they walked me out, I heard the woman speaking into her radio.
“Tell Roxburgh the Sinclair girl is here. Her blood is clean. We can start the matching process tonight.”
The door closed behind us with a heavy click. The cold hallway lights washed over me, making everything feel unreal.
I slowly realized that I wasn’t a person here anymore. I was just a sample to be studied, tested, and discarded.
☾𖤓☽ ───────── ☾𖤓☽
They took me deeper.
The hallway sloped down and the lights got dimmer. The air smelled worse here, like sweat and old blood mixed with cleaning fluid. I heard voices ahead. Not the flat voices of the guards. These voices sounded tired and helpless.
A heavy door slid open. One of the men cut the plastic straps on my wrists and shoved me forward.
I stumbled into a wide open space with high concrete walls and a metal ceiling that dripped in places. It was full of people. Dozens of them. Some sat on thin mats on the floor.
Others leaned against the walls. A few paced like they could not stop moving. Most of them looked young, closer to my age than to the adults who had brought me here.
No one spoke to me at first. They just stared.
A girl with short hair and a scar across her chin looked me up and down. “New blood,” she said. Her voice was flat.
“FRESH MEAT.”
I stayed near the door even though it was already locked behind me. My arm still throbbed where they had taken the blood. I wrapped my other hand around it.
A tall boy with dark circles under his eyes walked past me without looking up. His knuckles were split open and scabbed over. Another girl sat rocking slightly, arms around her knees, whispering something under her breath that I could not make out.
I took a few steps farther in. The floor was cold even through my shoes. Someone had drawn faded numbers on the walls in marker. Counting days, maybe. Or counting people who did not come back.
No beds. No privacy. Just mats and metal toilets in the corners and cameras watching from every angle.
I found an empty spot against the wall and slid down until I was sitting. My backpack was gone. My phone was gone. Everything that had made me GRACE SINCLAIR from a normal street was gone.
A girl nearby glanced at me and then looked away quickly, like eye contact was dangerous.
I pulled my knees up to my chest and tried to make myself small.
