-
13 – Running from the Mask
Curt stared at the ceiling, his bloody hand cradled in his lap. At least here he could breathe properly – it was always so hard to breathe in the Agency. Anywhere outside of those four walls still seemed…safer. The first months had been the worst – expecting Petersen to appear at any moment and finally finish the job. To kill him one more time without calling on Agency medical technology to bring him back from the brink. As time went on though, the odds of that happening anywhere outside of his nightmares dropped further and further. A tiny bit of safety, even if he only had the words of an…
-
11 – Cruel World
He couldn’t breathe. Every breath felt mechanical. Felt artificial. Felt unreal. Curt stared at the footpath, at the dirt, at the worn patches in the concrete, touched by thousands or millions of shoes, and did his best not to think. And as much as he tried to clear his mind, every breath brought screaming static. Every breath brought up memories, made assumptions and inferences about what would happen to a recruit in the hands of a sadistic Solstice. There was a scream in his chest, and he wished it would crush his heart. He squeezed the Genie phone in his hand and watched his knuckles go white. Every second counted.…
-
09 – Expanding Vocabulary
If there was one kind of person Curt hated more than agents, it was people who said that “everything happened for a reason”. People who stuck by that platitude when some minor inconvenience, but who could only gawp like a dying fish when you asked about something awful.Reasons seemed to vanish if you brought up childhood cancer, family members dying, people abusing animals or the utter inhumanity that humans were capable of. Things didn’t happen for a reason. Things just happened. Petersen had insisted on one condition. One test that would determine whether or not he would be allowed to be a recruit. Petersen had dragged him into Fairyland and…