6 Digit Passcode (24 page)

Chapter twenty-four

I am hungry, cold, and tired by the time the Digits come to get me. I’m huddle in the corner of the bed with my head propped up on a pillow and my arms wrapped around my legs when the door swings open and two men – both armed with gun that are aimed straight at my chest – enter the room and pull me to my feet before I can even register what’s going on. They push me out the door and each grab ahold of one of my arms, with the guns in their other hands still fixed on me.

I recognize both men as having been present when Signa brought me to the upper floor lab to have my brain scanned; one is the tall, dark-haired Digit who did most of the talking, and the other is the man who spent the first half of my visit sitting behind a computer screen. The second man has shaggy brown hair and a permanent scowl set into his jaw, and his gun is pressed uncomfortably hard against my shoulder.

“You’re probably thinking about running away, aren’t you?” he asks, his voice higher in pitch than I’d imagined. I don’t answer. “It would be pointless, you know. We can use your DNA whether you’re dead or alive, so we have no reason not to shoot you the second you make a break for it. There will be a lot less pain involved if you just come quietly, and I know just where to aim to make it hurt the worst.”

He pokes his gun harder into my arm, and I flinch. My body already aches enough without the extra bruises he’s pushing onto my skin.

“Shut up, Tetra,” the dark-haired Digit says to his companion. “Don’t forget why we’re here.”

“Yes, of course, Sir,” Tetra mumbles, clearly put-out by his reprimand. I wonder why all of the Digits keep calling the dark-haired man ‘Sir;’ is that his name, or is he their leader? He doesn’t look strict enough to be in control of such a large group of people, but that could just be the way his face was made – maybe whoever created him wanted to make him look sympathetic. If I didn’t know how cruel Tesla is, I would probably be inclined to think that she has some kindness in her, too, but I know her better than that.

The two Digits lead me down the hallway, pulling me along almost as roughly as Signa had just yesterday. I expect them to take me to the lab room I was brought to before, but we pass by the closed double-doors without stopping.

We turn down another long hall, with just a few rooms spaced far apart on either side. I peer through the windows as we pass, but I see nothing but empty beds and dressers; in one of the rooms, though, I think I hear the muffled sound of crying, but the dark-haired Digit, Sir, pinches my arm hard enough to make me wince, and I forget about the sound until I can’t hear it anymore.

There is a single iron door at the very end of the hallway, with no windows but two bolted locks and a barred handle. Sir lets go of my arm for just long enough to open the door, but keeps his gun pointed at me from behind his back the entire time; after he unlocks it, he slides the door sideways into the wall, generating a high screeching noise that makes my ears hurt. He grabs my arm again and pulls me into the room, and I don’t even fight him. What’s the point?

Inside, the room looks like a combination of a doctor’s office and a factory. There is a huge metal table in the center, with a very familiar-looking circle etched into the floor underneath it. What looks kind of like an assembly line is spread out along three of the room’s walls, with metal parts and circuitry displayed at random intervals along it; I don’t recognize what most of them are, but I see a couple of things that look suspiciously like mechanical body parts. A tray of tools is set up on either side of the table, and a large light fixture on the ceiling casts a dim, eerie glow over the entire room.

“Lay down on the table,” Sir tells me, holding his gun up higher until it’s at eye-level with me. I do as he says, noticing as I pull myself up on the table that there are straps on either side, both in the middle and towards the bottom. I take as much time as possible to get myself settled, though I’m certain that I am just delaying the inevitable; the press of cold metal against my skin makes me shiver, and the table is so flat and rigid that lying on it feels almost painful.

Sir slams one of my shoulders down with his free hand and holds me down like he expects me to try to get up and leave. I have no intention of trying to escape, even though I want to more than anything. If I knew that the Digits would shoot me down and kill me if I attempted to run away, I wouldn’t even hesitate, but I know by now that they want me alive – at least, until they’re finished with me. If I try to run, they will just capture me and push me back down on the table again, so it’s pointless for me to even think about it.

While Sir keeps both his gun and his eyes locked on me, Tetra circles around the table, using the straps to tie me down at my wrists and my ankles; he pulls the bindings just tight enough to dig into my skin painfully, but not so tight that I lose circulation in my hands or my feet. I struggle with them for a moment, hoping that I can loosen them enough to let me escape if the chance presents itself to me, but the straps are thick and heavy and do not budge.

“Tetra, would you like to do the honors?”

“Yes, Sir,” Tetra says, beaming like he’s just won an award. “I would be delighted to.”

He rummages for something on the raised tray nearest to him and holds up a syringe with a small vial of murky white liquid inside of it. His hand disappears from my line of sight, and I feel a slight pinch in the side of my neck as the needle breaks through my skin and whatever medicine is inside of it filters into my bloodstream. I can actually
feel
it tingling under my skin as it runs through my body, and after a few moments the stinging is replaced by numbness. Every fiber of my body feels weightless and empty; I curl my toes, pull hard on the restraints around my wrists, and even bite at the inside of my lip, but I feel nothing.

Is this what it’s like to be a Digit? To not only feel no pain, but to feel nothing at all?

I also begin feeling tired, but not enough that I can’t force myself to stay awake. My eyelids are heavy and I close them halfway, but I don’t let myself fall asleep. I’m too afraid of what I will wake up to.

“You’re a fighter, kid, I’ll give you that,” Tetra says with a throaty laugh as he watches me tug at the straps futilely. “But then, I expect as much from a Section One recruit. You’re almost more trouble than you’re worth.”

“You know,” Sir cuts in; “We’re not here to hurt you. I know it’s hard for you to understand right now, but we’re
helping
you. We’re replacing all of the aspects of you that are flawed.”

“You mean, everything that makes me
human
,” I spit out, unable to hold my tongue any longer. If the anger I feel inside could somehow be converted into physical strength, I would be able to rip my restraints clean off of the table and mow down every Digit in the way of my escape. But I try once again, and the bindings still don’t budge.

“No, everything that makes you
weak
,” Tetra says sharply. “We were human once too, you know, and we try not to lose sight of that. Part of us is still human, actually.”

His words echo in my head; that means I was right. Dori
is
still alive, technically. The Digits aren’t entirely made of machinery, though for how little empathy they have, they might as well be.

They are human, just like me -
part
human. “Which part?”

“The Central Nervous System. Well, bits and pieces of it. The brain, mostly.”

“So you things can
feel
?”

Tetra throws his hand over his chest and puts on an indignant expression, but his tight, rounded features twist it into more of a half-lipped smirk.

“Of course we can! We are human, after all. Mind you, we can’t feel
pain
, and our emotional range is quite limited, but we
are
capable of experiencing feelings, just the same as you.”

I glance quickly between the blade in his hand and the straps tied to my wrists. “And what are you feeling right now?”

“Me? Oh, nothing at all!” He twirls the knife between his fingers, catching the sharp edge on his palm and drawing small tears along the skin. He doesn’t bleed, and he hardly even seems to notice what he’s doing. “We can switch our emotions on and off as we please; I’ve got mine turned off right now. Would you like me to turn them back on?”

“Would it make you any less likely to kill me if you did?”

“Hmm,” he hums, pressing an index finger to his lips and rolling his eyes. “No, probably not. Sorry.”

“
Tetra
,” Sir growls, frowning at him. “You’re wasting time. We have other recruits to work on. Continue, or I will.”

“Yes, Sir,” Tetra says, ducking his head. He stops playing with the scalpel and instead grips the handle of it between his fingers and lowers it down towards my throat.

My heart beats louder and faster the closer the knife gets to my skin. My fear has nearly tripled since I found out what they intend to do to me; I would have accepted death, as long as it was quick and relatively painless, and I know that there is nothing I can do to stop them from replacing me with a robotic killer that has my face. But to think of them taking my brain – with my memories and my feelings and everything else that makes me who I am inside of it – and altering it until I’m nothing more than a heartless monster like Dori…

I don’t have a lot of experience with technology, so I can’t even begin to fathom how the Digits transfer a human’s brain into one of their mechanical bodies, but I believe them when they say that they can do it.

I was put into Section One because I resisted them – because I had the will to survive that Dori and Holden once had. They must have been using the simulations as a way to break our minds, to take away every bit of resistance and turn us into the fearless war machines they brought us here to become. I don’t know what the Digits do to the people put in Section Two, but whatever it is, it destroys everything inside of them that makes them human.

I can’t even imagine how much pain Dori must have been in, and I didn’t even search for him. His mind was
broken
until he couldn’t feel a thing, and I didn’t even
try
to help him.

A weight drops into the pit of my stomach, filled with guilt, dread, and sadness. Tetra’s scalpel touches down on my collarbone and presses into my skin; I gasp and squeeze my eyes shut against the pain. The knife sinks further until I can feel it running along my bones, carving out an arch from one shoulder to the other. The medication they injected into my neck is numbing the pain considerably, but it still stings, and I can feel the knife dipping up and down in my flesh like a saw. For a second, I think about how terrible my body will feel once the medicine wears off, but then I remember that I won’t be feeling anything at all by then.

I think I might be crying, because when I blink my lashes blur water in front of my vision, but I can’t feel any tears on my face. Craning my head, I lift my upper body as far up as the restraints and my captors will allow; I can’t see any of my injuries from this angle, but there is so much blood in my field of vision that my skin looks more red than brown. I hear small
plopping
noises on the floor, and with a sickening twist in my stomach I realize that I am hearing my own blood dripping off of the table.

Tetra pauses for a moment, setting his scalpel back in its place on the raised tray and sifting through the rest of the tools. Each time Tetra turns his back to me, Sir presses his gun hard against my shoulder and fixes me with a glare. Does he honestly think I’d try to escape
now
? I’m outnumbered, sedated, injured and bleeding, and trapped in a building inside of a massive wall that I have no way of getting through. Even if Sir didn’t have his gun trained on me, I still wouldn’t attempt something I know would end in failure.

The medicine must have reached its full effect, because I can’t feel the pain in my chest at all anymore. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing, though.

When Tetra turns his body back towards me, he’s holding a long, narrow knife in one hand and a pair of surgical clamps in the other. I wonder what he’s going to be using them for, but then I immediately regret thinking about it; each scenario I come up with in my head is more creative and horrific than the last.

I can see – but not feel – the blade touching the space between my collarbones. Tetra holds the clamps on one side of my neck and the knife vertically in the middle. I realize that he intends to slit my throat – that I am going to die in a matter of minutes. Seconds, even.