My earliest memories were of cold and eternal darkness. I'm Meriwa, but that wasn't what I was always called. When I was a kid, I was simply called 30B. Why was my name not a name, you ask? Why was it number and a letter?

Because they didn't want us to know who we were. Our identities didn't matter because we didn't even matter to ourselves. We only existed to serve the collective good of humanity. My genetic brothers, sisters, and I were created and reared at a remote research and development center in the Arctic. Imhullu was a top-secret facility named for the weapon Babylonian god Marduk used to kill the goddess of creation and chaos Tiamat. Brought into being by the government's Imhullu Project, we were bred to be weapons.

What kind of childhood do you think I had then?

Answer: Hell. That's what it was. My childhood was hell.

Imhullu was, according to the creation myth Enûma Eliš a spear of wind comprised of "the atrocious wind, the tempest, the whirlwind, the hurricane, the wind of four and the wind of seven, the tumid wind worst." When I was a kid, the trainers at the facility forced us children to read the myth and memorize passages. After about the first three years of my life, I could recite every line of the myth by heart. I knew Tiamat and Imhullu and Marduk, but I didn't know me.

This was the only story that mattered in my mind back then.

In the time before creation, the wicked goddess Tiamat created legions of monsters under the command of her consort Quingu. She made these monsters so that they could fight to avenge the death of her husband, the god Apsu, who was murdered by the other gods. With the magical weapono Imhullu, Marduk defeated the goddess by splitting her open, crushing her skull, and stabbing her repeatedly. He then dismembered her body and used her blood and guts and sinew and bones to create the world while binding her eleven monsters to himself. Upon killing the goddess, Marduk then acquired the Tablets of Destiny. These gave him the authority to rule the universe. After the killings of both Tiamat and Quingu, Marduk then created the first human, Lullu, whose job it was to keep the gods at bay.

Now I realize how fucked up it was that this was my bedtime story. So, at this point, you might be wondering why they shoved this story down our throats like they did.

That's because we engineered children, called Hunters, had a purpose. The Imhullu Project wanted us to know that we were neither Marduk, the divine savior of the world and creator of humanity, nor Lullu, the human savior. We were simply Imhullu, the weapon used to defeat Tiamat and her monsters.

We weren't people. We were objects. We had a very important role to play in this myth, but we were also items, tools employed to fight the darkness. Defective and useless objects are always cast aside. In the battle against Tiamat's monsters, faulty weapons would result in Marduk's death, and then evil and chaos would be free to reign over the earth. So, defective children were cast aside. In the eyes of the Imhullu Project, they weren't defective children. They were broken weapons. I saw siblings murdered and carted away when they failed. I couldn't fail, but I almost did...

Anyway, this brings me the most important part of my introduction here. 

Monsters are real. 

For centuries, humanity has fought them in secret. In the case of the United States, the government has surreptitiously funneled money into researching and combating the terrors of the night; lycanthropes, demons, warlocks, all of the goddess Tiamat's original eleven species are real. Very few American citizens know that their tax dollars really go to fighting these horrible beasts, and while people are busy making up myths about places like Area 51, the real shit is going down above the Arctic Circle.

All this is why I was made. I was a Hunter.

We kids at Imhullu were genetically engineered using bits of human and sometimes monster DNA then trained from the time we could walk to fight these unholy creatures. The Imhullu Project made us to be humanity's last defense against the darkness. We weren't born. We were grown in artificial wombs. You don't give birth a weapon. You essentially think it into existence. We were given no names, only numbers representing our place in the production sequence with a letter corresponding to our genetic model.

It's remarkable then that in this horrible space, I was still able to make memories. My first recollection is indistinct and amorphos enought that I sometimes wonder if it was real or if I imagined it. 

But... I know it's real because my brother is real.

In my memory, I was about four years old. In the barren recreation room of the facility, I had found a fuzzy moth. I remember being confused about how the creature could've survived here, in this cold and desolate place as I had cradled it in my chubby little hands and felt it squirm while it tried to escape through a gap in my fingers. When I cracked my cupped palms to peek at the insect, an older boy spotted my new friend. The older child then stalked over to me then slapped my hands, causing my little moth to drop to the ground.

"You're too old for shit like that," he told me before stomping heavily on the bug, spreading moth guts all over the industrial tile floor.

The smear of animal flesh on the ground had made my stomach turn. Then, I began to cry.

One of the adult attendants who'd been monitoring the exchange approached. "30B," he'd said sternly, voice ladened with warning, "stop the crying." 

Even remembering it now, that voice sends chills through me. It frightens me because it makes me want to cry even now, and at the time, I'd forgotten that we weren't supposed to cry.

Following what the attendant had said, I tried reign in my tears, but I couldn't stop. I was sad. My heart hurt, and my childish bawling only intensified because I knew with every part of my being that the insect hadn't deserved to die. It had done nothing wrong. Its only mistake was somehow surviving in this frigid, heartless place.

"Mutant scum." The attendant had muttered under his breath.

The guttural utterance was the only worning I had before the pissed-off and hulking figure then moved over to me, casually picking a piece of fluff off his ugly olive colored uniform as he did so. When I just continued to cry, wiping my eyes as if that would stem the flow of tears, he only grew angrier. Then, when the man reached me, he slapped me hard across the face, leaving a large welt on my cheek. I still can feel the sting sometimes. Sometimes I'll wake up and remember the pain of my childhood and cry for a bit before I realize that I'm not there anymore. 

At the time, I had sucked up my tears as best I could, focusing on the stinging of my cheek instead of my sadness to keep myself from making my abuser any angrier. Seeing that I had been punished for my sorrow, the older child who had caused all this grief by killing my moth grinned darkly then retook his place among the older kids. Oddly enough, I remember exactly what the older children were doing when he rejoined them. They were huddled around a chessboard intently observing a match between two other kids. No one except me and the bully had seemed to care about the exchange that had just occurred.

But then I'd realized that wasn't entirely true.

Unconsciously, I had noticed another boy observing this entire interaction silently from a quiet corner of the room. After the moth killer went back to his place, the silent boy walked over to him and cleared his throat to get his attention. When the killer turned around to face the other figure, the quiet kid from the corner balled his fist and hit the moth murderer squarely in the nose with a practiced right hook.

Nose now bloodied, the killer tried to return the blow but was easily blocked by his assailant who delivered a swift crescent kick to his head. It was a kick no ten-year-old should be able to execute so perfectly. I know that now. Learning to be normal has taught me that kids shouldn't know how to fight like that, and the eerie efficiency of the quiet child's kick led the killer to drop to the floor unconscious. The attendant, who had watched the fight with mild interest, then went over, collected the unconscious child, and carried him to the infirmary. 

The quiet kid from the corner would not be punished for attacking the moth murderer.

At Imhullu, fighting was encouraged among the children. We learned about the brutality of the world from a young age because the monsters we were destined to fight would be even more violent.

When all was said and done, the kid from the corner came over to where I sat with my back resting against the wall. Wordlessly, he slid down the wall to rest next to me. I recall sniffing and then wiping my eyes on my sleves so that I could better look at him through my tear-stained gaze. The quiet boy said nothing, and he didn't touch me or even make eye contact. After several long moments streched on, the silent boy reached into his pocket then pulled something out. The sight of his balled fist made me flinch until he unclenched his grasp to reveal what he held. There, resting on the flattened palm of the child who'd gotten revenge for the moth was a paper crane. I stared in wonder at the creation, fascinated about how paper could be made to look like that. Then, when he didn't move, I cautiously took the crane from his hand, feeling the roughness of the paper as I inspected the thing, eyes flicking from the crane to the boy's beautiful green eyes. All us children at the facility knew of each other. We spent every waking moment with one another except for when they'd cart us away for medical checks when doctors would poke and prod our bodies with frightening detachment and efficiency. 

But, that day I did more than know someone. I'd seen the quiet boy before then, but that was the day I truly met my brother 08A. My real brother. The one who I'd always love. The one who'd save me. 

The one who I abandoned.