I sit in my cell and watch the darkness. I don't trust it. The absence of light and substance plays on my mind, and starring into the dark abyss...things emerge. Memories play out in front of me, the figures blurry and shadowed, weak colours splashing about feebly. Imagined sounds permeate the buzzing silence, shouted words, whispered secrets, endless loops of nominal conversation. And then come the terrors, the nightmares that escape the realm my unconscious mind and augment my conscious reality: bodies hanging listlessly from the ceiling; a spidery creature that clacks across the walls, it's open mouth revealing a set of sharp, glistening teeth; a twisted face that rises up from dark corners and comes screaming towards me like a phantom.

But these are just baseless fiction, summoned up from the depths of my psyche. The real horror lurks in those phantoms which could be mistaken for real, phantoms that wear the faces of my peers, my friends, my enemies, my family; in those scenarios which play out so convincingly, that when they inevitably dissolve into horror, it feels as though someone has cut away a piece of my heart with a chainsaw.

The door opens and light pours inwards, a blinding flood. A figure follows, carrying a metal chair. They don't close the door behind them, so they remain a silhouette as they clunk the chair in the centre of the room and sit down, metal screeching shrilly.

I don't need to see their face, anyway. I know who it is.

"How are you, Atara?" Garen asks, sighing.

I turn my eyes away and stare at the adjacent wall, blinking hard. I know none of this is real. But after three weeks, it feels real.

"Sick of staring at nothing, I suppose." Fake-Garen has a manila folder in his hand, which he now flips open. He stares down at it for a minute, then brings a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose. Another sigh. "Shall I tell you about my day?"

This routine is getting old.

"I was expecting to make a real breakthrough today. I woke up, and I felt it. I thought, Today is the day. Do you ever get that? When you just know?" He waves a hand when I don't respond. "All my work the last few months seemed to be reaching a natural culmination. I had – or I thought I had – all the pieces of the puzzle. I thought I had it."

He shakes his head. "I know I should be easier on myself. The duties of Commander are taxing, and made worse now that the general is breathing down my neck, wanting an update every other minute – I have you to thank for that, by the way. Then I have the goddamn anomaly division – really, the most useless and irritating unit in this compound, and so negative, I don't know why they even exist – sending me report after report about all that's wrong with the world, as if I need the reminder. And to take on this project in addition... I really shouldn't have expected such grand results so soon."

I fix a stare on the dark oval of his face.

"You're wondering what this project is I've been talking to you about all these weeks," he says. I wasn't, but I don't correct him. There's no point – he's not even really here. "I'm afraid I can't share it with you, much as I would like to. You're an excellent listener, Atara, like your mother was. Quiet." He seems to consider this a moment. "I admit, it surprised me. You were so talkative during your briefing–" Is that what we're calling it now? A briefing? "–and now, not a peep."

I close my eyes. Open them. Wait for the waking-dream to end.

"I can tell you a story about her, if you'd like."

I would not like.

"You'll enjoy it, I promise."

I won't.

But he starts the story anyway, oblivious to my internal protests. "Before she got sick, before the mission, before you were born, your mother and I were in the same Selected class. Did you know we grew up together? I don't suppose you did. We weren't by any measures friends. In fact," he says, laughing, "Carrie hated my guts. She thought I was arrogant, conceited, too ambitious for my own good. She had a point.

"But one day – and I remember this day very clearly – she came up to me in class. There was something different about her that day, a nervousness. She was the most confident person I knew, besides myself, so naturally I was intrigued." He starts laughing again. "We'd been assigned a project by our professor to be completed in pairs, and she asked me if I wanted to be her partner. I should have known then that – but I suppose I was naïve, especially when it came to her.

"Anyway, over the course of the next two weeks, we met up on a regular basis to complete it – I hardly even remember what the assignment was, now – and she was unfailingly kind. At first her kindness shocked me. I doubted its authenticity. I rolled our conversations over in my mind, searching for hints of the truth behind what had to be a façade. As the days progressed, however, and as our shared dialogue grew, the doubt began to fade. And I realised, we got along. Really well, actually. It was kind of amazing. We laughed and traded stories and completed the assignment with time to spare.

"Now, this project was a presentation. Both of us would have to present our work to the class at the two-week mark. The night before, Carrie invited me to what was supposed to be party – a small gathering of Selected who were planning on knocking back a few drinks to celebrate getting through the assessment, and to dull their nerves surrounding the next day's presentations. But when I arrived at the venue – the personal quarters of one of the Selected – I came upon an altogether very different gathering.

"For one thing, no one was drinking. For another, there were only six people in the room, Carrie and myself included, and the mood was sobering. Stupidly, I said, 'Is this an intervention?'

"And very calmly, almost coldly, Carrie got to her feet – she'd been perched on the arm of a chair – and said, 'No, Erik. This is not an intervention.'

"I should have turned on my heels right then and there and made a run for it. Instead, I remained dumbly in place, my eyes on Carrie's, trying to understand what I was missing. Then two of the boys grabbed my arms and started leading me out into the hall. They took me through USO, to a sector I had never been before. There was a small, tucked-away room, nothing more than an old, empty storage closet, and inside it was a chair."

Garen pauses, maybe for effect, maybe just remembering. "They strapped me to it while your mother watched, expressionless. Then they closed the door and left me there in that dark, quiet place, without another word. The whole thing was unbelievably well-organised, and quick, too, and I realised in my dark prison that, of course, everything – from Carrie asking me to be her partner to the moment of my imprisonment – had been planned.

"Someone came back for me the next evening – not your mother, mind you – and let me go. I'd missed the presentation, which had no doubt been their goal all along. I was at the top of the class before that stunt, and of course none of the adults believed me when I told them I'd been kidnapped. There'd been a convenient power outage that night, which meant all the hall monitors had been off. It was my word against the word of my peers, and my story sounded like an excuse.

"When I next saw Carrie, she walked right past me as if I didn't exist. And I have to tell you, that, more than anything else, more than failing the assessment, than losing my rank in the class, than being locked up for nearly 24 hours in that horrible closet, that hurt."

He pauses again, longer this time, and just when I think maybe that's it, the waking-dream over at last, he continues. "You'd be surprised how long a wound made by betrayal can linger. How much it can link people together. She bound herself to me that day in the dark, for better or for worse. And now, through her blood, we too are bound together."

Garen snaps the manila folder shut. Behind him, the light flickers, the vision collapsing. "It's going to be you and I, Atara," he says, standing, lifting his metal chair. At the door, he pauses, and adds softly, almost sadly, "For a very long time."

And then the darkness returns.

— — —

Hey everyone! Unfortunately I'm not posting a new chapter of Mortals on Inkitt this week, just due to how much work I have to do for university, but hopefully Chapter 5 will be up on Inkitt next Tuesday. 

I hope you're all enjoying the story so far :)

Shaye