The three of them sat on the chairs near the door, and Darius kept his head bowed. Doctor Andrews was standing in front of him, with his two assistants (Darius had dubbed them Nurse Bashful and Nurse Timid) bustling about the room, filing papers and messing with the data on different machines.

This room was only comforting to him, with its vague familiarity with every other clinic he had ever been in. Especially the ones his mom had worked in.

"Well..." Doctor Adams seemed to be done inspecting the clipboard he was holding, and he passed it off to one of the nurses. (Nurse Bashful, perhaps? Darius couldn't differentiate between them yet.) He cleared his throat, and Darius looked away, attempting to feign disinterest. "It seems as if all of you are cleared. No health concerns between the three of you, but you—" he cut off to point at Kennedy. "Could stand to eat a bit more. I'll talk with the kitchen about adjusting your caloric intake."

A quick glance at the girl revealed Kennedy and her ducked head, no doubt with embarrassing flaring across her cheeks.

Their guard took a step forward, and the foctir stiffened slightly, before leaning in to hear what the guard had to say. "Ah, I see." He tapped his clipboard against his leg once, twice. "Well, they're all cleared for that, if you would like to take them there."

The nurses both came back and showed Dactor Adams something, and then their guard, who nodded. "Field trip," he said, motioning for them to get up. "Todsy we'll learn about gravity."

He Lee them through the door and out into the long winding hallway that took up the back portion of the building, before they ended up in the main hanger areaa. Darius stopped dead in his tracks, and Kennedy ran into him from behind, the two of them grabbing onto each other in an attempt to stay upright.

"Is that a..." Darius squinted at the shape not too far away from them, the feeling oh-so familiar. "A carnival ride?"

Kennedy stepped away, her eyebrows knit together. "Is rhat a gravity machine?" She still had her hand holding onto his shoulder, and Darius' gaze flicked down to it, then back to the contraption. "You have to be kidding me," she said. "This has to be a joke, right?"

Ash stepped yp beside them. "I mean I guess it makes sense," she said, folding her arms and leaning back slightly to inspecting it. "When we go into space there will be a lot of g-forces we'll be dealing with, so I guess this is a way of training us." She glances over at their guard. "Will we also have low-grav situations to train in as well? I mean, that seems the most logical course of action."

Their guard didn't answer her question. "How 'bout you lot just get over there and find it all out for yourselves. We have technicians there to help you get set up for the simulation."

They did, in fact, have technicians there, as well as machines with wires hanging around them like vines in a jungle. Small, squishing feeling pads were placed on his chest and arms, with a central one on his forehead. Ash and Kennedy were already in there by the time Darius got led in, hooked up to machines and instruments on the walls. Darius got hooked up as well, and the technician in front of him finally spoke, the voice deeper than he had expected it to be. "When you get acclimated to the environment in here, please begin trying to move around the room. The monitoring equipment will document everything, but we need a baseline for further comparison.

The technicians left the room, the door closing with a clunk, the noise bringing some finality to the situation. And then they waited. In long, awkward silence. Finally, Kennedy burst forth into speech. "Oh my word! I'm so sick of not talking, you guys. Like, honestly theu expect us to be quiet all the time and I honestly cannot handle it. Do you think there's any chance of or getting out out jere?"

Darius's lips twitched. "I don't know, this place seems pretty harmless and chill."

Both Ash and Kennedy shot glares at Jim. "Please tell me you're joking."

He was, in fact, joking. But it wasn't like he was planning on telling them that. Darius was saved from having to come up with any response by the contraption letting out a series of clicks, before it started into motion.

It was slow at first, and the clicking which had seemed so out of lilacs when ut started quickly began to shift into the background. Kennedy took this as an opportunity to keep talking. "This makes me think of when I was s kid, and my friends and I would lock hands and spin with out backpacks on, and then they would feel like they would fly away from our backs. We used to do that all the time when I was a kid."

There was a low beep, and the room shifted, picking up speed. Pressure starting to build against his chest. "Is it just me, or is this starting to hurt?" Darius squirmed, and the mechine Jr sss hooked up to chirped.

"I don't think it's that bad," Ash replied, but there was a slight strain to her voice.

"I dint think these are supposed to be situations we'll be moving around in." Darius tried to lift his arm, but he could only bold his hand our for a few seconds before it crumpled back to his side."

He attempted to roll out his shoulder (not successful) but when he looked up again, Ash was not trapped against the wall like he was, but pushing her whole body away, a fierce look on her face.

Darius groaned to himself and made an attempt to copy her actions. They hadn't even been here for a day, yet Ash always seems to know the right thing to do in any situation. When to salute, when to be submissive, yet that glint of rebellion, that little bit of subtle defiance always seemed to show in her eyes.

It seemed, the longer he felt the pressure, the gentler it would become, and he this time when he attempted to push himself away from the wall, it worked.

Ash was now walking on the wall, each step bringing her closer to Kennedy, who had jer faced scrunched up, eyes shut tightly. "Hey!" Ash called, barely paces away. "It's time to wake up and get to action!"

Kennedy shook her head, her lips flattening into a line. Ash sighed and shot a look toward Darius, who was now able to fully sit up. He shrugged in response, then focused back on his own efforts. If he could just get enough momentum when he pushed up, he might be a to reach a crouched position. From there, he could make his way into the middle, where what seemed to be a desk was set up. Maybe this was like an escape room! Maybe the only way for them to shut off the spinning gravity was to solve whatever was in the middle of the room.

A look up told him Ash had had the same idea, and was already making her way into the center, her arms spread out wide as if to catch herself, her knees bending as she moved from wall to floor.

Darius managed to make it on his hands and knees. Every inch seemed like a battle, but finally he made it to the middle with Ash, both of them panting and gripping to the table so as to remain upright. Kennedy was still plastered on the wall.

Darius saw the challenge on the surface and cursed.

"It's math," Ash hissed, sounding as displeased as Darius felt. "Of course it had to be math."

This, however, seemed to perk Kennedy up. She made the slightest of efforts to sit up. "Math?" She chirped, suddenly interested.

"Yeah!" Ash called back, almost stumbling for a moment. "I'm not even going to bother reading it to you, I'd get something wrong." Her foot slipped again, and Darius lunged to catch her, the two of them falling back before Ash managed to grab the desk, hauling Darius back up to stand beside her. "You need to come over here yourself to help us!"

A loud trill echoed in the space, followed by a series of clicks, and the inertia on Darius grew. He slid from Ash's grip and hit the railing with a thud, forcing all the air out of his lungs. "Ow," he groaned reaching up to feel an already forming bump on the back of his head. "Double ow."

Kennedy let out a low whine, and then she was pushing away from the wall, her legs kicking her out. Her fingers slipped through Ash's outstretched hand, her feet hitting the railing, and just before she fell backwards again, Ash grabbed her. The two girls were groaning as Ash struggled to pull Kennedy in, but they did it, and Ash told Kennedy to tuck her legs in front of the desk legs, the pressure pinning her into place.

Darius wrinkled his nose. Of course Ash hadn't shown him that. Whatever. 

Kennedy was muttering to herself now, fingers flying across the touchscreen on the desk, occasionally asking Ash to repeat numbers back to her. Then there was a loud buzzing, and she must have put in the correct answer, because suddenly, the spinning stopped.

Ash and Kennedy both hit the floor, dropping like sacks of potatoes. They groaned simultaneously, Kennedy curling up into the fetal position and Ash splaying out on the ground. The door to the contraption opened, light spilling into the space, eliciting a pained noise from Darius as the brightness cut into his vision. He lifted one arm to shield himself from it, barely catching the hazy shape of a person entering the room.

Ash managed to push herself up off the floor, and though Darius couldn't see her face with her back to him, he could hear the tiredness that had seeped into her voice. "Did we do well?"

The technician's voice seemed just as tired, through his was also tinted with dark shades of annoyance. "You broke the wires."

○○○

Between the medical examinations and their "gravity simulation", the three teens had spent their morning away, and were seating back at their dining table, alone in a sea of other tables exactly like it. No one heard or seen anything about Carter since he was taken away. It they hadn't gone through all the trouble of kidnapping them, Darius suspected they would have just shot Carter right then and there.

But for all of Lieutenant Dafferny's speech on them being expendable, Darius had a feeling they were desperate to keep them, frantic to make this work. It made him wonder if they had even been the first to be "picked up" for this mission, or if they were only the latest in a series of failed attempts.

It wouldn't surprise him if they were. The amount of unsolved runaway or abduction cases had been steadily growing over the years, and any one of those missing kids could have been brought to this hangar, could have had to go through all this training and these same experiences, only for it to all go wrong.

Maybe they did shoot Carter, just away from the group.

The thought of it made Darius feel strange inside. He didn't exactly have a reason to feel fondly for the dude, and yet, he didn't want any harm to come to him either. He hoped he was OK.

Today's meal seemed to be some sort of sad lasagna, like it had just crawled out of the worst school cafeteria in the world. Darius poked at it with his fork, not sure if it was worth the risk. Kennedy hadn't even touched her plate, simply staring off into space, her fingers drumming on the table top. Ash was digging in, stopping every to often to wash it down with the orange drinl they had provided.

She took to this too well...

It didn't seem right.