The Defiant

After a beat, the door was pushed open further, and its inhabitant practically fell out of the pod before straightening up and looking around, startling when he saw me.

The newcomer was a teenage boy, about fourteen or fifteen. He was stocky and fairly short, with fair skin that looked like it rarely saw the sun. His face was round with a pointed chin and long nose.

“Who are you? Where am I?” he asked tremulously, stepping back toward his pod, away from me. Although, I could hardly blame him. Who wouldn’t back away from a complete stranger who also happened to be twitching uncontrollably?

I didn’t say anything, just shrugged.

“Seriously! What’s going on?” His hands were shaking. He saw me looking and brushed his sandy blond curly back from his face to cover the motion.

“I don’t know. I just got out of that one,” I said, pointing at the pod I’d come from, noting as I did so that my voice was high and youthful-sounding. How old was I?

“Are you—like me?” He stepped forward.

“What? A captive?” I said, rising slowly to my feet so I could look him in the eye.

“No, I mean…” he trailed off, glancing down at the floor.

“Don’t remember anything?” I asked curiously. If this boy had amnesia, too, that would mean mine was intentional. Which meant…

I shivered.

“Yeah. That. I don’t—That is, I don’t remember. Anything. Not who I am, not where I’m from, not anything.”

“Me neither,” I said, taking a step toward him. He inhaled sharply, but didn’t back away, at least. Progress.

“So, you didn’t bring me here?” He brought his right hand from behind his back and started tapping his fingers against his thigh.

“No. I don’t know why we’re here, or how we got here, or anything,” I reassured him, watching the tapping fingers, in a pattern of four. Tap tap tap tap. Tap tap tap tap.

“Or so you would have me believe.”

“What?” I asked, startled from my observation of what I had determined must be a nervous tic. If ever there was a time for one, it was now.

“I don’t know how long you’ve been here. I only have your word that you aren’t the person behind this whole thing.” He backed away again.

“That doesn’t make any sense. If I kidnapped you, why would I lock myself in here with you? What would be the point?”

“I don’t know.” He threw his hands in the air exasperatedly. “Why would you kidnap me in the first place? And why wipe my memory?”

“I wouldn’t know, because it wasn’t me,” I said vehemently, irritated.

“Whatever. I’m out of here,” he said, edging past me and walking purposefully over to the door.

“No! Don’t touch that!” I called.

“Why? Don’t want me to escape?” he said scathingly.

“No, I just don’t want you to get electrocuted, you idiot! I got zapped with that thing before you woke up. Why do you think I’m still twitching?”

He just rolled his eyes at me and pushed on the door.

I winced as it shocked him, but I didn’t feel too badly about it. After all, I had warned him. And he was being stupid, anyway. Why would I have orchestrated this whole thing and then locked myself in?

I waited until he recovered, laying flat on his back on the floor, then said, a bit smugly,

“Told you so.”

“W-w-whatever.” He sat up slowly from the floor, shaking, teeth chattering in his head.

“Now do you believe I’m not the one orchestrating this?”

He looked straight at me. I tried to appear as earnest as possible. It must have worked, because he apparently decided that I was trustworthy. He nodded.

“Good,” I said, offering him my hand. He took it and pulled himself to his feet, twitching a bit. “Do you think we should open up these pods?”

“No. We don’t know what kind of delicate machinery keeps them together. We should just wait to see if they come out on their own.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. What do you think this mosaic is?” I asked, stepping back to look at the intricate wheel on the floor.

“What’s a mos—Oh, the thing on the floor? I’m not sure. It looks almost religious, you know, like a Buddhist dharma wheel? I wonder what language that is.” He pointed to the writing along the outside of the circle. I shrugged, and bent over to read it, then gave up when I realized the letters were different from English.

I was still peering at the mosaic when the distinctive sound of another pod opening startled me. I whipped around to see a girl step from the alcove on the left side of the doors. She walked forward gracefully, long legs swishing in the same style of loose black pants the boy and I wore. She was tall, slender, and gorgeous, with a long, swishing curtain of silky black hair, warm cinnamon skin, and the face of a celebrity. I was immediately jealous of her long-lashed dark eyes, full lips, and prominent cheekbones.

“Who are you people?” she asked with a lyrical accent, narrowing her eyes at us as she crossed her arms and stuck her hip out confidently.

The boy just stood there staring, awestruck, at her, so (after a hearty eyeroll) I took it upon myself to explain the situation.

“We’re just like you. We woke up here in other pods just a few minutes before you did. We don’t know who we are or why we’re here, and I suspect that you don’t either?” She nodded in affirmation. “That’s what I thought. Clearly, for some reason we don’t know yet, somebody placed us here and wiped our memories. That’s all we know for now. Oh, and I almost forgot! Don’t touch that door, it’s electrified.”

The third arrival’s amnesia proved my theory; that our memory loss wasn’t an accident, that someone or something had wiped our brains for some unknown reason.

She nodded her head, seemingly taking in the information, then said,

“So what do we call each other, then?”

I hadn’t thought of that. I guess if there were more people in the rest of the pods, we couldn’t exactly all refer to each other as hey, you.

“We could come up with names? Or we could name ourselves after the order we woke up in? To avoid confusion, you know,” I proposed.

“Yeah, good idea,” the boy said, finally gathering his wits enough to speak.

“Okay,” I said, “That makes me One, you Two,” indicating the brown haired boy, “and you Three.”

“And there are four more?”

“If each of these is occupied, there are,” I said, indicating the pods.

“What’s with the door, again?” Three asked, walking over to it.

“When you touch it, it shocks you. Both Two and I did before you woke up,” I explained.

Three raised an eyebrow.

“Fine,” I said, frustrated. “Test it yourself. It’s all the same to me.” I was getting really tired of people not trusting me.

“I think I’m good for now,” she said, surprising me. Then she turned around and strode back in the direction of her pod.

“You’re not going back in there?” I asked, shuddering at the thought.

“No,” she said, throwing a glance over her shoulder and rolling her eyes at me, “I’m looking at my reflection. Aren’t you curious what you look like?”

Three rubbed me the wrong way, but she did have a point. I returned to the pod I’d come from. Two, who’d been staring rather vacantly in Three’s direction, followed my example after a moment, heading off to another alcove.

The darkened glass reflected well, and I examined my appearance, feeling oddly disconnected from it. I didn’t recognize a thing; not the heavy lidded, exotic-looking eyes; not the narrow cheeks and chin; not the thick, shiny dark hair falling past my shoulders. Nothing. It was a very odd feeling to look at your reflection and be looking at a stranger.

I was about seventeen, around the same general age as the other two. And, to my surprise, I found that I was quite pretty, or at least I would have been without the scar.

I touched the supple smoothness of my face, interrupted by the puckered ridge of skin like a mountain range tracing its jagged path down the right side of my face from my temple to the corner of my lips. The skin looked torn, not severed cleanly as by a scalpel. I wondered where it had possibly come from.

I was torn from my thoughts by a startled squeak from Two, who had inspecting his own appearance in a previously closed pod that was now pushed wide open.

Two stumbled back from the pod as what looked to me like a blur of orangish-red barreled out into the center of the room and whirled around.

I blinked, and a short, skinny girl was revealed, sweeping a head of fiery red curls back and forth to keep us in sight, glaring with huge green eyes.

“Who are you? Why am I here?” she demanded fiercely in an Irish accent, backing away from us and toward the door.

“Hey, Four,” Three said nonchalantly.