Chương 63: Audit

It was as though the world left me in stasis for four days. Just sitting in stagnant waters to rot while the Earth turned. Attempts at comfort and warmth were temporary and fleeting, like little glints of light on the horizon that could never be in focus. The only thing in focus was that red stain on my hand. The blood never even touched my skin. I was in my costume. That costume was being heavily cleaned and I wouldn't be touching it for a long time, apparently. So there shouldn't be any red stain on my hand.

So why could I see it? Why could I see the crimson trickling between my knuckles, dipping between the little gaps and veins in my hand? If there was an answer, no one wanted to tell me it, and I didn't want to ask. I was too scared of what the real answer might have been. The only leftover of the costume was my mask. They let me keep it for some reason. So that's all I could really examine without noticing the blood on my hand. I hated the fucking thing. If I didn't listen to it, I wouldn't have taken that life.

For some reason I decided to trust its temptation to be a hero. As though I was allowed to be something like that. If the world wanted to make a hero out of me, I would've been born with a cape on my back. My gaze pored over every detail. The little scuffs and marks from the two battles it was put to the test in. It was all cosmetic, even the lenses seemed fine. The little aesthetic touches that were added, I recall them being called laurels or something similar, hanging off of the sides were similarly unharmed.

Did they waste Dumb Metal on those too? Didn't matter. What did matter was that no matter how hard I looked at it, I couldn't hear the thing again. That compulsion. The one that put me into the fight with Technofiend. A familiar voice rang out over my earpiece, which I had neglected to take out.

"Leo, it's time we get you to your appointment." Tancred. Clenching the mask in my grip, I wordlessly made my way out of my room and towards the common area, where I found both Tancred and Sam. Tancred was carrying a brown paper bag, which he tossed to me before he even bothered to greet me. As I caught it, I noticed Sam was carrying a grey briefcase of some kind. Wasn't sure what for.

"Two granola bars that both sit at about eight hundred calories each, two gummies packed with about two thousand percent your daily value in Vitamin C, and a bottle of water. The gummies and water are so the granola bars don't grind up your insides. You're gonna finish that entire bag on the way."

"W-why would I-" I stuttered out, realizing I hadn't spoken a word since I left that clinic. My throat had already forgotten speech from just that short stint. It was raw and tender and sore.

"Because you've been holed up in your room for four days and no one's seen you come out and eat. I get you're probably used to not eating because you lived like a raccoon for a while, but I'm legally obligated to make sure you don't starve to death." Sam piped up.

"There's honey filling in them. You'll like them, I promise!" Her face didn't match her voice. The smile wasn't... I wasn't sure what the best word was for it. Almost like a receptionist at a hotel who was solemnly told she needed to have a meeting with her manager in twenty minutes with no explanation for why. Almost a looming dread. You'd think she was the one who killed a guy.

The filling wasn't exactly my concern, but I just held onto the bag and my mask, feeling like some kid getting ready for a Halloween party. That's how they all looked back then, anyway. Wasn't something I really got to do much of. I just gave a nod to move us along, and Tancred led the two of us out to the van. Billy was sitting on the van's hood, and when he saw us he scrambled off and climbed in while we piled into the back.

"To the place," Tancred decreed. Billy laughed.

"You don't gotta be so cryptic about it, we're just going to a warehouse."

"Yeah but we're not using it for fucking storage, Billy. It's not a house for wares, is it?"

"Well, we're using the office as a bunker but we don't call the office a bunker, right? We just call it the base and the office." The agent groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose. Without another word, we drove off. I had no idea of the time, so all I could do was force some semblance of an appetite. It wasn't that I wasn't hungry, it's that nothing could satiate the hunger that always sat with me. Food never did it, so I didn't care to eat it much.

The granola bars were fine, saccharine with that honey taste that seemed to soothe the soreness of my throat. The gummies were little flavorless pods, almost snotty in texture, which repulsed me. The water was the easiest thing to down, I simply chugged it all down at once, punctuating the drinking with a heaving cough.

"You really shouldn't be chugging water like that," Sam warned lightly, as though her words were leading her feet into a bear trap. I shook my head.

"Not carrying all this to wherever we're going," I explained in the same motions as pounding my chest to clear my airway and esophagus of whatever stowaways remained. The remaining waste was balled up, becoming the subject of my restless fidgeting for the ensuing ten, maybe fifteen minutes before we arrived. There were attempts by the others at conversation, mostly from Billy and Sam, but they kept falling flat. Neither Tancred or I had any interest in talking. Worried me that I could share a sentiment with him.

We finally arrived at the location, and upon stepping out it was confirmed to me that we were in fact at a warehouse. Tancred finally spoke for the first time since that snipe at Billy.

"Welcome Super Commission testing center 4089." This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. High number.

"There's that many testing centers like that?"

"Huh? No. It's a Seal Team Six kind of thing. Use a bullshit number to hide the actual total." Whatever shrivelled remains of a personality were trying to claw their way out of my throat.

"So. Only a few. One's just conveniently in Charlottesville."

"Well, no, there's still quite a few."" So there's many."

"Just not that many, smart-ass. I don't have the exact number, it's not relevant to you. Now quit hair-splitting." In my peripheral I could see Sam tensing up, her hand tightening around the handle of the large briefcase she was holding. Really shouldn't be subjecting her to this.

"Fine," I conceded. He nodded, leading us in. The warehouse itself was pretty organized inside, and it in fact wasn't for storage like Tancred declared earlier. Instead one corner had its own room segregated from the rest of the interior, made of solid concrete. From the angle I was standing at, the walls seemed as thick as I was tall. Leaning further to the side, I could see a large window on one side, revealing a sterile-looking room with a grid-like pattern.

Outside that room, next to the window, were multiple tables — all with devices stacked up on them. It wasn't just things, as there seemed to be multiple suited staffers milling about with the devices there, plus with other facilities further along in the warehouse. Nothing I could really understand besides seeing they were all basically computers with large boxes on or under them.

"Alright, where is... Hey, you!" Tancred pointed to one of the staffers, who perked up.

"Where the Hell is Casney?" The staffer shook her head.

"He's taking a smoke break, sir. He should be back soon." The auditor groaned, rubbing his face.

"I asked him to not go on fucking break until later. Hate him so much." When his hand freed itself from the lower half of his head, he turned to Sam and I.

"Get him to the testing area and set up your EKG or whatever it is you set up. I've got paperwork to fill out." As Tancred left us, Sam led me to that concrete room and brought me inside. Immediately, she planted down the briefcase, opening it up.

"So I've got some new diodes for measuring your brainwaves. And ignore what Tancred said, it's not an EKG, it's an EEG."

"What's the difference?" I asked, trying to figure out what K and E could mean there. G I could parse as "Gram."

"EKG is just 'Electrocardiogram.'" Didn't that start with a C?

"EEG is electroencephalogram. The first checks the electricity from your heart, but an EEG is for your brain. You've gone through one already. Two... technically," she explained, starting to trail off as she collected a set of little black squares, which she started sticking to my forehead and elsewhere.

"These ones do more of a deep reading and pick up on things faster. So we're gonna get crisper results on your brain activity, okay?" I nodded, thinking about how this was like needing to confirm one was looking at an elephant after seeing an only slightly fuzzy image of one. But she was the doc. She had a reason. She then retrieved this longer strip of the same material, which she coiled around my neck, leaving only my Adam's apple uncovered.

"What's this for?" Dr. Way looked at me with something like shame on her face. The same kind of faces my foster parents gave whenever kids asked if the adults who visited were going to adopt them.

"This, um." She stopped for a moment. That felt odd, usually answers were practically perspiring from her.

"This is for checking things like your pulse, general vitals. It's a stronger diode. Basically to see if there's any other biological signals for if you're starting to lose your grip." For if I go feral again. My grip on the mask tightened.

"Right, so we're going to need to use a saline solution to get these off of you. That'll happen after testing. So just... if they're itchy or anything, you gotta deal with it until testing's over. Okay?" I nodded, looking towards the walls, getting a better look at the grid pattern. All pretty uniform.

"Why are the walls like this?"

"Oh! Uh, I'm not familiar with these testing facilities, never been to one, but um... they look like every square's about one meter across both width and length. It's probably for measuring. That's actually gonna be useful for me. Can use that as reference for any movements you make." Another nod from me was all I could offer, before she finally closed the briefcase and picked it back up.

"Right, one last thing. Let me tell you this now while people can't hear. This room is soundproofed. I can tell those windows are triple pane, and the walls are concrete, and like two and a half meters thick. We won't be able to hear you asking for help. So if you do need me to interfere, I want you to do a double fist pump for me, okay?"

"A what?" I asked. She planted down the briefcase, before clenching two fists and pointing them up in the air. Her wrists bent a little too far back. She definitely wouldn't be good at punching.

"Just like this."

"Oh, okay. Yeah, uh. Yeah. I think I can do that." Squatting back down, Sam picked her briefcase back up before looking at me. That shame came back on her face for a second, but she said nothing as she walked out. That just left me in that soundproofed room with the mask. Bastard still wouldn't talk to me again. I knew it wasn't actually talking before, but whatever thoughts in my brain were convincing me to put it on for the first time just never came back.

I just wanted to figure out what the Hell went through my head to decide on it.

"Hope I didn't keep you waitin' too long," spoke a new voice. A man's. Older, but the accent was... strange. His Rs were too thick and his accents sat too long. Sometimes it almost sounded British, but it clearly wasn't. Turning towards the voice, I saw its source. A man, clearly older than Tancred. Exact age I wouldn't know. Just older. Leathery in the face. Thick grey hair that was kept in a neat haircut. Definitely had a better hairline than Tancred, at least.

He was close to my height, but with significantly more weight on him. He trudged over, putting a hand out.

"My name's Agent Casney, but I prefer people just call me Henry since that's what my mother went with." The longer he spoke, the less confident I was on figuring out his accent. At one point I thought maybe Australian, but that didn't fit either. There was no accent like it that I'd ever heard. I shook his hand, and it was like holding onto solid stone. Firm in ways I'd never seen from another human's hand. Even Tancred's didn't feel this tough. It felt abnormal.

"I'm uh, Leo. Leo Holt."

"What, that's the best grip you've got?" Agent Casney asked, confusion painted across his face as though he was just asked if his refrigerator was running.

"Youths are too damn scared of actually making a good first impression. C'mon now, here's a handshake for you." Pressure. Actual pressure on my hand. There were men larger than Agent Casney who put more of their weight on me and I didn't feel an ounce of it. I felt physical force from this man's grip. Instinctively, I went to squeeze back, trying to meet the counter-pressure. Lightning. All through my neck and throat, it clawed and tore at me, causing me to gag and choke with agony.

It was coming from the same area as the device Sam stuck to my neck. Did something break? Too much pain to know for sure.

"Now there's the kind of grip I expected from what I was told about you. But I regret to inform you, boy," Casney started.

"You can't crush the American dream."