"Three years ago, I started having trouble with balance, motor skills, memory; stuff like that. The doctors told me that I was sick, the kind of sick you don't get better from." It was when everything started. With the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Reminding herself to take slow, even breaths her hands nervously fiddled with the hem of her shirt, twisting and pulling at it. Her mother always hated that habit of her's. "I had a year, where I was only going to get worse before kicking the bucket- there wasn't really any cure. Could just get comfortable and wait. A couple weeks after getting sick, I was approached by this woman at my apartment. I guess that probably should of been a red flag." But she'd been younger, and scared. She was only twenty-three then, and like most twenty-three year old's, she didn't want to die.
"She told me that the Agency she worked for, The Keller Agency, had heard about my recent diagnosis, and was interested in taking my case. They were an experimental branch see. Trying new drugs, and she did warn me that their methods weren't quite FDA approved or anything. But still, I agreed." And she would of liked to tell him that it was a long, thought choice she'd made. To enter herself into that program, but honestly? It wasn't. She wanted to live, plain and simple. "From there I signed some papers, packed some clothes. The woman, said her name was Angie, but I wouldn't put too much faith in anything that comes outta their mouths, anyway she picked me up the next day."
That's when things had started going downhill. "Sure enough, three o'clock rolls around and Angie and three other guys show up on the dot. One of the men gave me a sedative. Supposed to knock me out for the ride to the place. What was going on wasn't exactly legal, and the less I knew the better." A muscle in her jaw twitched and Xanthippe suddenly felt the need to move. Like a caged wolf she began to pace a little, looking about a million miles away. There was a lull in her story, a good ten minutes until her pacing stopped and she was ready to continue. "Anyway, a few days there and it was pretty clear why it was illegal. The injections, they started almost immediately- here." She moved, sweeping back her hair to expose the nape of her neck. The pale skin was broken by th scar of a needle. Once she was satisfied he'd seen it, she continued onward, letting the cascade of hair come sweeping back over the scar.
"I shattered my leg once in a car accident when I was a kid. Jesus even that didn't hold a flame compared to these injections. They never told me what was in it, so your guess is as good as mine." Those memories were searingly vivid. "The patients were all kinds of sick and dying people. The kind you don't miss. Junkies. The hopeless, your standard no one will notice if they're gone people." Behind her eyelids was the memory of people strapped down to their hospital beds, iv's and tubes running out of more places than could possibly be safe. "I learned that, their goal was to create enhanced people. Most of the people didn't make it though. They were trying to perfect the formula. Sell to the highest bidder, we were just lab rats. But those that were successful, were sold." Xanthippe's voice had slid to something cold, something detached from the story, as if she were simply reciting a recipe for birthday cake.
"I don't know how they did it. But, there were tests. If you showed that you were changing, they wheeled you off. I didn't see them after that. Anyway, I was there for about a year and a half. They say if your genes are gonna bond and change, it'll be in that time frame. My disease went away, but it didn't look like I'd developed any sort of mutations. So I was a failure. But they'd spent money on me. With all the treatments." She spat the word as if it were something ugly, something painful in her mouth. "So, they had a few contacts. They'd come in at the end of the month and pick out what they wanted. The people who didn't get picked up, where disposed of. Can't have anyone blowing the whistle." She tilts her head back, staring at the ceiling reminding herself to breath calmly and it's awhile before she continues again.
"You think agonizing injections of god knows what, the shit making you sick all the time, being fed through IV's and being subjected to all sorts of tests from physical to mental and anything in between is bad. I did, until I ended up with the Irish." At the name her stomach twists and her skin flushes hot with fear. "I guess I should be grateful I didn't get shipped to some new country or something. The Irish have their stubby fingers in a lot of things around the city, including prostitution. So, that's where I ended up at first." She bites at her tongue nearly hard enough to draw blood, and again a long silence falls upon her where she takes up pacing again. "They keep you doped up. You know, you can't really fight back like that I guess. 'S why I don't like taking anything. Well a month with the Irish, wouldn't you know my mutation pops up."
It was an accident, leaning against the wall of the cell they'd kept all the girls in, when she'd fallen backwards through the wall. "They didn't miss a chance to cash on something. So instead of prostituion, they told me I'd be doing some enhanced fightclub. Some people were there of their own volition, some were not. It didn't really matter. If I didn't do it, they had the information about my family so, saying no or leaving wasn't an option. I- I hurt some people. And then you showed up so here we are." Xan had fought enough to keep herself alive. The fights got progressively more and more bloody. The first fight felt more like a playground fight. But eventually they'd get more and more vicious more bloody. Xan wasn't ever too popular, simply because she preferred to remain intangible and let someone tire themselves out. Wait for an opportunity to bash their skulls against things hard enough to get them to pass out. Her heart hammered about her chest, hard enough the dainty vein on her neck is frantically throbbing against her skin, and her palms feel sweaty. "That's all I got. The important stuff, yeah?"
March 23rd, 2016 at 10:01pm