101X

I was born, raised, and schooled in the labs, and I would die there. Like so many of the others who I had grown up with, I would have been put in the Survival Room, the difficulty of the tasks becoming harder and harder until I was no longer able to survive the hell the people thought up for me while I was in the room.

However for the time being I was needed and an asset; my skill at killing so very good that they didn’t dare put me in the Room until I was useless, as useless as my brother had been when it had become known that he knew as much about fighting as a new born.

He had been allowed to live with the woman who had given birth to us, and the man she had married. He was able to attend school and make human friends and even contact the others who had been chosen to live outside of the lab or had escaped, while I was stuck in a 4x8 plexi-glass cell.

It hadn’t been bad, especially since it was the only thing I had known. I had thought that the experiments, the beatings, the torture, and the daily murders of those around me were normal. That was the life I knew, if you weren’t the best- you didn’t live. And then I met Matthew.

He had come in for one of the experiments, and while he was there it was decided that they would test what he would do if he were confronted with the fact that he had a twin sister who had grown up in the labs, and had faced the horrors he had grown up hearing about from his mother when she talked about what it was she had saved him from.

I had been sprawled on the floor, trying to sleep and ignore the stinging pain that was emitting from my back where the lashes had landed. I had messed up on an assignment and as a result my back had been lashed 50 times, a relatively light punishment. All of my skin was bare, we weren’t permitted clothes until we were 10, and at the time I had only been 8.

Matt had been put in the cell while he waited for the testing to begin, and from the second he was put in my cell we knew who each other were. It was hard not to.

Our looks were the same. We both possessed the red-copper hair that our mother had bequeathed to us, and the brown gold eyes that our unknown father had had. Our face shapes were the same and our general shape was identical. However, while he had the round health a child our age should possess I was thin and frail, the malnourishment I had endured my whole life having taken effect.

He had starred at me for two seconds before introducing himself. I of course had never been named, just given a lab number and told to answer to it. Matt had blinked at my introduction of “I’m 101X,” before he had laughed.

“That’s not a name!” He had told me as his eyes had shined at me. He had acted like he had owned the room as he had moved and sat on the only piece of furniture I had been permitted . It was the base of a cot, lacking a proper mattress it had thin pad stapled to the springs. It was more of a torture device than a place to sleep, so I mostly ignored it and camped out on the floor.

Matt however didn’t seem to mind the fact that it was as comfortable as a bed of nails and had made himself right at home on the creaky bed. Of course I was offended that he had just told me that the name I had been known by my whole life wasn’t actually a name, so I had turned to him and growled, the way I always did before I was to fight.

The sound rasped out of my eight year old throat like gargled nails, the fact I had not had a drink in three hours making it so that the sound was lower and more gravelly than ever before. Matt had been shocked to hear the noise, his own growl having never been developed do to the act he had grown up in an environment where he had never had need of it.

“It is to a name! Why are you here?” My voice had been low and threatening, my animal ready to stake its dominance over this entitled male who dared to tell me things like he was so much smarter than I was.

That was a problem the labs had never been able to fix. My pride.

I was one of the most prideful of the Creations, and I was the one who was most likely to kill to preserve said pride. That was one of the reasons that they had been looking towards me for a pack leader, the fact that I would shred anyone who dared to stand up to me, and Matt was not above that need to be in charge.

He had dared to laugh at me, to challenge my pride, and he would get injured, if not killed, for it.

Matt for all of his outside beliefs was still animal enough to recognize the danger in my voice, and the pain I was preparing to inflict on him. And I didn’t doubt that he was wary of it. I was trained to attack, my whole life spent training with very little time devoted to knowledge, while he had only been trained to fight over the summer.

So he was wary as he stood from the cot, and moved towards the door he had entered the room by. And he got lucky, for the scientist still saw him as an asset to the experiment that was being conducted out side of the labs, because the door was opened and he was pulled out.

My anger had only grown with every day I was denied getting revenge against him until anything I might have felt for him at our first meeting had been destroyed, completely whipped out by the anger at the fact he had challenged me and gotten to live, or at the very least escaped punishment.

Looking back on it that was probably the scientists’ goal, to make sure I had no connection to the people I was supposed to have the greatest one to. Instead I had developed a connection to the others in the lab.

The day of my tenth birthday I was given the standard white shirt, pants and underwear of all females in the lab and put into a team-test room.

The room was only slightly larger than the one I had grown up with, and the space was reduced due to the fact that the room held two sets of bunk beds and two single beds, all of which were in slightly better condition than the one I was used to. Sporting a thin mattresses that was thick enough to cover the sharpness of the creaky springs that lay under them the beds were covered in a thin blanket, that could barely be called a blanket.

The others who were placed in the room were all about the same dominance as I was, with only two of them topping me. And those two became my family, with the other three Creations almost blending into the background.

I had no need for those weaker than I was, and each team was always made up of three, so I found no need to pay attention to them. Instead I focused on 76A and 92Z. Both boys were dangerous in a way that my cat understood and was weary of, but not to far ahead of my own dominance that I was afraid to approach them. And before long the three of us were inseparable, the way a team was supposed to be, and none of us were worried about the fact we weren’t yet a team, we were as good as and the fact we had yet to fail a mission sealed that.

Those two boys became my confident, and I theirs’. They knew about my hatred for my blood brother, and I learned of their hellish childhoods, and because of our closeness, we became a better team. By the time we were to be placed in permanent teams 92Z, 76A, and I were closer than most out of the lab siblings.

So it was natural when the three of us were put in the same team and moved into a permanent room, which was by far the best I had ever seen. There were three separate beds, each with a thick mattress, and a set of drawers. 92Z was made head of the team, do to the fact he was not only the most dominate, but the oldest.

Two weeks after we were moved into permanent teams I was allowed to release my anger towards my brother.