Aurora IMs Ananke and Darren feels bitter (Part of a novel).

NOTE: This is a little piece of a novel I started a while ago. it's near the end but it's my favorite piece of writing from it. I added some details and changed some sentences so it would be at least sort of understandable.

Hate was on Aurora’s face for maybe the first time ever as she stared fixedly at the screen. She understood that they thought they were doing the right thing – she always understood - but her emotion over her lost childhood was too strong. She hated Them anyway.

“One of our many problems was finding children to experiment on.” Each new piece of text that popped into the little orange box had Aurora leaning closer. This was her first-ever contact with Them, really. Maybe after this she would understand her one-time captors better and be able to See them.

“Why not just take DNA from the researchers to make kids for the experiments?” she replied.

“No one wants it to be their kids, you see.”

“That’s so wrong.”

“Well, we did try it at first, but people couldn’t think of their own children as expendable enough. Needless to say it went badly. You were one of the ones we wanted from the beginning, but we couldn’t see how to take you. You were so loved. Didn’t get you as early as we’d like. By age eight there’s a lot of risk of Memory retention. We were scouting at your house when you crashed the car, and we saw how easy it would be to make your parents think you died in the crash.”

“What about Darren? Couldn’t you have left him?” Tears of pure, unadulterated sadness poured down her face but it didn’t show in her smooth IM voice; it was a quiet, private sadness. She cried to herself, glad for the distance and the darkness around her.

“Honestly he showed no particular promise, but we were so desperate for subjects, and it was just too easy.”

“You bastards.”

“Yes, I know.”

The screen stayed like that for a moment, two moments. Aurora was not out of questions, but she was all out of caring. The place mark blinked silently at her.

Another message popped up on the screen. “Don’t you think Armistead would be saying it was destiny right now? He would say, ‘what are the chances of you crashing at the exact moment that we were scouting there?’”

“Yes, that’s what he would say.”

“We both know how wrong he is.”

“I thought you bigwigs wanted me to believe in destiny.”

“The other bigwig does. Not because he believes in it, but because it's such an easy tool for manipulation. But I think you should have it right.”

“Thanks, I guess. Which one are you?”

“I think I’ll let you guess for now. You should know, though, that Armistead does believe in Destiny. He believes everything he tells you.”

“I’m sure you saw to that.”

“Yes.”

Aurora flicked closed her stolen laptop and leaned back on her cot. Now that she’d been captured by the traitor Nova and sold to the “law enforcement” agency called Blaik, They were being much more communicative.

The experiments had always referred to their nameless, faceless tormentors as They. Now that they had escaped and grown to understand their former life, they knew that They were a semi-secret group of genetics researchers called Ananke. Aurora had looked it up. Although there was no list of an Ananke Inc. online, she’d found out that Ananke was the goddess of fate and necessity.

Fate. The ‘fate’ that neither of the Ananke leaders believed in?

And that brought her back to Armistead. A good guy on the wrong side. He’d been sent by Them to pretend to be her friend, to monitor, to direct, and, most of all, to tell her all about her destiny.

She was sure that last part wasn’t in his orders – it was just who he was. Ananke knew that. They understood almost as much as Aurora did.

She closed her eyes, but her brain was too alive with these thoughts to shut off for the night. Big gig tomorrow. Terrorist group. Should be easy. It was always easy, for no normal human could match her strength, speed, or endurance. Of course, she also had her other power. Armistead had said that she’d started out abnormally perceptive, which was why They’d wanted her, and that They’d intensified it to the point of telepathy. More than telepathy; she could sense things that had happened before, that were happening now, that would happen in the future, all because she understood people. She could take every single variable from the people and the environment and extrapolate the things she could not see.

She rolled onto her side and pushed her mess of brown hair above her head so she could see the people she would be fighting with tomorrow. None of them wanted to be here, not really. They had all turned off their consciences to make it easier to do the things they were forced to do, but Aurora refused to do that. If she had to do something, she would do it, but she would not make herself numb to it.

So, though it would be easy for her tomorrow, it would be excruciatingly hard.

Before she fell asleep she tried to think about Darren, but there wasn’t much to think about. She knew of her childhood friend’s existence now, but she didn’t remember him. Ananke had wiped her memory clean of anything before her life as an experiment, but she’d heard that Darren Remembered, somehow. She fell asleep wishing she could picture his face, but could only succeed in stirring up that half-remembered love she’d felt for him before they’d both been captured.

Darren hadn’t closed his eyes since he’d found out that Blaik knew about the BDH. Big Damn Heroes was the nickname for the nameless group he was newly a part of, the group dedicated to stopping Ananke.

What was it now, three days? Three and a half. That was how long the entire 20 BDHs had been on red alert. A few had slept. Not many. They didn’t know when the battle would start.

Invariably when he knew he should be sleeping but couldn’t he thought about Mariko. Where was she now? Safe? Dead? The BDH had been scouting for all the escaped experiments but had not found her yet. Sometimes he could not stop himself from thinking, She’s the really important one. He knew it wasn’t right, but it would pop into his head before he could push it back down every now and then.

He’d heard Mariko’s name was Aurora now. All the experiments had named each other because they hadn't known they’d ever had another name, but Darren remembered and had always gone by Darren. And he still thought of Aurora as Miko, his childish pronunciation of her former name. It was so hard for him to let go when he knew all he’d lost. It made him so angry.

He let the anger run like a sickly warm stream through him, less intense but more horrible after so many years, let it prepare him for the battle ahead, and never fell asleep.