Nothing but darkness and silence, surround me. This must be what it feels like to die. All alone. No one else is around. Just darkness and silence. I've never been the religious type but now I wish I was. Maybe if I had some kind of god to believe in, I wouldn't be in such a terrible place. Is this where you go when you don't practice a religion of any kind? Despair washes over me like waves. But wait, if I am dead, where is Wolfe? Did he abandon me to die, alone? Or are the Ghemin not merciful enough to kill him, yet? Are they torturing him? Wolfe! Where are you? Where am I, for that matter? Won't someone please come and get me out of this darkness? Won't someone please come and rescue me?

              Suddenly I can hear voices cutting through the darkness and pulling me towards a small circle of light. The light grows larger and larger until my eyes open. I can feel my head is still strapped down to a table. I am facing the ceiling, again. I can't see much but I can hear everything.

              "I need you to cut, here, here, and here." a male voice says.

              "What are we going to do to this one?" another male asks.

              I can hear the clinking of metal on metal and suddenly I feel a sharp pain in the vicinity of my stomach. My eyes widen in horror, and I scream in pain, only no sound comes out. I'm not even sure if my mouth opens. I seem to be in some sort of twilight trance. The state you find yourself in when you aren't fully asleep, but you aren't fully awake, either. But this is no dream or if it is, it's a nightmare.

              "I was thinking intellect. If we can make the human race smarter, maybe we can find a way to fix the planet." says the first voice.

                "What about self-healing? Or maybe quick healing?" the second voice asks. "If humans could quickly heal their selves, maybe they could survive the planet."

              I hear beeping sounds that pick up in pace until they seem to be making one long beeping sound. The voices start to sound far away as if the owners were in another room. At the same time, my vision starts to blur, and it gets hard to see.

          "Blood pressure is dropping. What did you hit?" the first voice asks.

           "Nothing, I swear. I don't know what's happening."

             "We are going to lose her if we can't figure it out."

              A blurry face appears above mine, I blink rapidly trying to see but the face remains blurred almost as if I had something in my eyes. I try to speak but no sound comes out. Help me, please! I can feel an immense amount of pain. Just let me go, I will happily forgive and forget everything. Or if you would rather, just shoot me and let me die quickly. This is horrible. Please just put me out of my misery.

           "We have a problem, sir." he says. "she's awake."

             "Up the dose. She must be of hearty stock, that's a good sign for us. Means the changes should work."

               Ahhh! Help me! Seriously, you need to stop! I've never been in such pain in my entire lifetime. Not even the time I broke my arm when I was seven.

              The Ghemin above me places a small white cloth over my eyes.

              Why did you do that? That's not helping anything! I can still feel the blade biting into my skin.

               "That is a really good point."

                "Sir?"

               "The quick healing ability. Let's try the one, and if it goes well, if her body holds out, we can add the second. How does that sound?" the first one says.

               I feel a pinching sensation in my neck. They must have injected me, again with something.

               "Sounds good." the second voice says before my mind returns to darkness again.

                                              **********************

             I briefly open my eyes, but my head is pounding, so I close them back. An involuntary moan passes my lips. My whole body hurts, I swear even my hair hurts. Body parts I didn't even know existed hurt. I let out another involuntary moan and try opening my eyes, again. My head feels like a bomb exploded inside of it, so I just lay there a moment, until it fades to a dull throb.

              "You're awake. Good. I was beginning to think I was going to be the only survivor." a voice says from to my right.

              I turn my head and squint my eyes, trying to make them focus. I see a young girl, maybe a year or two older than I am. "What? What happened?" I ask.

               "Best I can figure is they did some kind of experiments on us," she says walking over and sitting on the empty bed next to mine.

                 "Experiments?" I ask. And then I remember the Ghemin talking, the pain, the being awake when I should have been knocked out, the terror of not being able to move or yell out in pain. I sit up quickly which brings not only pain but a large helping of dizziness that causes my vision to swim and darkness to creep in. I close my eyes and hold my head, hoping the dizziness passes quickly. After a few moments, it does, and when I open my eyes my vision is back to normal. I look down, I am still in that weird gown the Ghemin "helped" me into, earlier. I see a few small blood stains near my stomach but not enough for me to check the cause. I don't think I want to see what they did to me. While the arm the Ghemin soldier jerked, hurts, it no longer has shooting pains running through it.

                I look around the room, this room is larger than the one I was in before. The walls of this room are orange in color, like the color of the fruit. There are rows of small beds, I count about twelve, laid out side by side with just enough space to walk between them. On some of the other beds are other females, although none of them appear to be awake yet, except the one talking to me. I look at her again, she has medium length blonde hair and golden-brown eyes. She definitely would be classified as pretty. I bet if she hadn't been chosen in the lottery, she would have had her choice of any man she wanted. Unlike me, with my boring brown hair and blue eyes. Even my face and body are plain, not something any man would be interested in.

               "Who are you?" I ask her.

              "Carina. How about you?" she answers.

                "Rayanna. But my brother calls me Rain."

                 "How old are you? I'm twenty-four."

                "I'm twenty-one, today."

               "That's a terrible way to spend a birthday."

               "Tell me about it. So, you are twenty-four? Are you married? Do you have children?" I ask.

              "Yes, I got married three years ago. I have two small children at home, that I will never see again," she says as tears well up in her eyes.

                   "I'm so sorry! Are they boys or girls?"

                   "Both of them are girls." she says sadly. Her eyes glaze over, and I realize she must be picturing her children and husband.

                   "Hopefully, your husband will never get chosen for the lotto."

                   "I think the best part of this whole thing is, he is too old for the lotto. He just turned thirty-eight. So, at least I know my children will have one parent."

                Hm. I could tell her about my dad. About how he was too old for the lotto, but still died when I was a child. But what good would that do? Probably would just send her into another round of hysterics. Instead, I say, "My only family is my brother, and he was chosen just like me."

             "I just wanted to be there to see my children grow up." Her tears are falling freely from her face.

               "Sshhh. It's okay. How about we think about something else like, why we are still alive."

                 "Maybe so they can do more cruel experiments? I mean, look at me, they cut my tail off. How am I supposed to balance without it?" she says, still crying.

                "No, I don't think that's the case. I don't think they are planning more experiments. I'm pretty sure they are done with whatever they were doing. I think we can call ourselves survivors of the Ghemin experiments. And I doubt we are the first survivors."

                "But if there are survivors every time, why don't we ever see them again? Where do they go? There's no way we are the first to survive. Maybe they kill the survivors once they get their data?" she asks, drying her eyes.

                "I don't think so. It's hard to explain, but I feel that something more is going on. That once they get their data, we go somewhere else." I pause a moment looking towards the door. "Have you tried the door? Is this door protected by electricity as well?"

           "I tried it just before you started to wake up. It's definitely protected by electricity."

            "Figures," I say sighing.

             A loud moaning sound fills the air; it's coming from the other side of the room. Carina and I look at each other and then look in the direction of the sound.

             "Shall we?" I ask.

               "Might as well. Another person means another brain. Maybe between the three of us, we can figure out what is going on around here and how to escape."

                 We get up and dodge through the maze of haphazardly placed beds. Lying in the bed is a dark-haired girl, that I recognize as my next-door neighbor. We used to play together all of the time when we were younger. "Janice." I say, gently shaking her shoulder. I remember how much my entire body hurt when I first woke up, so I drop my arm to my side. "Janice! Wake up." She moans again and then rolls over and opens her eyes and I wish that she hadn't. I wish that Corina and I would have stayed over by my bed and completely ignored my childhood friend. Because when she opens her eyes, I can see every vein in her eyes. Her eyes appear red and bloodshot. "What the?" I back up and she moans again.

             "Rayanna? Is that you? I thought I heard your voice, but I don't see you. I can't see anything." she says, turning her head in my direction. "Why does everything hurt? Why do my eyes hurt? Someone, please help me!" Blood starts running out of her eyes and down her face like some sort of freaky otherworldly tears.