Deal of a Lifetime

Melody steps into the apartment, relishing the silence, well as much silence as she can get, the late night New York City traffic audible from ten stories below. She shakes her feet until her heels clatter to the ground, then pushes them under the small table she kept by the door, just enough space left to toss her keys on, the rest filled with random clutter. A sharp pain shoots through her body, stopping just behind her eyes. “No, no, no, not right now,” she mutters, stumbling forward and gripping the plush faux velvet of the blanket lying on her battered couch , suddenly regretting her decision to leave the bar. “Can’t I have one minute to myself?” she mutters, flinging herself over the back of the couch, her head hitting the cushioned arm of the couch, the worn leather slightly creaking under the impact. She lets her eyes focus on the detail of the ceiling, the fairy lights she’d hung last week, illuminating the dark room like the stars do for the night sky, anything to try and tether her to the room instead of the bright void calling her name, what is commonly referred to as the light at the end of the tunnel, she just knows better, knows more than she’d ever wished.

She opens her eyes, her apartment little more than just a dream, not when the sterile white room in front of her demands to be not only seen, but felt as well, the walls almost vibrating with the energy lurking behind them.

The wall in front of her shudders, the mostly featureless face, excluding the general indents of where a mouth and eyes should be, emerging and moving as the room stutters to life. “Update?” the voice that seems to echo off everything questions.

“Still a shitshow, what do you expect?” she groans, her body rolling until her forehead rests against the cool material of the table, her body temperature never seeming to be able to regulate during her semi-regular trips here.

“Update?” the voice repeats, the walls shrinking by a foot on each side of her. The increasingly claustrophobic space does little to motivate Melody to the side of her captors, more an incentive to defy than a deterrent, anything to get her out of the screwed up deal that she was never even offered, just given without question. 

Melody scoffs, pushing herself up until her back hits the chair, the shackles she’d been expecting to shoot out from seemingly nowhere, usually securing her to the chair until she offers some explanation of what’s she’s been up to, don’t come. She’d been expecting, almost praying for the cool relief of the metal bars. The voice repeats once more, in the same monotonous voice that haunts Melody’s nightmares. An empty threat fills her mind, a few choice words forming on her tongue.

A door that hadn’t been there just a second ago, ever been there as far as Melody was aware, opens. A relatively human shaped figure enters the room, a dark black cloth draped over where the shoulders would be. It moves further into the room, the door closing behind it without a sound, moving forward and sits down in a chair that materialized across from Melody while she’d been focused on the figure. Before her own eyes, the figure fizzles to life, features getting more and more clear each time Melody blinks. Within a minute, her mother’s face is staring at her, complete with her perfectly styled artificial blonde bangs, but she knows better, knows her mother is at home with her dad in the middle of nowhere Kansas, probably sitting at their small dinner table contemplating where they went wrong. “Let me guess, you were about to express something along the lines of telling the computer to go do something that should only be done in private,” echoes around the room, the words morphing from the monotonous voice to a fairly close replica of her mother’s voice, albeit slightly mechanically. She rolls her eyes, knowing that if her captors were using her mother’s voice, at least a robotic version of it, every sentence will be a question, one of the things that annoyed her most about her mother, every single stupid statement morphing into a question in her voice. Melody had practiced speaking, ensuring not to end up a weird combination of her mother’s constant questions and her father’s short sentences and grunts he deemed enough communication most days. “We do ask that you keep profanities to yourself, no matter how creative, because we have in fact heard them all,” it says, placing it’s perfectly manicured hands on the table, taping out a slightly off beat rhythm, a sad rendition of a hymn. Melody cocks her eyebrow, a pose she’d first adapted in her younger teen days, the first warning sign or her rebellion as her mother would say, but it was simply a silent challenge, a dare if she was feeling especially childish. The creature wearing her mom’s face tilt’s it’s head, blinking slowly. “Don’t you want the world to be a better place?” it asks, reaching out to take one of Melody’s hands within its own. Melody fights the urge to physically recoil from the touch, the hands ice cold. She relaxes into the touch, letting the ice flow through her veins, muting the heat within her. “Of course you do, you just don’t think it’s possible,” it murmurs, sympathy in the voice, something she’d never had directed at herself, only experiencing it as her mother would offer condolences to others. No, she never received sympathy, not from her mother, just judgement. Part of her craves more, more of the sweetness that she’d never received from her own mother as a child. The creature reaches forward, taking Melody’s other hand it it’s own, clasping them tightly. The creature murmurs, but all Melody cares about is putting out the flames within her own body, reaching forward and wrapping her hands around the creature’s wrists, placing her finger directly over where it’s pulse point would be if it had one. “I see I may have chosen the wrong facade, I apologize, family members are our default.” Melody wanted to laugh, at the nativity of the creatures, knowing that if they wanted compliance, from her and many others, family wasn’t the right direction, far from it.

The pale skin that matches Melody’s own shifts under her own grip, growing darker, stopping at the shade just short of the color of her own hair. Melody’s heart drops, raising to meet eyes she thought she’d never be able to see again, outside of the dozen of photographs scattered around her apartment that haunt her everyday, that she hasn’t had the strength to put away in boxes yet, but having Ray in front of her, she realizes that pictures have never done her justice, never able to capture the love in her eyes, the kindness in her smile, such a stark contrast to her outward appearance, hard around every edge possible to cover the softness inside.

Ray leans forward, propper her head up on her elbows, Melody lightly groaning at the disappearance of Ray’s skin from her own palms. “Her image popped up on your file when you first arrived, but we feared that it would be too much for you.”

“No, no, this is fine, good,” Melody murmurs, reaching up and tracing her finger along the scar in Ray‘s left eyebrow, a stupid little mark courtsey of an even more stupid dare when they were teenagers, drunk on cheap beer as they hopped a fence to get into an empty lot in the city that they had no business going to in the first place. When the creature had been wearing her mother’s face, it’d been easy to remember that it was in fact a creature, not her actual mother, but now sitting in front of Ray, she doesn’t even try to remember that, or the fact that she’s been yanked out of her own body more times than she can count to be brought to this sterile room, because now sitting in front of Ray, this place feels more like home than anywhere else she’s ever been.

Ray tilts her head, leaning into Melody’s hand, letting her head rest against the heat of Melody’s hand, Melody relishing in the coolness of Ray’s skin. She always had run cold, such a contrast to her sweetness, always eager to please everyone. “Do you really think so little of the human race that they can’t be helped?” Ray questions, her dark eyes trained on Melody. She lightly nods, too transfixed on Ray to bother thinking anything other than how lucky she is to be sitting in front of her again. “You haven’t had an easy life, but you’ve done okay for yourself, until your little accident,” she whispers, reaching out to wipe a stray tear from Melody’s cheek, “but we know it wasn’t an accident.”  

“I-I,” Melody stutters, never having said the truth out loud. She recounts the event in her head, double checking that she had not in fact said much of anything to anyone, not to the EMT that resuscitated her in the ambulance with sirens that she swore sounded just like her alarm clock from home, not the doctors and nurses that pestered her with checking her vitals every hour for the two days she’d been in the hospital, not the detectives that interrogated her before she was released from the hospital, not to her parents who took the first bus to New York when they’d gotten the call as Melody had cursed herself for not changing her emergency contacts, not to Father Tyler who her parents had dragged up to New York with them, not to the busser outside the station as she’d waited for the Red Line, not to anyone.

Ray leans back, sitting up straight in the chair, “If you haven’t figured it out by now, we have a way of seeing inside your head, just like how we can pull your subconscious here when your body's laying on the couch in your apartment,” she states. She interlocks her fingers in front of her, more serious than Melody had ever seen her before, and then the veil is broken and suddenly she’s reminded that it isn’t actually Ray, just a creature wearing her face, working its way into Melody’s heart. Melody recoils, physically pulling her body as far away from the table as she can, mentally punching herself for letting herself get wrapped up in the deception. 

The creature shudders as it can feel Melody’s walls go back up, taller and thicker than ever before. It tilts its head as it reconsiders its plan. It knows failure isn’t an option, not when orders come from this high above. For whatever reason, the top level wants this girl, can’t understand why, for all aspects it can consider, she’s young, fragile, full of doubt, both of herself and the world in its entirety. It weighs its options, calculating all possible angles. “We’d like to offer you a more prominent position,” it says, watching the way Melody’s face shifts. “No more being pulled out of your body when they sense you’re alone, no more small scale tasks, a chance to really make a change,” it says, leaning back to wait. Questions race through Melody’s mind quicker than it can keep up, she finally settles on a single word. Why. If only the creature knew, maybe then it would settle the questions within its own soul while being able to offer Melody an answer. “Top Tier doesn't share reasons, only tasks,” it explains, its eyes moving around the room as the walls shift, expanding back to their original dimensions, Melody thankful for the extra room. She pushes her chair back until it hits the wall, not wanting to be anywhere near the imposter. Ray’s mind within the creature begs for it to rush forward, to comfort Melody, but it can see it in Melody’s eyes, the fear and hatred bleeding from her soul. Now is the time to strike, it knows this, that it has accomplished half of its goal, now to seal the deal, and part of it hates itself for playing a part in this, wishes it could just send her home to be free of all of this. “All you have to do is say yes,” it says, watching, waiting, knowing exactly what to say, “if you say yes, you get explanations,” it offers, hoping it enough to convince her without having to dangle an empty promise to the girl cowering across the room. Melody’s mind races, the creature being bombarded with images of a twisted version of the own face it’s wearing, blood dripping down her face, cuts all over her body, shards of glass protruding from open wounds. It knows what it has to do, even if every ounce of Ray in it is screaming not to, not to do this to her, that she deserves better, always has. “You can even have her,” it says before Ray can convince her otherwise.

Her mouth reacts before her brain even has a chance to weigh the options, the creature can tell, but it doesn’t matter, the word is past her lips and that’s all that matters. The room shifts, the white walls fading away into static, video feeds from all over the world breaking through the noise. “Today, you are officially no longer an I, but part of something bigger, to change the world, you’re a We now,” it says, letting Ray fall away, returning to its featureless form, the video next on the queue running its already cold body colder, the words that it knows are coming, that are sure to make Melody regret that single word more than anything else she’d ever done or could have ever possibly done. “Welcome to World Enders, Division One.”