Jax sits down on the edge of his bed, running his fingers through his long black hair. “I checked the box and the papers were- they were in the wrong order. The newspaper over the wanted poster. It’s fine, I don’t really care.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I told you, it’s fine. Did you look through the whole thing?”
“No,” he responds, guiltily, guilty, “just the first two.”
“Okay.” He rubs the side of his face with his palm, dragging the ball of his hand across his jawline, skin scraping across the coarse black layer of short hair on his cheek. Emerett notices a scar cutting through the hair on the right side of his face, right next to his mouth. Long and pink and indented, reaching from his chin to the middle of his cheek, pulling his skin inwards at its puckered edges like a claw pressed up against his face. From the escape? Massacre.
“Do you want to- do you want to know? The story?”
Emerett nods and Jax sighs in return, scooting back on his bed and crossing his legs like a child.
“I was in the army, or I trained for it at least. Like you, I’m assuming. You never went into battle?”
He shakes his head.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Your hair gives it away.. The length, you know. So, I was part of an experimental batch of hybrids, animal people or whatever. They designed us to see if animal DNA would help soldiers in battle, heightened senses and strength and claws and all.” He flexed his clawed fingers, illustrating the idea. “We did great, too. Not as good as some of the later.. formulations, but great. They made wolves like me, some big cat types like Heliote, and bears. That was all, I think.
“Anyway, we reached about the same stage in training you did. We went through all the conditioning, all the training, all the- all the punishment. We were aggressive, kind of… highly reactive, but that’s what they made us for. We were brute fighters. We were animals, instinct-ruled and tight-wired, going through all that shit they put the training soldiers through, you know.
“So, we were a few months out from being able to go into battle, and one of us just snaps. His name was Julien, a lion, my– a close friend of mine.” He falls silent for a second, looking down at the ground. “He did something, something wrong, and they took him out to that platform in the courtyard where they whip… transgressors? Whatever you call it. People that do things wrong. Whipping, god.” Another silence.
“They took him to the middle of the courtyard and I was there. I watched them bring him out and make him kneel and everything, and I saw his eyes. When they were calling out his name and whatever rule he broke, I forget now, his eyes were closed and then they open and they were different, wider or… sharper or something. Tiny pupils, maybe. His eyes were wrong and he stood up all fast and it was like a tornado, he had the whipper down on the ground and he was bashing his head– his head on the pavement and snarling like an animal and–” His voice catches in his throat. Emerett notices his eyes are closed, and his cheek shifts, the setting of his jaw. It makes the scar twitch. He wants to say something but he doesn’t know what.
“The guards got him in what, maybe thirty seconds? They shot him and blew his head open all over the courtyard and then they were both dead. Fucking god. The next day they rounded us all up and handcuffed us and sent us to the executioner. The hallway was so bright, I felt like we were walking straight into hell.
“There were a lot of… factors that went into what happened next. We were an experimental batch, remember, and they didn’t really know everything about us yet. That is to say, they didn’t know how strong we were, and how hard we were to condition. They rely a lot on the conditioning there, they’re all so sure that we’re too beaten down to try anything with them, that’s why they didn’t put restraints on the people being whipped or anything.”
They did, or they did when Emerett was there. He didn’t know there had been a time when they didn’t.
“But they were wrong. We were thick-skinned. I also think some of the guards called in sick that day, or something. Anyway, one of us near the front of the line, I think it was a guy, broke through his handcuffs and killed one of the guards. They had guns, of course, and they shot him, but by the time they got him down, twenty more of us were out of our handcuffs and moving. It was like some kind of mass hysteria, or like a really small war. It was kill or be killed, and the guards were outnumbered and overpowered. The rest is history. Or it was news, at least. ‘Several army officials dead in horrific massacre,’ you saw the paper.
“Some stuff happened after I was out, it was a few weird ass years before I heard of this place,” he sweeps his hand in an arc in front of him, gesturing to the general area, “but eventually I made my way here and… here we are.”
Emerett stares at him for a few seconds and it becomes clear that he’s not going to say anything else. He breathes slow, trying to process this new information through his lungs. Jax looks at him expectantly. He has no idea what to say.
“How long ago was this?” ends up coming out of his mouth.
“Oh damn, I don’t know. The escape was probably like five years ago, and I got here…” he thinks for a second, furrowing his brows and quirking the corner of his mouth upwards, “maybe two years after that?”
“Geez,” Emerett half whispers, sitting back in the middle of his bed (he had made his way to the edge, unaware) and leaning his head back on the wall. He really doesn’t know what to say. Kill or be killed, he said. He’s clearly alive, so he assumes that means he killed, but, he thinks, if an army guard had caught up to him when he was escaping, he probably would’ve done the same thing. He was trained to defend his life, at all costs. Chills run through the back of his neck like the cold edge of a knife.
“It’s late, I’m gonna go to sleep,” he hears from Jax’s side of the room, quiet and choked.
He nods, and keeps his eyes open after the torches go out, staring at the ceiling in the pitch dark.