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“I’m going to take it out now.”
“Okay.”
Ray sat on a wooden chair with his back facing Emma. He tilted his head to give her better access to his left ear, and more importantly the tracker inside it. It was midnight, and the moonlight gently shining through the windows left a blue hue that illuminated the dining hall just enough for Emma to accurately guide her scalpel to the location of the tracker.
Leaning in to begin, she noticed strange marks all along the back of Ray’s ear—erratic streaks of light skin surrounded by darker patches. For a moment, Emma had thought it was a trick of the light, that the shadows had created such an illusion, and she curiously moved her head to inspect the phenomenon from different angles. However she quickly realized the marks wouldn’t move. Neither did they plan on leaving, ever.
Scars.
A wave of guilt struck Emma as she thought back on how she had once gripped Ray’s hand tight, begging him, perhaps even threatening him, to never sacrifice another one of her siblings ever again. With every unsuccessful attempt to deactivate the tracker, a child was shipped out early. The idea of other lives being sacrificed for her own made Emma sick to her stomach. Ray had tested his invention on others without any care to what would happen to those children, or so she thought. It had never crossed her mind that Ray’s first test subject was himself.
It made sense now. The scent of lighter fuel lingered in the air.
Ray was a reserved boy. He was sarcastic, aloof, and based every decision on logic. But he was still a boy—a boy who must’ve cried the same way Emma did when he realized the House’s secret, a boy who had to carry the burden of knowledge and nightmares for 12 years, a boy who loved his family as much as Emma.
Grace Field House. In just a few minutes, the two of them would leave behind the life they once knew. The ceiling loomed high over their heads.
“Emma?”
In the dead of night, sounds echoed until a single whisper became a choir, and the silence that had fallen upon the most sociable girl in the House became louder by the second. Emma readied her scalpel once again.
“Tell me if it starts hurting too much,” she said, her expression solemn.
Emma didn’t only mean it physically.
“Yeah,” Ray replied.