The Monarchs

For a moment, there was stillness. Then an eye-opening jolt filled my lungs with breath, as if I had spent a lifetime on another plane and were only now awakening to reality. My pupils hastened to adjust to the blinding light. My limbs shook with a force I did not understand. Ghostly whooshing noises echoed through my awareness, like whispers through an ocean wave. All the while, my mind was off somewhere, floating adrift, blissfully half-awake to the current situation yet anxious to tune back in.

“Give me clarity!” I shouted through a mechanism unknown; and suddenly, I was born again.

With the whispers gone and my body still, I found myself facing a white wall in a small, empty room. I knew this room—knew how much I loathed it—yet could barely recognize my own memory. It had been an eerie, disorienting sleep, accompanied by a silence so deafening that I could hear my heart ticking away like a broken clock.

How did I get here? I asked my open palms, if only to distract from the present moment. Breathing once more with meditative grit, I yearned to retain that spotless mind. Yet as my focus calibrated on those scars from hard labor, the veil of amnesia was inevitably ripped away, letting it all flow back through.

The fear. The pain. The guilt. The loneliness. The emotion came bursting from within, clouding my mind with misery, and I dared not dwell on it longer.

Twisting in my chair, I surveyed the windowless walls of this unnerving prison. They were adorned with only an automated door I was unable to open and the portrait of a man whose gaze I could not bear to meet. This was the reality of the white room, as I so cleverly called it. Everything in the labs was colorless, from the walls to our mandatory robes to the emotions of the ones who tested us like rodents. Here was where we were forced to wait; the sun never shined, and I could hardly stand the sight of my own shadow.

The greeting came from somewhere else entirely: “Welcome to your life, wandering spirit.”

With that, I was taken out of myself, gazing into my own eyes from a transcendent perspective—eyes that were nearly twice as large as an average human being’s, according to Dr. Salazar, and emitted light in a way that made them true windows to the soul. Setting ablaze when properly stimulated, my eyes could penetrate into the essence of matter. And my mind could manipulate matter in ways not considered normal—at least, by a standard definition of physics.

There were dozens of children with eyes like mine at the Facility, and we could all do things considered abnormal. This was why we were being tested. We were fated for this cruelty.

My heart pounded as I was pulled back in, my sweat-laced palms trembling through a head full of curls as I pushed my hair back from my face. This here—this is me. I tried to breathe but this time choked on thick air, my repressed dread forever waiting in the wings.

I was amazed at how easily I had dozed off, as if my sleep-deprived brain had enacted a fail-safe before the panic came. It was, after all, a Sunday. And though I was in the labs most days for checkups and exams, it was on Sundays they liked to experiment with my mind. Hurt it. Drug it. Alter it in strange ways until it did strange things.

And it was worse for me than most of the others. Unlike them, I could not consciously control it—whatever it was—and neither could my handlers. Even after ten years of pills, injections, and agonizing shock therapy, a monster lay dormant in the back of my brain, one that only awakened when prodded hard enough.

Soon, they would be coming to take me.

For one precious moment, I closed my eyes and imagined disappearing, surrendering to some boundless void as I had often dreamed while at the Facility. It was only for my tutor, Walter, that I subverted this fantasy; he gave me solace in the form of music, wisdom, and philosophy.

And it was only for Evelyn that I reminded myself how beautiful the world could be, despite our daily suffering and the loss of those loved ones who now only lived in our dreams. We were very close in this regard, and even if she didn’t have eyes like mine, they were extraordinary nonetheless, an enchanting crystal blue. “The universe can sometimes leave you in the dark,” I could hear her saying, “just to bring you closer to those who share common light.”

My limbs stopped quivering as I surrendered to reality. I opened my eyes with a sigh, wondering whether true love was just an illusion. But as I stared again at the white wall, I imagined Evelyn’s visage looking back at me. The closest candidate for true love’s existence, she held my gaze with her smile. And somehow, I smiled right back, my depression dislodged; the whole of my psyche was ensnared in those blue eyes. I knew that even as our reality crumbled, she would dance with me through it.

“There is a better world,” I sang in a whisper. “There must be.” I didn’t know where this thought came from.

A buzzing noise broke my trance. The automated door slid open. A much older woman stepped into the room, her long blond hair splayed across her lab coat. With her burnt eyes and hollow grin, Alice appeared closer to the edge of madness than ever. Perhaps her mind had finally shattered under the mounting pressure to make something out of me. Perhaps her team was being threatened by the higher-ups. Or maybe this was all unrelated, and there was a whole life of hers I could never know, with her own problems and yearnings for liberation.

I might have felt bad if not for what they had done to me. All that was left to me was that look in Alice’s eyes and the breath of my name vibrating across unseen strings.

“Samuel.”

There was an extended pause where the woman stood staring from the entrance, leaving me questioning if something was truly wrong. “I must again—” She cleared her throat. “I must again apologize for keeping you waiting. Dr. Salazar is ready to see you now.”

I nodded with silent scrutiny, perusing the dull flame of memory for anything that could explain her bizarre behavior. I had only just begun to contemplate my amnesia, unaware of how long I had been waiting and how in the world I had fallen asleep. Time was a tricky agent, and my dreams had faded altogether. It was as if I had appeared out of oblivion.

Attempting to stand on my sandal-clad feet, I nearly got sucked back in, struck by a profound dizziness. Only Alice gliding over to grab me by the shoulder prevented my passing out. With that strangely grounding touch, I focused back in on an uneasy grin and eyes that stared with unreal intensity.

“Are you well, Mr. Helen?”

“I’m fine,” I asserted, quick to brush her off, though my words were contradicted by the fact that it didn’t feel like me who was saying them. I was used to this sort of numbness. Walter had told me that dissociation could be a side effect of traumatic experience.

“We only wish to help you,” Alice responded, sensing my growing discomfort. “That is all you have to remember.”

“I . . .” I trailed off as I looked down at my palms, then back into the eyes of the scientist. Something seemed different, and for a second, I considered making a run for it. But where would I go, exactly? Life was a game of choices, yet for me there was no choice except to walk through the open door.

I shook my head in surrender. “Let’s just get this over with.”

“Are you afraid, Mr. Helen?” she inquired, and I wondered if I caught a flicker of empathy in her eyes—whether she and the other scientists truly thought they were doing good things, however skewed their reasoning. At the very least, I could see their eyes, unlike those of the soldiers who patrolled the Facility.

“I’m just afraid I can never change,” I said honestly.

“You know very well that we’re not giving up on you, not after all these years. In fact,” she continued with something close to a smile, “I think we may have hit on a breakthrough.”

My heart skipped a beat. Having heard those words several times too many, they did nothing but spur me to brace for pain. I felt the monster kick from within before I quivered out, “What are you going to do to me?”

Alice hesitated, probing my eyes with that maddening stare before gesturing for me to follow. “You will be taken care of, Samuel. You must trust it.”

It was futile to resist and tiresome to question. I trailed Salazar’s head assistant as she exited the white room. But I glanced back at that man on the wall whose eyes I always had trouble meeting. He was the reason I was here—the reason I could never escape. Painted in front of the seven-star flag of the Union, General Mabus flaunted a proud, defiant grin, representative of the increasing military might of a once-decimated nation.

However, behind his gaze, dampened by thick silence, seemed to be a mysterious whispering that could only be picked up by the deeper subconscious. It was as if the man himself were conveying a message to me, one only I could decipher if I listened very, very—

“Samuel?” Alice called from the other side of the door. “Are you coming?”

“Yeah,” I grunted, darkly amused by the irony of her question and chalking the whispering up to an imagination disenchanted by a decade of loneliness.

* * *

The labs consisted of a huge, maze-like complex with white-coated scientists popping in and out of rooms. Some carried smart glass pads that could produce holographic images of our brains. I was unfamiliar with most of the scientists, but as we passed, a few stopped dead in their tracks, inspecting my eyes before continuing on to their own assigned subjects whose minds they handled freely.

These subjects had eyes like mine, yet most of them were years younger, and all of them had better control of their abilities. Within a glass cubicle I noticed Lila, a playful adolescent with purplish hair and an uncanny ability for remote perception. I paused as her handler wrote coordinates on a whiteboard: 02R3-0144, corresponding to a target through mental association. Sitting in front of a Union map, Lila entered a meditative state and pointed toward the sea.

A few rooms down I found little Noah, who was telekinetically revolving an egg around a world globe, much to the intrigue of two scientists. Noah was one of the few children I was close to because of our shared duties working in the fields weekly with Evelyn and the orphans. The bright-eyed twelve-year-old smiled warmly as I passed; the scientists expressed disappointment as he lost focus and the egg fell and cracked on the ground.

Then I passed Maya, Lila’s dark-skinned friend of the same age who had the gift of clairvoyance. She went through a deck of cards with extrasensory ease. The man who was testing her revealed a queen and grinned in contentment. Powerful energy surged from an unknown place within, and I averted my eyes before Alice pushed me along.

I did not recognize the others we passed. All of my distinctive comrades had arrived after me, some within the past few weeks. When they first brought me in as a young boy, the Facility was a smaller military base used to construct weapons. With more and more large-eyed, psychic children born across the Union every year, there were now countless numbers of us being tested in the labs each Sunday. They called us the new youth. And we had become their newest weapons. To some, we were the next step in human evolution—to others, nothing more than radiation-afflicted freaks. I was used to this, for I was the one who started it all.

As we passed a boy with a shaved head who couldn’t have been older than nine, I was uncomfortably reminded that I had no idea what had happened to their parents. I couldn’t ask most of them, as they liked us to interact as little as possible—a safeguard against psychic rebellion. Even with those few exceptions, I was too nervous to bring it up. All I could do was reassure myself that perhaps they were safer here anyway, in one of the rare corners of the earth untouched by disaster and deadly energy.

All at once, alarms blared throughout the building.

Yelling echoed in the distance, and myriad scientists rushed out into the corridor. In their eyes, I saw that they feared the worst: that we were under attack by the enemies of the Union, rising up once more to take what was left of the planet.

For a minute, I was also afraid. Yet a dark part of me hoped for this destruction. It craved it. In my mind’s eye, a grim scene showed the labs and the Facility all burning away, and with it the years of traumatic memory. I caught myself smiling.

Then, I spotted Cyrus.

Curiously naked with the exception of his briefs, the burly teenager sprinted around the corner, determined to bulldoze through the crowd of stunned scientists. As he ran and shrieked, it became clear that this wasn’t the same Cyrus I had known since we were young. His arms flailed. His enormous eyes were aflame. And his screams were terrifying, louder than the alarms. Gone was my smile as I stared in bewilderment.

What have they done to him?

Before I had time to think, he was headed straight for me. I stood stiff, trapped like Medusa’s prey, entranced by the power within those eyes.

“Move!” a man shouted from behind, thrusting me aside with brute force.

I gazed up in horror from the floor at the three soldiers who took my place. Clad with white body armor and helmets concealing their eyes, they pointed their weapons, and time seemed to slow. It took shots from each of them to bring Cyrus to his knees. Tiny darts hit his skin, funneling currents of electricity through his trembling body for several terrible seconds until he passed out.

The spectators gasped, for it was painful to see my benevolent, bushy-haired friend sprawled unconscious across the floor. As part of the first wave of children at the Facility, Cyrus was one of the few close to me in age, closest in unhinged ability, and therefore closest in testing procedure. As the scientists slowly gathered around him, I could do little but pray for my psychic counterpart to keep on breathing.

The soldiers stowed their weapons. The alarms ceased, replaced by quiet murmuring. A few moments later, a slight man with hunched shoulders and a fidgety demeanor wriggled through the crowd.

“Where is he?!” demanded Dr. Salazar, appearing next to Cyrus with eyes wide behind his spectacles. He caught my gaze, giving me a nod before angrily confronting the soldiers. “What have you done?”

They did not react. After all my years at the Facility, I had yet to figure out if they were even fully human.

“On the contrary, Malcolm, what have you done to the boy?” challenged another scientist, the one who worked with Noah. “Your reckless experimentation had him screaming like a madman.”

“Don’t question me, Erwin. If only you had seen the power I unleashed in him! Nasty hallucinations can be a side effect, unfortunately.”

“That was more than simply hallucinations. He was clearly in anguish. As usual, it appears you’re playing with darkness.”

“Sometimes one needs the darkness to recognize the light,” Salazar asserted—an interesting sentiment, coming from him—before bending over Cyrus. “Come on now, boy. Wake up,” he said to his naked and debilitated subject. An ominous feeling arose within me. Cold sweat dripped down my neck as my heart pounded back to life, intuiting something to come. The soldiers and scientists stood unsettlingly still. Alice was staring in silence. And as I looked around at all the children watching from their cubicles, my awareness wavered in and out of reality.

Something definitely wasn’t right.

The eyes of the shaved-headed boy grounded me as I connected with them. Smirking slyly despite being trapped behind those thick glass walls, he mouthed one word to me: “Escape.”

More gasps arose as Cyrus twitched on the floor. His eyes opened with a violent snap, and he inhaled. After a moment of stillness, Salazar looked up at the crowd in relief.

“See! He’s—”

Before the lead scientist could finish, his body was propelled ten feet down the corridor, cushioned by several others. Immediately, the soldiers pulled their rifles on the telekinetic culprit.

“No!” I heard myself scream as I barged into one of them, pushing him to the ground. Cyrus thrust back the others with a shriek of psychic will. A glance of gratitude was sufficient before he turned and ran. To my utter astonishment, I ran right after him, through the startled scientists and away from the soldiers retrieving their weapons. Bullets sang as we turned the corner, with a plea from Salazar echoing through the commotion.

“Stop! You can’t kill him!”

We darted through the labs without time to look back, only pausing to make a choice at each intersection. But the corridors were eerily empty, and there wasn’t an end in sight, only more corners. We were rats scurrying through a labyrinth, yet we ran nonetheless. We ran until we were breathless. We ran until we were convinced we were running in circles, for there were no scientists and no exits—not even any doors! Soon, there wasn’t a sound but our own heavy breath.

“We need to get out of here!” Cyrus bent over with exhaustion at a four-way intersection. “Where’s the way out?”

“I thought you knew,” I said, still in disbelief.

“My mind is not right, Samuel. But you’ve been here the longest.” His eyes glowed, a fiery red swirling around his pupils. “Samuel?”

“I . . . I can’t remember.”

“Come on, Samuel. Trust your gut. It has to be in there somewhere.”

I stared at my palms as if they would provide an answer, and remarkably, I felt a sharp tingling in my right as a faint memory emerged through my dazed awareness.

“This way!”

We ran along our chosen path, not knowing where it would lead. But it wasn’t long before we noticed an unusual sight along the colorless walls: a blue wooden door, sanctuary from the storm. I wasn’t sure if I had ever seen this door, yet a part of me recognized it. I turned the handle; it was open.

“I guess we have no other choice,” Cyrus said. Voices and the sound of pounding feet closed in from either direction. I nodded, and we stepped through together.

As the door shut behind us, we found ourselves in what seemed like an old storage room, filled with so many dusty objects that I could barely make out the walls. Hurriedly, I approached a circular stone table sitting near the corner and attempted to drag it to the door. My arms were too weak. I gathered my strength before trying once more.

It lifted into the air with no effort at all. There it remained, levitating.