Current Day:
“Wake up, Ms. Lowe. Up and at ‘em.”
Mel opened her eyes. Her head burned, pain surging through the layers of sleep.
She was in a white, sterile looking room. There were a few people hovering by the only exit. There were no windows.
And Mel didn’t know what was going to happen.
Lastly, her eyes settled on a figure towering over her bed. She was in a bed?
It was an elderly man; his face was bright, almost gleeful, but somehow mirthless. There was a crazed, wild glint in his eye that made Mel shiver. She started to sit up, but discovered that her arms and legs were secured to the bed.
“Where am I?” she croaked, her voice hoarse from lack of use.
“In my home. My facility… And your place of birth,” the man said.
“What?” Mel was incredulous.
“You are… my first success. My first… triumph.”
“Who are you?”
“I am Amadeus. Your creator. And, in a way, your father.”
“What are you talking about…?” Mel’s voice, dry with dehydration, cracked and crumbled. Much like her spirit.
“Your parents never told you that you were adopted? Hmm… How are Jack and Helen?”
“Let me go!” Mel squirmed and writhed, struggling to free her limbs from their shackles. Nothing happened, aside from her head hurting still more. No one moved to stop her. They simply watched her antics with interest. She made no other reply, so he continued.
“I can’t. It’s taken a long time to find you, Ms. Lowe. Yet here you are. And I’m sorry about the headache. I’m afraid that we had to keep you under for the best results. We’ve been conducting a memory scan… Your head is quite a full one. I, and my assistants, have managed to unlock the key to your ability.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
The man’s beard shook as he chuckled.
“Of course not. You see, Ms. Lowe, I found you. Abandoned on my doorstep, so to speak. I won’t go into the details; they really aren’t that interesting. I tested you, experimented… And, most importantly, I didn’t feed you anything that wasn’t artificial. For months you were fed through a tube. And it affected you, though we didn’t know. You’ve never been the same.
“But your results hadn’t shown any abnormalities; they didn’t show up for nearly a year! And I thought my experiment was failed. So I placed you into the foster system. And you disappeared… And now I have found you. At last…” He rubbed his hands together, and continued, relishing the moment.
“As I said, we’ve been scanning your memory, and have revealed some interesting facts. Your ability flares up when you are looked at through mirrors, or after you ingest organic materials, or when you look at trees. There are other triggers. However, these are the most significant. That is why the pain from your first premonition was so violent: you’d been in contact with three triggers beforehand.”
A klaxon sounded, and the man looked at a man next to the door. They both nodded.
“I’m sorry to do this, Melody. I never meant to cause you pain. But I can’t help it; there are greater forces at work here… Oh, yes, two things. Firstly, the reason you haven’t been having premonitions in this facility, or in the forest, is that we’ve been injecting you with preservatives. These seem to calm your system, and return your brainwaves to a laconic pace. It should wear off in about thirty seconds. I’m about to give you another dose. The last thing… Would you like to know how I found you? I shall tell you.
“You submitted a short story to a website, under a pseudonym. I found it, about five years ago. I noticed how similar the symptoms of your character were to my other subjects. And then, you registered at a Vermont hotel under the same name four years ago. So we tracked you down, with the help of the woman you met in the forest so long ago. I can’t seem to recall the name of the story… Oh, yes… It was called ‘Intuition’.”
He unscrewed the top of a bottle of serum. A thick, clear liquid floated inside, and slowly, he drew a needle from his pocket and filled it with the fluid.
“Like I said, I’m sorry to do this. But the time is up, and you may start to predict what we’re going to do to you. And that would be more painful then actually having it done… Don’t worry, we’ll have you under the whole time. Though I’m sure you can predict exactly what I’m going to do with this needle, even without your ability.”
He bent, and stuck the needle into her arm.
Her last thought wavered, then she fell into the blackness again.
I have to get out of here. I’m going to get out of here.
The only problem was, she didn’t know if it was simply her desperate need to escape, or her ability.
Her Intuition.
