I WAS AWAKE, BUT I couldn’t open my eyes. Sounds surrounded me. I heard whispers of unfamiliar voices and the squeaks of shoes against slick floors. My eyelids felt heavy when I tried to open them. There was a bad taste in my mouth, and I licked my lips, which felt dry. I tried to lift my hands thinking that maybe I could peel my eyelids open, but they wouldn’t move. They were held down by something.
“I think she’s waking up,” a hushed voice said with a slight accent. It was familiar, like I had heard it on the radio or over the intercom at school. It was not someone I knew. But it enticed me to try and wake up.
My eyelids opened, and for a moment, all I saw was white. The lights were burning bright, making me feel fuzzy and disoriented. I blinked a few times and then looked around at what was around me.
It looked like a doctor’s office but not quite like any doctor’s office that I had ever been in before. The counters were a spotless white, and I was strapped to a chair, like the one I sat in when I went to the dentist. There were computers, machines set up all over the place. There were a handful of people in the room sitting at the computers; one of them was in front of a large touchscreen looking at a very complicated chart. An IV was attached to my hand, and there was a consistent beep ringing through the hush of the room, sounding very much like a heart monitor. Were they monitoring my heart?
The strangest part of the room though was on the ceiling, right above my head. It was an incredibly large lion’s head attached to the body of a female, with the letters SF boldly intertwined around her body. I looked around and noticed it on the computers, the machines. It was everywhere, like a symbol, like a mascot.
I didn’t know where I was, except that I felt like I was in a weird sci-fi movie or an alien was about to burst from my chest or something. What I did know was that I was exhausted. Even if I hadn’t been strapped down, I didn’t know that I could move my arms or legs. They felt heavy, like they weren’t even a part of my body. I felt dead. Was I dead?
“You’re not dead, Miss Valentine.”
I jumped. Had I actually asked that question out loud? I turned toward the voice and was met with a face, a face that was blurry in my memory, but I knew that I had seen it before.
It was a woman, probably in her late fifties to early sixties. Her skin was dark, the color of melted chocolate on a hot summer day, and her hair was deep black, impossibly black, except for the streaks of silver that weaved through it. She was tall, taller than most women that I had met in my life, but it also could be the way she carried herself, poised, ready, standing with her feet together, examining me carefully.
“How do you know my name?” I asked, my voice rough. My tongue felt like sandpaper, and I was having a hard time getting the words from my brain to my lips.
“It is amazing how easily you can find a person just by taking one simple fingerprint,” she answered, stepping closer to me. One of the other people in the room, a young man, came up to her and whispered in her ear. She nodded, and he immediately turned and walked away.
My fingerprint. Searching for the memory in my brain was like fighting my way through an impenetrable fog. And then I remembered. I had been fingerprinted when I was about thirteen years old, as a precaution. Of course. Everything my dad had done in my life had been a precaution of some sort. “Where am I?” I managed to ask.
“You are at Sekhmet Facilities, Miss Valentine, in the medical rooms,” she answered. She had an accent, British with a touch of something else, something unfamiliar to me.
There was that word again: Sekhmet. “What is…Sekhmet? Sekhmet Facilities?” Each word came out carefully. I wondered if this was what it was like to learn to speak. I was unsure of each word that came from my mouth.
“Sekhmet Facilities is my research institute. We do quite a variety of things here,” she explained. “Do you know who I am? Well, no, of course not. You probably don’t.” She laughed, and it sounded beautiful, full of chimes and bells. I had never felt so charmed by a laugh before. “My name is Doctor Cylon. Razi Cylon.”
I squinted at her for a moment, and it dawned on me where I had seen her before: a news conference on my television so many months before. “You’re from the CDC. I remember you on the news.”
She hesitated, biting her full bottom lip. “Well,” she said, carefully, “it is true that I was once affiliated with the CDC, but my primary focus is Sekhmet and the objectives of the company as a whole.”
She was speaking, but her words made no sense. She raised a hand to my face, her nails a bright crimson red, to brush back a strand of my hair and tuck it behind my ear. I recoiled from her touch. Her hands were cold, unnaturally cold, and the mere touch of her skin on mine had sent shivers up my spine.