The Luna and Her Quadruplet Pups

Amaya's POV

"Run. Just bloody run."

I don't know if I'm speaking out loud or if the words are trapped inside my head where everything else is screaming. My bare feet slam against roots and rocks, tearing open, but I did not stop, not even for ones. The facility's antiseptic smell still clings to my skin, mixing with the copper tang of blood, mine, maybe someone else's. I don't remember anymore, I just want to get out of this place.

Branches claw at my arms, my face, my thighs through the thin medical gown that's all they left me. Each scratch burns, but it's nothing compared to the fire they put inside me. The injections. The restraints. The cold metal table and the faceless masks hovering over me while my body betrayed me, over and over again, burning from the inside out during those forced heats.

"Please ..no more.."

Was that me? Or was it Sera?

I stumble, catch myself against a tree trunk. Bark bites into my palms. Sera. Oh dense, Sera. Her screams are still echoing in my ears, high and desperate, coming from the room next to mine three nights ago. Then silence. The kind of silence that means they finally broke something that can't be fixed.

My stomach lurches with something I can't really phantom. I press my forehead against the rough bark, gasping for hair, I'm literally going crazy..

Move, Amaya. They're coming.

I can hear them now, boots pounding earth, dogs barking, men shouting coordinates into radios. They're close. My legs are shaking so hard I don't know how they're still holding me up. Every muscle in my body is screaming, exhausted from the drugs they pumped through my veins, from the testing, from the hell they called research.

Such a clean word for what they did to us. I push off the tree and run again. The forest blurs around me, green and brown and shadow. My lungs are on fire, each breath a sharp blade cutting my throat. How long have I been running? An hour or two? The sun's too low now, sinking between the trees, painting everything in blood-red light.

There's so much blood on my hands. Not all of it is mine. The guard at the south corridor, his eyes went wide when I grabbed the scalpel from the medical cart. I didn't think before driving it inside his stomach.

He fell, and I ran.

"Subject 47, stop! There's nowhere to go!"

The voice booms through a megaphone somewhere behind me. Subject 47. Not Amaya. Just a number. Just a womb they wanted to fill with their perfect hybrid offspring.

My vision swims. I'm seeing double, two paths ahead instead of one. I veer left, or maybe right, crashing through undergrowth that tears at my legs. The medical gown is mostly ribbons now, barely covering anything, but modesty died months ago in that place.