Fear My Mortality by Everly Frost

had said to me back at the Terminal. They won’t send the usual officers for this one.
    Officer Reid had been at Implosion. He’d sent his wasp after Mom and Dad and then me. He was there for a reason, I just didn’t know why.
    I looked to Mom as the panic spread. She couldn’t let me go with this guy. But she’d dropped her head into her hands and didn’t see the gleam in his eyes, her shoulders shaking as she sobbed. The doctor patted her hand, leaning between us, blocking my view. My legs wobbled and would have given out except that Officer Reid clutched my upper arm.
    The door closed behind us, and my imagination went wild as he propelled me down the corridor. “What are you going to do to me? Really?”
    He didn’t answer until we reached the end of the hall and he punched the down button at the elevator. Once inside, he said, “Tests. Just like the good doctor said.”
    “What kind of tests? Blood tests? What?”
    He clasped his hands behind his back, all casual looking. “Don’t you want to know if you can die?” He looked at me with a strange twinkle in his eye as if he’d just told a joke and I was supposed to smile and say, “Good one.” He had the same eyes as his brother, wide, oval, green. I pictured Aaron that afternoon mocking a gun at his chin and pulling the trigger. I pictured Reid dragging his dead classmates into the storage room, the broom cupboard, squishing their bodies in before they woke up.
    The elevator descended, but my stomach remained on the upper floor. “Everyone dies.”
    He paused before he nodded and spoke. “Eventually.” He shifted so he was half-facing me. “You know, the easiest way to figure out if you can be killed would be to slit your throat right now and see if you heal.”
    His eyes were shining gems. I looked away from him and clamped my mouth shut. I stared at the doors as the elevator descended even more. The button he’d punched looked like some kind of sub-basement. He’d inserted a security key as well. As we passed the lowest level, the elevator continued to descend, new numbers flashing on the display at the top of the door. A small panel extended from the wall and Reid tapped it a couple of times before it slid away, seamlessly disappearing into the side of the elevator again.
    I heard myself mocking Michael about scientists lurking in basements.
    The light blipped above the door. Reid pulled me into an entrance room, lit with green fluorescent lights. On the other side of the small entryway, a steel door gleamed. When the elevator doors shut behind us, he seemed to relax, and I guessed there was no way I could escape.
    “Where are we?”
    He beat a tattoo of numbers into the control panel and went through a series of identification tests: fingerprints, ocular, and voice recognition.
    “Not many people get to see this place. In fact, it doesn’t exist.” He chuckled. “Like Eve and aliens.”
    I pressed my lips together. “You’re not really a Hazard, are you?”
    “They prove useful at times.”
    “That would make you—what?—special forces? Central intelligence?”
    He raised a derisive eyebrow as if to say that I was way off the mark.
    Worse then . “Black Ops.” Another supposed myth. Like the Mirror Room at the Terminal.
    He smirked but didn’t answer. The door slid open and another corridor stretched away into the distance. It reminded me of the Terminal’s corridor with all the doors. We stopped at the second one. It was steel too, except that there was an uneven patch in the middle, as though someone had taken a hammer to it.
    He saw me looking at it. He nudged me in the ribs, making me flinch. “The last one tried to escape.”
    He was suddenly really close to me, so close I smelled the new plastic scent of his suit like an artificial skin encasing his body. It took every ounce of strength in me not to step away. I said, “I just want to get this over with.”
    No sooner were the words out of my mouth than he grabbed me,