Keeping track of Earth time with limited access to the world outside of the Governor’s Palace wasn’t easy, but Jane had always been pretty good at math. If her numbers were right, it was January 9th, 1968—a week after her sixteenth birthday—when she finally snapped.
She’d worked so hard during her time as a servant to make her superiors trust her, to persuade them she wouldn’t beg for help or run away at the first chance she got. There was no solid escape plan, just a few vague ideas and the certainty that there had to be some way out. So, she took her time, forced herself to smile and nod and dig her fingernails into her skin so hard they drew blood. Whatever it took to keep even a hint of irritation or frustration or pure anger from showing.
Then, she would return to her room and snap stolen tablet pens in half. Rip up any paper she got her hands on. Scream in the shower.
When it was really bad, when the list of commands and criticisms of her completed tasks and lectures about moving too slow became too much to take, Jane stopped listening. She did try, but her mind refused to cooperate. It was somewhere else. Unaware. Unfeeling.
And that’s where it all went wrong.
“Jane! Are you listening to me?” Her supervisor, a North Kronosian relative of the Starrs themselves snapped his fingers in front of her face. “Maybe if you stopped daydreaming, you could get dishes washed in a decent amount of time.”
Jane couldn’t stop her response from spilling out. “Maybe if you paid me, I’d give a damn!”
Other servants working on food prep nearby—they were slaves, really, but Starr preferred the first term—looked on in horror. A few gasps cut through the thick tension in the kitchen.
“What was that?” the supervisor hissed. What was his name again? Jane was supposed to know. She’d tried to learn. But she couldn’t seem to keep much in her brain these days.
“I don’t care anymore,” Jane told him. “Do your worst.” She’d been here four years. Maybe a change of scenery would be good. Maybe she could find some way to escape while she was transported to wherever servants were sent when they were no longer wanted at the palace.
The supervisor barked out a cold laugh. “You’re going to regret that. I almost feel sorry for you.” He nodded to a couple of guards nearby and pointed at Jane. “This one. Labs.”
Jane expected the guards to escort her out of the kitchen, maybe with some forceful dragging if she refused to move her feet. But one moment she was standing, the next a pulse gun touched her neck, and then she was out cold.
This time there was no in-between, no vague sense of moving from place to place, no floating in darkness. Jane woke up lying on the concrete floor of a cell. She sat up and pulled herself to the bars.
“Hello?” she yelled. “Where am I?”
“Shut up!” a raspy voice called back from somewhere else in the cell block.
Jane’s hands tightened around the bars. “Not until I get an answer!”
“You’re in Sky Labs,” another voice said. “Now shut up. Some of us are trying to rest.”
“We’re all as good as dead, anyway,” someone else added.
Jane regretted saying anything at all as arguments broke out in the cells around her. She laid down on her back and stared at the ceiling until the voices faded and eventually, the world turned from near black to a dull gray.
Guards in plain gray uniforms came. They brought her food and water and refused to answer her questions. All she was able to gather was that she was waiting for her turn to be experimented on.
She used the meal schedule and the changing light to keep track of both Kronos time and Earth time. Days passed. Weeks passed. Months passed. On what Jane was pretty sure was Christmas morning, she was finally pulled from her cell.
The assortment of aliens in lab coats barely acknowledged her presence as guards strapped her to a table. To them, she was nothing more than a number.
“ID?” a woman’s voice asked.
“Seven-dash-sixty-dash-alpha-mu,” another replied.
A man set a smartsphere on a nearby table. “Begin recording,” he commanded. “This is test number one of serum version twenty-eight for the Advanced Cybernetics Integration Project. Human trials.” He tapped the sphere and scrolled through the text it projected. “This time, we will administer the serum three days before replacing limbs with the ones we’ve manufactured.”
A four-armed scientist with shiny black skin and long antennae extending from his face moved to stand over Jane. He held a tablet in one hand, a pen in another, and a smartsphere in the third. With his fourth, he picked up a mask connected to a machine through a tube and placed it on Jane’s face. She tried to pull away, but it was no use.
“Trust me, you’re going to want to be unconscious for this,” he said as he fastened it to her face.
“What is this?” Jane asked. “Anesthesia?”
No one answered. Something pricked her left arm, and she glanced down to find a needle in her skin. A dark blue liquid raced through a tube into her blood. She grimaced. It was freezing, and oddly heavy in her veins.
Her breathing quickened. “What is that? What’s in my blood?” A fruity scent filled the mask. Her eyes locked onto the monitor on the opposite wall. The date and time blurred. Was this real? Was she still in her cell dreaming?
Jane woke up screaming. In excruciating pain. Her blood was ice and her skin was on fire and her heart hammered against her ribs. A monitor beeped, faster and faster, and then it flatlined.
She woke up again. Now, everything was cold. Something under her skin was cold. Her right arm was gone. The monitor on the wall hummed so loudly her skull trembled. There was an unbearable ringing in her ears.
The next time she woke up, her arm was back, but it was wrong. It felt frozen, and when she tried to lift it, it was heavier than it should have been.
“Beginning test of limb functions,” someone said.
A hand took Jane’s right wrist, and a blade pressed against her arm. Blood welled on her skin. Another voice spoke. “Blood vessels are functioning.”
“Prepare her for the second round of brain operations,” a man said as someone bandaged the cut. “If that’s successful, we’ll move on to limb reinforcements and artificial organs.”
The next wave of darkness was longer and colder. Jane came out of it slower, with blackness receding from her vision gradually while lights danced and fuzzy people moved around her.
The date on the monitor—and some quick math—told her it was January 2nd. Her seventeenth birthday.
“Heart rate and breathing are steady. Activate the brain system.”
Sharp pain fired through Jane’s skull. Her vision flashed white before fading back to normal, save for the jumbled numbers and text and symbols scrolling along the right side of her vision.
“System online. Transferring time data.”
The text disappeared. The current Kronos time appeared in the bottom right, semi-transparent.
“Okay, we’re going to have you try a few things for us,” a green-skinned woman said, not lifting her gaze from the tablet she held in webbed hands. Was she talking to Jane? “See if you can make the time disappear and reappear in the corner of your vision.”
“What—?” Jane struggled for air. “Where—?”
“Just make the clock disappear—”
Jane’s hands tightened around the edge of the table. “Back away!” she gasped at the scientists crowding around her. “I can’t breathe.”
“Heart rate’s spiking,” someone warned.
Jane tried to pull away from the crowd pressing in, but there was nowhere to go. She yanked a hand back and found metal cuffs around her wrists. The chain connected to them clinked against the table. “Please. I can’t—”
“The subject needs to calm down before we attempt mental and physical tests,” a deep voice ordered. “Put her back in her cell. We’ll give her sedatives before bringing her back out.”
Jane wasn’t quite sure what happened after that. Did they give her more anesthesia? A pulse? Did she black out the memory of being dragged back to her cell? The next thing she knew was on the frigid concrete floor in the fetal position, every inch of her body screaming in pain.
The pain was too much for her to even think for the first few hours. After that, it either lessened, or she adjusted. Either way, she was finally able to process her surroundings. Someone had chained her to the cot in the corner of the cell. Metal shackles hung around her wrists.
Jane sat up, gasping and shivering, and held up her hands. She couldn’t point out any visible difference between them, but something about her right hand was…wrong.
She turned her attention to the clock in the corner of her vision and tried to mentally command it to disappear. Nothing happened. She tried harder. It flickered.
What else did they put in her head? They couldn’t have gone through all that trouble for a clock. Jane climbed to her feet. The dull ache that had settled into her body sharpened. She hissed in pain but kept herself upright.
Footsteps and voices signaled that people were coming. Jane tugged on her chains. The cot moved a few inches with surprising ease. Hadn’t that thing been heavier before?
Jane moved her gaze to her right arm, desperately searching for some imperfection that would prove it wasn’t her own. She frowned. There were faint scars near her shoulder. They’d cut above her tracking chip. If it hadn’t been a dream and they’d really replaced her arm—she shuddered at the thought—then that thing had to be gone.
Two scientists, accompanied by six guards—a bit excessive, Jane thought—stopped in front of her cell. “Be ready to pulse her,” the scientist on the right warned as one of the guards unlocked the door.
The other scientist—a man with tan scaled skin and thin white hair sprouting from his head—spoke to Jane. “It would be in your best interest to cooperate with us,” he said. His deep voice was the one that had ordered a break so Jane could calm down the last time she was in the lab. “Help us with our tests, and we’ll get you some better living conditions. You have the opportunity to be our equal, not our prisoner.”
Jane eyed the guards. The cell door easing open. The chains that bound her to the cot. What was the worst they would do if she tried to escape and failed? She was valuable. They put time and money into her. What did she have to lose?
The first guard entered the cell.
Jane lunged, yanking her arms forward. The cot flew off the floor and slammed into the guard, knocking him to the ground.
Her skull hummed.
The next guard started toward her in slow motion. Jane moved to attack again and found herself moving slow, too, though not quite as slow as the guard. She picked the cot up off the floor and threw it at him, marveling at how easy the metal bed was to lift. The guard and the cot tumbled to the ground. The chain broke free of the leg it had been attached to and snapped somewhere in the middle.
Now Jane had a chain dangling from each wrist. The clock in her vision disappeared, replaced by numbers flashing on top of the approaching guards. Heights? Weights? She didn’t have time to decipher them. She swung.
The chains worked as whips, easily knocking aside the guards. The two scientists scrambled out of Jane’s path. The deep-voiced one pulled out a communicator. “Code rogue seven—” he began.
Jane knocked the device out of his hand, shattering it on the concrete floor, before turning and sprinting out of the cell block.
She collided with walls a few times as she sped around corners. She had never run this fast before in her life, and she wasn’t entirely sure whether it was adrenaline or whatever they’d done to her. Though, the more she moved, the more she suspected it was the latter.
Faces of guards came and went. Jane was left with a vague recollection of throwing them into walls or striking them with her shackled wrists or simply racing around them. Whatever metal they’d used to chain her up was weak, cheap stuff that was already heavily dented and bent by the time she found what she hoped was an exit.
Twenty guards had gathered around the door to block her. Definitely an exit. The only weapons any of them had were pulse guns. Were the scientists really that insistent that they not damage her?
Jane stumbled and slammed into the wall at her left. She glanced at her right wrist. The shackle was nearly broken. She hit it against the wall once more, and it fell to the floor in two pieces, along with the chain. Jane picked up the chain and spun it around a few times, testing it as she moved toward the guards.
The world slowed again. Jane worked her way through the guards on instinct. Had the scientists intended her to have this much power? Or was some of her new strength an unexpected side effect of whatever they’d done to her body? Her brain?
Jane reached the thick, metal doors and found them locked. Of course. Her gaze flickered to the box to the right of the doors. She turned and knelt by the nearest collapsed guard. “Key card,” she demanded.
He laughed and pointed his pulse gun at her. “As if I’d—”
Jane slammed her left wrist shackle into his head and ripped his badge off his shirt. Guards stirred around her. One reached for her ankle. Jane kicked the woman’s hand aside, darted to the door, and swiped the key.
As she pushed open the doors, an intercom overhead announced, “We are entering lockdown. Please remain where you are.”
Jane tossed aside the key card. Too little, too late. The doors slammed shut behind her.
The exit spat her out in a dark tunnel. She ran as hard as she could, blindly taking twists and turns and ladders until she spotted light coming down up ahead. For a time, she could hear distant shouts and footsteps, but they’d faded by the time she came to a stumbling halt in the faint neon glow.
The light came through a grate, and it was accompanied by sounds of traffic. Jane examined the ceiling more than ten feet above her. While she assessed the best way to get up, she slammed her left wrist against the wall until the other shackle broke off.
The clock returned to her vision. This time, when Jane willed it to disappear, it did.
She positioned herself under the grate and jumped. To her surprise, her fingers grazed the metal. Her excitement at her unexpected strength was cut short by the pain that shot through her body when she landed and tumbled to the ground.
Jane curled up and forced herself to breathe through the pain. Once it had faded to a dull ache, she stood up and tried again. This time, she was able to wrap her hands around the bars of the grate.
Now that she was here, she wasn’t sure what to do next. She swung forward, and the grate lifted an inch before dropping back into place. She swung again, harder. When the grate lifted this time, she pushed her legs through.
Jane wound up lying on top of the grate beside the opening, groaning in pain. She untangled herself and slid it back into place. When she stood, a few people walking by gave her strange looks, but most didn’t even bat an eye at the ragged girl who’d pulled herself out of the sewers.
She’d made it.
She was on the streets of Kronos.