A man with yellow eyes sometimes flashed across Dawn’s mind in sleep. There seemed to always be a bright light just behind him, so his silhouette was animated perfectly. How distinct a shape it was, too. Tall. Robust. A proud, gigantic span of wings stretched out from his back. A name fluttered through space around him. Drago… Drooga… Drogan? Drogan, Dawn settled on. But were the yellow-eyed, winged man and Drogan the same person? She couldn’t be sure just yet. But what was that light behind him? Was it significant?
Of course. The explosion, Dawn recalled. It was as bright and big as a star. It was bigger than any planet she’d ever seen. Dawn remembered fleeing it, then an intense, heavy sadness. That was as far as she got before three sharp knocks rattled her door.
“The hell are you knocking for, when I can’t even open it?” Dawn snapped, even while stuck in her relaxed, cross-legged stance.
“Now, Ms. Redding, we talked about this. You show me respect and courtesy and I’ll do you the same. You were doing so well, too,” Marcus’ voice came through. He sounded genuinely disappointed.
“I was? I’ve been… How many times have you been to see me, since the time I slammed my head into the wall?” Dawn asked.
“Three,” Marcus told her, too quick to have been a lie.
“Holy…”
“The memory loss is progressing. We need to make some headway on your treatments now. Will you come to the door?” Marcus requested, with a sickening tone of politeness.
“What, you don’t want to come in here with me?” Dawn prodded, a vein throbbing in her neck, “What could you possibly be afraid of?”
“The only thing weighing on my mind, Dawn, is what might happen to you if we don’t make some progress. It’s time for a field test,” Marcus told her. There was an alien, oddly real tone of worry to his voice. It was enough to get Dawn to stand, at least. “Please. If you want to remember… If you want to help yourself, help everyone, help me.” Dawn ran a hand backward through her thick, knotted hair. She took one last, deep breath of meditation.
“Alright. Open up,” she said.
The first time Dawn saw anyone - that she remembered, anyway - besides Marcus and her nurses, was in a big gymnasium. The light brown wooden floors were so glossy it that hurt to stare at them. Instead, Dawn occupied her time instead, by alternating between glances at the new gray sneakers Marcus had given her and the other subjects of the Slayer Program’s first field test. Every one of them was thin, like Dawn. It would take the mass of any two of them to achieve Marcus’, and he was hardly a humongous man. Side effects of the treatment, Dawn supposed.
Each of them had wild, untamed and overgrown hair. They all bore the same, dull colorless t-shirt, shorts and shoes. That was where all similarity ended. Each test subject seemed to have been chosen distinctly to be different from all others. Across the seven, including Dawn, there was a wide spectrum of ages, skin, hair and eye colors and heights. There were three men and four women. Dawn scanned each of them through her periphery in search of a memory trigger. A name. A face she knew. All the while, Marcus and two nurses paced across the other side of the gym, jotting on their clipboards.
“Hey, crazy,” the woman next to Dawn whispered. Her eyes shot to the sound - the first thing Dawn remembered that sounded familiar.
“Says the voice in my wall,” Dawn murmured back to the woman. Both of them made a little half-turn to see each other better. Morgan. Dawn was absolutely confounded at the sight of her. When last they spoke, Morgan said the two had known each other before this crimson prison. How could I forget…a face like that? Dawn wondered, when nothing came to her at the sight of the half-woman-half-machine. Three of Morgan’s limbs were entirely made up of steel pumps and pistons. Her left arm was wrapped in an inked mural of Dragons. Her eyes were starkly different from each other. One a dull blue, the other an artificial yellow.
“You remember something now, eh?” asked Morgan. Her wrinkled old jaw bent in a smirk.
“Just from…whenever the last time we spoke was. When you told me your name through the wall,” Dawn admitted.
“Well…if anything’s going to jog your memory, it’s this,” Morgan told her. “The irony is downright mythic. Yours is one of the most whispered names in the galaxy. The girl who saved us all. The only one who doesn’t remember is you.”
“Wait - you know what happened to me? Before this, I mean?” Dawn couldn’t help a few loose steps toward the old woman. Any progress beyond a few inches was stopped in an instant by an invisible wall. At least, it was so clean and clear it seemed to be invisible, though it was only glass. “What…the hell…”
“You’ve got it bad, huh?” Morgan chuckled, “You already did that once before.”
“There’ve been…other tests like this?” Dawn shuddered. She fell away from the invisible wall and slumped where she stood.
“This is the fifth… There used to be ten of us,” Morgan told her, with half her previous gusto.
“Alright, patients. Most of you know the drill bu-”
“Patients?” a dark-skinned man three glass booths down screamed. There was a manic humor about him. His eyes were remarkably open, to the point that Dawn wondered if he had eyelids at all. Blood vessels rippled his skin like tree roots under topsoil. “Call us what we are! Lab trash! Prisoners! Maybe contestants in some sick game show you’re running here! Not like you tell us jack shit.”
“Talkative today, are we Michael?” Marcus mused. He made an urgent note of it on his clipboard. “Perhaps this is a game show, and knowledge is the prize? Hm?” He let the thought linger among the seven prisoners in seven glass boxes. It was a long while before he said, “Data from these tests will be transmitted directly to an associate of mine on Neptune. The work we’re doing here… It’s more than important.” Marcus began with his eyes on Michael alone, but turned to each of his patients as he went on. “The continuation of our species depends on it. On you, Slayers.”
“This… This is about the Dragons, isn’t it?” Dawn dared to stomp a few steps toward her finely-dressed warden. Her nose flattened against more glass after two steps. Marcus raised her an eyebrow, jotted something on his board, then continued on like he hadn’t heard her.
“As I was saying. Most of you know the drill, but for those of our patients with memory issues…” Marcus stepped aside to reveal a wooden stool with a cup on top of it. A tiny piece of silver glittered on the floor beside it. Their instructor flicked a finger out at it. “This coin on the floor is called a quarter. Once upon a time, long before the formation of the WCC, it was currency. A quarter. Now? It’s just a scrap from a forgotten time. Isn’t worth what it weighs. Which is precisely what we will all become, should we fail here. Your goal is to put the quarter in the cup. Begin.”
The immediate shift in energy between her fellow Slayers was instant, and beyond puzzling. Each of them tensed against the nearest wall of glass. They shut their eyes tight. Some of them started to shake after a few seconds. Then the grates of a vent shifted above her head, and she understood why. They were holding their breath. Dawn sucked down whatever she could swallow too, before heavy black mist fell down through the vent.
The stuff resembled mist for only a second, before it changed shape. Dawn knew from the way it unfurled, condensed, ran and billowed through the air all a
t once what it was. While she had no idea what to call it, she knew it was the same black substance Marcus and the nurses had injected her with. Dawn flattened against the glass behind her to get away from it, but the stuff moved with a haunting vestige of will. Tentacles of darkness rolled out of it to graze her arm, then evaporate to smoke once more.