Beyond the Sea

Helena - DYAD - 1962

Helena sat, smiling and cross-legged, in the middle of the room. The two scientists watching her through the window looked worried.

“Why is she smiling?” said one in a nervous voice. None of them had seen her smile before. Her teeth looked sharper than was possible. Maybe it was just the way the fluorescent lights played on them. Her eyes glowed, steadily golden, boring right through the mirrored glass. Her head tilted to the side, as if listening to something, and her grin grew even wider.

The other doctor, the not-so-nervous one, checked her watch.

“It’s the subjects lunchtime.” She chuckled, in a humourless way. “The budget for her food alone has tripled in the last six months. She’s probably just happy about getting extra pudding.”

The first doctor, still looking at Helena, frowned. He didn’t think the subject was that easily pleased. His fingers tapped nervously on the sill, then pressed the intercom button.

“Helena?” She shifted her gaze to him, lazily, and he cleared his throat nervously before speaking again. “Helena, you seem happy today. Can you tell us why you’re happy?”

Helena unfolded her limbs and rose to her feet in a relaxed manner, and moved closer to the window. Both the doctors found themselves leaning back slightly as she approached. She had grown to nearly six feet tall now, slender, her hair a white-blond mass of curls falling down past her shoulders. She resembled nothing so much as the old illustrations of angels, although the comparison was lost on these two, creatures of godless Rapture that they were. Possibly it touched some primal gut feeling, the one that said - be afraid.

Her head tilted to the side as she touched her fingers to the glass.

“I’m happy because I’m going to see my sestra soon.” She smiled again as the words left her mouth, a small, certain smile that worried the man even more.

“She’s delusional,” muttered the white-coated woman, her pencil scratching rapidly in her notebook.

Helena giggled and shifted her golden gaze to her.

“немає ти божевільний!”*

The woman’s writing stopped and her eyes shot up to meet Helena’s.

“She can hear us without the intercom? How thick is that glass?”

The man knocked on the window.

“At least an inch and a half. The room’s completely soundproofed. But...I mean...she can see us, even though it’s mirrored on her side. Is it that much of a surprise that she can hear through walls too?” HIs voice had a touch of awe, along with the fear.

Helena made a show of cupping her hand around her ear, and stuck her tongue out at the two of them. Then, seemingly bored, she wandered away and flopped down on her bed, hands behind her head. She closed her eyes for a moment, and behind the mirrored window the pencil flew out of the doctors fingers and clattered on the floor of the observation room. She heard some confused sputtering and she smiled.

She hummed a tune that the entire staff knew by heart now, singing snatches of lyrics as she waited for her lunch. And her chance.

  It's far beyond the stars

 It's near beyond the moon

 I know beyond a doubt

 My heart will lead me there soon

 Happy we'll be beyond the sea....

She didn’t react as the small slot at the bottom of the door rattled and opened, a tray of food sliding into the room. She kept humming, hearing the bolts being shot back into place, footsteps walking away, the voices of the two white-coats in the observation room still buzzing away. She got up, stretched casually, and collected her tray.

They drugged the food, of course. Sometimes the pudding tasted slightly different, and it made her sleepy. Not that it mattered, not any more. Her face soured for a moment. The last test they had taken her for - that was when she knew the drugs no longer worked on her. She had only gotten drowsy, but pretended to pass out as usual. She wanted to know what they did to her.

Now that she did, they were never going to do it again.

The scientists of DYAD seemed to love proving the same thing over and over, and they played with Helena like she was a self-repairing doll. Timing how long it took her body to recover from cuts of various depths, even going so far as to cut off the tip of the little finger on her right hand. The pain was bad, but the itching as it rapidly regrew had nearly driven Helena to distraction. Needles drew blood repeatedly, they scraped skin from the inside of her mouth, they hooked her up to various machines and measured whatever the bad man wanted them to measure.

Helena had wanted to kill them all. But instead, she lay limp, and listened, and learned. The various doctors talked freely in front of the seemingly unconscious subject, but beyond that - she could sense what they hid behind the words. Some were scared, here under some sort of coercion, but most seemed to be just doing a job. To them, she was nothing more than a lab rat. None of them emitted the burning righteousness of Dr Suchong. Helena knew that if it were possible, the bad man would have a thousand Helena’s created, just so he could take each one apart in a different way and discover what made them tick.

Apparently she had somehow absorbed the ADAM into every part of her system at a level never seen before, far beyond the Little Sisters. There were various theories - the larger-than-normal quantities she drank, the onset of hormonal changes, some genetic abnormality, or, as one of the scientists put it with a shrug, just one of those random things.

As she lay there, silent and slack-faced, Helena listened beyond the words and felt out the room she was in, then she expanded her senses outwards. This was a part of DYAD she’d never visited in happier times - none of it felt familiar at all. Ah, there were no vent openings: at least not the ones she was used to. Just small grates, too small to climb into, for the expulsion of air. She could feel weight - this section of the building was underneath the main part of DYAD, deep down, under the ocean floor. She continued to push her senses outwards, until she knew where all the exits were, and how to get there.

She had idly wondered where Rachel was. There was no inkling of her down here, and she hadn’t snuck down for one of her secret midnight visits for quite a while. Maybe she had been locked up as well . Thankfully, the testing came to an end and Helena was wheeled back to the cage to ‘recover’. She had feigned a slow awakening, all the while thinking, thinking, thinking. Pulling at her bottom lip, she had decided the next time they took her out of the cage would be the last time.

Now, she held up her right hand and peered at the pinky. Of course, the ADAM healed her so fast and so proficiently, her skin was flawless. None of the experiments left visible scars, but Helena sometimes thought she could still feel every touch of the scalpel, every sharp point of the needle. She imagined a network of scars under her skin, overlapping like feathers. She wondered what it would be like, above the ocean, flying up, up, into the sky, no one to stop her. She would fly all the way to Sarah, just like in the song,  and they would be together again.

So now Helena smiled and ate her pudding, then put on a good show of yawning and letting her head droop sleepily. After about fifteen minutes, she slumped on the floor and feigned the sleep of the drugged. She remembered what mama Tenenbaum used to say to her and Sarah. I will be quiet as church mouse, maty she thought and couldn’t stop the quick flickering smile that passed her lips.

The white-coats had become somewhat complacent after all this time and didn’t check her as thoroughly as they used to, or strap her to the gurney as tightly. The wheels rattled and Helena’s head lolled on the bleach-white sheet. Only two of them today. Good. With her eyes shut and her other senses working overtime, she knew they were nearing the testing laboratory. When the wheels stopped rolling and the two men busied themselves opening the door, Helena quickly wiggled her left wrist out of the loose strap. Risking a glance through her lashes, she saw the code being punched into the keypad by one, the other checking the roster pinned to the wall.

“Suchong is in today.” he said in a wary voice. “Make sure she’s secured properly - you know what a stickler he is.”

“Stick up his arse.” mumbled the first man. Helena could hear the dislike in his voice, and felt his fear. One of the coerced, she decided. So when he turned to fix her bonds and found her ripping the restraint from her right wrist, she didn’t hit him as hard as she could have. He still flew backwards, hitting the wall with a thump and sliding down to the floor. His eyes were still open, if bleary, and they found Helena. She put her finger to her mouth as if to say shhh. The man’s face looked confused, then cleared. His eyes said good luck and he quickly slumped as the other man turned, already pulling out an electrified baton, the kind they had used on the twins Big Daddy.

Her eyes narrowed to golden slits. Free from her bonds, she was on her feet in an instant, dodging the baton effortlessly, then plucking it from his hands with ease, the man slack jawed at her strength. He held his hands out in a conciliatory manner.

“Look. Helena. Don’t do anything stu-”

She looked at him and recognized him as one of those who had hurt her Daddy and separated her from Sarah and in that instant jabbed the fully charged baton into his stomach. His body went rigid as the electricity ran through his system, then jerked and jittered in place as Helena kept the pressure on, pushing him against the wall, only removing the baton when he slumped forward, then fell to the ground - a slightly blackened corpse with exposed teeth.

Helena spat on him.

Then she looked up at the door which had swung open, and at the shocked faces looking at her. She smiled and stepped into the room.

After a moment's hesitation, three of them rushed at her, grabbing her arms. She shrugged them off, flinging one into the wall, and knocking him out. The other two she grabbed by their skulls and rammed them together. They also fell down, unconscious. Helena then turned to the last white-coat.

Suchong. The bad man.

Even now, he didn’t seem afraid, merely curious, studying her with bright eyes behind his glasses.

“It appears - you - have been keeping secrets - Helena. The extent of -your- strength. Remarkable. I wonder. Do - you - have any other tricks?”

Helena stared at him, a sneer curling the corner of her lip like a worm. Then she quietly said,

“Do you want to see? Or do you want to know ?”

“Hm. I wonder - how - invincible you really -are -.” he pulled a gun out of his lab coat pocket and aimed it at her, flicking the safety off. “Shall we -find- out?”

Helena looked at the gun, then back at this face, and hoped that it would work on something bigger than a pencil. She flexed her fingers and concentrated. The gun span in Suchong's fingers, and shot across the room. A little gasping laugh escaped from her mouth. The doctor looked taken aback for once, his eyes suddenly wary.

Then, she was up close, slapping his still outstretched hand aside and grasping his throat with one hand, pushing him up the wall while he choked and squirmed. Gently, she plucked the glasses from his nose and crushed them in her hand.

“I think -” she said slowly, “that you are a very зла людина.* Only darkness in your heart. So, that is what you get. Darkness.”

She let him slip down the wall, picked him up by his coat and threw him across the room, onto the operating table. Looming above him, her thumbs hooked and stabbed into his eyes. It felt like jello, after popping the initial resistance. Suchong screamed in pain, and, at last, fear. Helena held him down effortlessly, until he stopped screaming and his fumbling hands ceased to scrabble at her. She pulled her thumbs out of his eye sockets and wiped the blood and gore and fluids off on his shirt front. He still twitched and moaned as she shoved him off the table and he hit the floor, seemingly trying to get to his feet but unable to control his limbs. Helena shook her head and whispered,

“Now you see what you are. ”

With that, she took his head in her hands, and twisted it. He fell limp at her feet. She looked down at him, silently, then leaned down and spat on his face.

Closing her eyes, Helena stood and stretched and listened. An alarm had been triggered somewhere, but she would be gone by the time they got here. The exits were nearby, then it was into the vent system and they couldn’t follow her in there. She stepped out into the hallway - the white-coat she had left alive was still there. Their eyes met and she could see fear in his now, as they moved between her and the laboratory door. Helena shrugged and strode away, moving quickly towards the stairwell exit.

As she swiftly padded up the stairs, the concrete cold on her bare feet, she remembered Rachel. The bad man was gone - but there were others. Rachel's awful mother…she pondered this. Sarah would want her to help the other girl. Helena nodded. Then she would go and find sestra-Rachel. Maybe she was ready to leave by now.

And it would be nice to have company, even if it was a touch...chilly.