Lasciate Ogne Speranza Voi Ch'intrate, Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here

[Selene]

The dark hours following Selene's abduction stretched on into days, then weeks, months, until it seemed that she'd been in the clutches of these frightening men for ages with no sign of relief, let alone rescue, forthcoming. In all, three cycles of the sun and moon had passed since the night that she was taken from her motel room by a gun-wielding militants. Her only memories from that moment on were being blinded by a dark, musty hood and shoved into some kind of vehicle which her captors used to speed away from the scene. There was shooting and shouting - neither in small quantity - and several minutes of rough driving before the getaway vehicle screeched to a sudden halt. Then when all seemed to finally calm, there was a prick on her arm, a sudden rush of heat carried along her bloodstream, and the world was very, very quiet.

When Selene awoke many hours later, it was in a room completely alien to her. Longer than it was wide, the ceiling of that dingy, dimly-lit chamber was so low that her head nearly scraped it when she stood. There was no window in her prison, and her very small, concrete world was illuminated only by a flickering incandescent bulb dangling from the ceiling and the occasional shaft of light that shot across the room when a slot in the heavy iron door screeched open and a plate of crude, usually cold food was shoved through three times a day.

Perhaps it was lucky that Selene missed most of the shouting and shooting. The blow to her head had knocked her senseless for awhile. She had drifted slowly up out of the haze of darkness and opened her eyes the barest of cracks... or at least she thought she had, but it was so dark she thought at first her eyes were still closed. After trying several times to force them open further she realized dimly there must have been something over her head and so she'd just squeezed her eyes closed and wished she was unconcious again instead of bouncing around in the back of god only knew what. She could recall all too well the man crashing into her hotel room and knocking her over the head - and her throbbing, pounding headache was enough to remind her of the later - so she must have been in the back of one of those terrible metal vehichles like the one they'd put Mark in, only this time her father wasn't waiting to hug her when she reached their destination. When the needle pierced her flesh and she felt the fire burning up and down her veins she was certain she was dying. There was no flashing of her life before her tightly closed eyes, only the faces of all the people she wished she could see one last time in order to tell them all the things she wished she'd said...

When Selene awoke again, slowly drifting up out of a haze of darkness and very odd dreams, she wasn't sure wether or not she should be... disappointed. Yes she was alive - how long was that going to last? - but judging by the looks of her prison she didn't think she was in a very good situation. For a long while she had simply laid there where they'd left her staring up at the celing. Her head hurt. She felt drowsy and far off and she worried she might have had some kind of concussion after having her head knocked around like that. Even after she'd been able to move, Selene had spent most of her time curled into a tight ball on the floor. There wasn't a single moment that went by during which she wasn't absolutely terrified. At some point whoever had brought her here was going to come back, and she couldn't imagine anything coming of that that would be any good. When she'd run out of prayers, completly certain that God either wasn't listening or wasn't going to answer, her thoughts drifted to others and she found herself wishing she could make them hear her. Maybe if she thought hard enough she could reach out across whatever empty distance lay between them and somehow bring her father to her terrible prison. Failing that perhaps she could at least tell him all the things she wished she had, like how much she enjoyed having him as a part of her life, and how she was sorry that she'd spoken to him in anger and then run away... if she'd never done that she wouldn't be here now and did he even know that she really had forgiven him? Then she'd think of Mark and wonder if he'd been as terrified when they took him away in the truck as she was now. Was he thinking of her now? Did he know how sorry she was he'd been caught up in all of this? Or had he decided never to speak to her again even before they'd taken her away forever? In the end she forced herself to eat the terrible food they left for her because she had no choice. At first she feared poision but why bother when they could just starve her to death instead? When she'd finished she'd curl up as far away from the door as she could get and begin the process of her desperate thoughts all over again. If her father were coming for her... wouldn't he be here by now? Had he too forgotten about her? She didn't want to believe it, but she had few ways of determining how much time had passed and it felt like a whole year had gone by since she'd first been shut up in here.

The routine continued around the clock without break, the pattern eventually becoming the sole means by which Selene could measure the passage of time, though that measurement had no bearing on anything but the long, grueling intervals between meals. Late in the third day, however, something new and entirely unexpected happened.

Selene was just finishing her ninth meal when the room shuddered with a resounding metallic clank, and the massive iron door that barred her from the wide world outside her coffin-like prison ground slowly open on squealing hinges. She would immediately recognise the two armed men who slipped into her room and hoisted her to her feet by the arms as belonging to the same group as those who attacked the motel that night, bearing the same Russian-made combat rifles slung over their shoulders and clad in the same makeshift uniforms. "Come with us," one of her captors addressed her in broken and heavily-accented English as they dragged her bodily toward the open door.

Selene shuddered at the same time the room did, uncertain of what might be happening. Was her small world going to colapse in on itself and crush her, ending this terrible ordeal once and for all? As the door came open she sat up, pushing her back all the way against the far wall and staring at the two men with wide eyes like those of a frightened animal that has found itself cornered. Finding herself faced with gun weilding men once more, Selene found herself shaking all over, she hugged her arms close over her chest but it didn't help any. She wanted to scream for them to go away and leave her be but they had the guns and she was terrified of doing anything that might anger them. She offered no resistance as they pulled her to her feet, even if she had tried it would have been pathetic indeed, sure Mark had made her take that self defence class once long ago, but it hadn't exactly covered russian men with guns and she hardly thought screaming 'that's my purse' and kicking one of them where the sun didn't shine was going to help her situation any. She stumbled the first few steps, resisting moving forward, fearing what awaited her outside, knowing that it was going to be much worse than being cooped up inside a small room for the rest of time. She feared rape most of all and the way she was dressed could only make that worse.. she had only the small tank top and flowing skirt she'd been wearing when Mark had been driving her up to see the sunset. Selene had never before wished for long sleeves and long slacks and a neckline that brushed the underside of her chin. After those first few steps it became clear that they were going to drag her wether or not she walked on her own so she decided to save herself the brused legs and did her best to walk with her knees and ankles shaking.

[Selene]

The complex that the two armed militants marched Selene through was bland and featureless, certainly built with function far emphasized over style. It looked like a prison, or perhaps some sort of military bunker - the latter perhaps more likely, given that the only breakup in the brick-and-mortar monotony along the course they plotted through narrow hallways and claustrophobic stairwells was the generally shambled nature of the structure. The damage she witnessed along the way to wherever these men were taking her was far too severe to chalk up to even decades of misuse; at some point in the past, or perhaps even now, this building was in a warzone.

Their sojourn through the ruined halls lasted several minutes, until Selene's captors finally led her into a room significantly larger, but no less featureless or poorly illuminated than her cell. Save for the door and the single track of fluorescent lights, the only things in the room were a table, a pair of chairs, and two shadow-wreathed figures apparently standing in wait. "Please," a disjointed male voice cut through the darkness in perfect English, "Sit down."

Normally Selene was the type to take in every detail of anything that presented itself to her. For perhaps the first time in her life she wasn't really inclined to notice the prison her captors had brought her to. The only thing that really penetrated the haze of fear that had taken over her mind was the fact that had she been able to escape the small room she was being kept in, it would have done her no good. There would be nowhere for her to run, and surely the men inhabiting this... whatever it was knew it far better than she. And they had guns. She stared at the shadowy figures that awaited on the other side of the table, certain that she'd now been thrown straight into a horror movie and at any moment they would leap forward and simply consume her before she could even scream. Her eyes were wide with fear and she felt tears burning at their edges. She bit her tongue, trying her best not to let them slide down her cheeks and did as she was asked, smoothing her skirt as she sat in the chair, as if it would make any difference when they decided they wanted to rip it off wether or not it looked nice...

The man who lowered himself onto the chair across the table after Selene settled in was not at all like the rest of her captors. This one was dressed in a pressed three-piece suit in lieu of guerilla combat gear, sporting a well-groomed crop of hair and cleanshaven features that spoke to a definitively South Asian lineage with perhaps a touch of mongoloid geneaology. He seemed more suited for press conferences and parliamentary work than the armed thugs who surrounded him. "We'll start with the basics, miss," the man spoke in a casual, almost friendly tone of voice as he opened a manilla folder on the table in front of him and scanned the contents with his dark eyes. "Your name and nation of birth?"

Selene wasn't buying the friendly act for a moment. Either that guy was going to order his cronies to shoot her or he was going to leap over the table and rip her cloths off, she just didn't know which one yet. Her fists tangled in her skirt where it lay across her legs in front of her and squeezed until her knuckels were white. Once she'd watched a show about military interrogations. Actually she hadn't really watched it and now she wished she'd actually paid attention. She'd only left it on because her father had just told her the truth about his history and she'd needed some kind of noise while she was doing her class work. She remembered something about only saying one's name rank and serial number; but all she had was a name, and it wasn't even a very exciting one, the only person they could possibly be interested in that she had anything to do with was her father, and they didn't even have the same last name. But these questions seemed innocent enough she saw no reason to lie. Her voice cracked the first time, and her second attempt was quiet and somewhat high pitched but she managed to say, "Selene Brodrick. I'm an American."

"Miss Brodrick," echoed the man in the suit without looking up from the documents laid out on the table before him. By the expression that coloured his dark features, whatever was printed on those papers must have been very interesting. Unfortunately, Selene wouldn't understand a word of it - everything was transcribed in a completely foreign script. Arabic? Hindi? East Asian? "Why were you at that hotel under guard, Miss Brodrick? What is your connection to the UNISCI Skygate Project?"

Selene shifted somewhat uncomfortably. She wasn't supposed to talk about anything she did with the Skygate Project, it was all supposed to be top secret and she was lucky she even knew it exsisted. On top of that the story about why exactly she'd been at a motel under guard was extremely long and convoluted not to mention embarassing and once again containted pieces that were supposed to be secrets. She was going to have to lie, but she was terrible at lying, and she knew it. She tried to remember what the show had said about lying, but she couldn't remember much of it, and even if she'd been able to she was still too horrible a liar to hope they'd believe her. She decided to try to use as much truth as she could. If she left some bits and pieces out and only used little white lies it might be somewhat believable. "Th...there was a mistake." she began slowly, and so far that was true. "A good friend of mine took me on vacation for a few days," her voice was shaking but she still hadn't lied yet. "My friend... he.. he was arrested for kidnapping." Now she had to find a lie. She wanted to avoid mentioning her father if at all possible, she was pretty sure if he had been in this situation and not her, he would have done the same thing. "He looked like someone else, you see, someone named Eddie." she remembered one of the armed men throwing that name around. "I was just waiting at the motel for the misunderstanding to get cleared up! Then we were going to go back to our vacation." There, that left out every fact that actually explained why she'd been there, but it was basicly the truth. One obsticle surmounted, one left to climb. She tried to remind herself to breath. Her heart was beating so fast she thought it was going to burst out of her chest. "I... I don't know much about the skygate project." she proceeded with catution. "I work at Skygate Institute... to pay my bills, my university tuition. But I'm just an intern... I most help with the files and apointments. They don't tell me very much." Okay that was a complete lie, but she hadn't been able to think of any way to insinuate truth into that one, before she'd even gotten the job they'd impressed upon her that she must never say anything about the top secret work. She was fairly certain that meant 'even if there's a gun pointed to your head'.

The clean-cut man across from Selene pulled his gaze away from the file in front of him to regard her for a moment, and clasped his hands neatly together. He seemed to consider her words for a moment, and after a drawn out silence he finally nodded, flipped the file folder closed, and handed it off to the other man in the shadows.

The file came open again, and half disappeared into the dusky gloom as the other figure in the room held it up to scrutiny. "We are disappointed, Herr Amida." This man, much less amicable (or human) than the one in the suit, spoke in an utterly featureless monotone, as though he were under some sort of hypnotic trance. "She was not the one we paid you to retrieve."

[Selene]

Well wasn't that just peachy! The object of TWO misunderstandings in the same day! Something about that was just a slight bit too hard to believe. But it was true that there was very little reason for them to have grabbed her at all. She was just an intern and few people outside the institute (at least that she knew of) knew she was Major Gegory Barrow's daughter; and the whole different last name was probably enough to throw people right off that trail. Strangely enough sitting there, absolutely sure that she was about to die, Selene was reminded of the day the crazy man had shot at her at the mall... no one had been able to explain that either. She recalled the arguement that had driven her from the institute in the first place and felt a sudden dread growing inside her, it was icy cold in the pit of her stomach. Well Daddy... if I ever do see you again I guess I owe you quite the appology...

The first man's throat bobbed as he swallowed down hard at his mysterious companion's blank admonishment, but showed no outward sign of apprehension beyond that. "We appologise, but my men didn't anticipate the presence of American special forces. They're guerilla fighters, not commandos..."

"Guerilla fighters outfitted with the finest equipment on the market," the silhouetted figure flatly interrupted. "Regardless, the results of this woman's blood tests are interesting. We would accept her as your offer in our exchange, in lieu of the original agreement."

Selene went cold inside. She swore that her heart literally stopped beating for a split second and she didn't know if she was all that happy about the fact that it started up its racing again. Selene had done her own blood work, she had shown her father the results several weeks before all of this insanity had exploded. She knew exactly what they'd seen if they'd taken her blood and knew what to look for. Worse she now knew exactly what that meant, and aside from the fact that her father was right, it meant that she might actually be worth something to someone, despite the fact that she wasn't exactly sure how to make her talent useful, though she was beginning to understand what it must do. Her eyes practically bulged in her head and she sat there frozen and staring. She was being sold! like an object or an animal. It was so completley wrong she felt she should offer an indignate response, but again there were men with guns in the room and she didn't have one, so she clenched her jaw as tight as she could and just stared.

While Selene was rapidly succumbing to a silent, internal state of panic, her clean-cut, well-mannered captor was quite visibly relieved by his companion's last declaration. Whatever this 'original agreement' of theirs had been, it was obviously very important to this man called Amida. "You won't regret this, Mister Falkoner," he promised emphatically.

"See that we don't." The man in the shadows walked past Selene and her captor, and moved toward the exit at the rear of the room. "I will see you again in Tokyo, Herr Amida."

Who were these people? Selene had been thrust into the middle of a very bad spy movie... and she should know, because she'd seen her fair share of crappy spy movies. She'd never believed that real people actually acted like this. What was all this about Tokyo? Suddenly she understood why her father hadn't come for her yet. He doesn't know where I am! she felt her last hope shattering into a thousand pieces to be swept away by the wind, if ever she felt the wind on her skin again. Selene Brodrick simply deflated. There was none of her father's strength inside of her now, she was absolutely certain. She was on the verge of absolutely falling apart. She'd just been sold to some crazy inhuman man and he was taking her to Tokyo where she'd never see anyone she cared about ever again. Her fists worked in her skirt, opening and closing a few times and finally setteling tightly back into their former clenched position. Her shoulders sagged and her head bowed into her chest and though she fought with every bit of will left in her, Selene couldn't stop a few tears from sliding out of the sides of her eyes and down her cheeks. They burned with fear, with shame, and somehow she couldn't find it in herself to care. After all... she didn't have anything left to lose.

Amida pursed his lips and nodded slowly, taking a moment to reflect on the events of the brief interview. He'd dodged a proverbial bullet, that much was very certain. His people needed this deal desperately, and an overzealous soldier on the ground had nearly cost them that. After a long, silent moment passed, the paramilitary leader leaned back in his chair and signaled his men with a wave of his hand. "Take her back to her cell, and begin preparations."

Back in her cell, Selene curled up against the familar far wall, pulled her knees to her chest, laid her head upon them and allowed herself to sob while there was no one around to see. Now she would only too happily have gone back to the day she'd screamed at her father and accept his safe arrangement with Dr. Newton. This is what she got for wanting to remain in control of her life... she'd lost complete control over everything. She sobbed until all her tears were spent and then she remained curled into her tight ball, once more wishing that if she could just think hard enough her thoughts could reach out to her father. She knew where she was going now... he'd come if he knew, wouldn't he? But he didn't. And in the darkness of her dispair Selene was surprised to learn that she would miss Mark almost as much as she would miss her father.