[chaptered] Breaking Zero Kelvin - Chapter 10 (The Black Market)
Sorry this is so late aaaaaaaah D:
Title: Breaking Zero Kelvin (Multichapter)
Author: Luna (dreamweavernyx)
Pairing: Kazuyuri
Genre: Fantasy/Scifi
Summary: AU. They are two runaways, chased out of society through a deep-rooted stigma though they have no say in it at all. Only relying on word-of-mouth rumours and a set of sketchy directions, they now have to set out on their own journey to accomplish the impossible: escape.
Notes: Character list here.
Previous chapters: Prologue | 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09
~
10: The Black Market
The next day, another officer came for Tae. Hauled to her feet, she was roughly handcuffed and then prodded back into the elevator, which brought them zooming upwards to the fifth floor.
The doors opened, and a gust of sterile air smelling slightly of a hospital greeted Tae as she stepped out of the elevator. Her surroundings looked like a cross between a science lab and a hospital, and she quickly guessed that this was where the DNA test Shizuna had informed her about would take place.
“Sit,” the officer growled at her, pointing to a metal chair in the middle of the room. Gingerly trying her best to sit down with her hands still awkwardly cuffed to her back, the moment she sat down properly a metal band shot out to wrap around her waist, binding her in place.
An emotionless lady with black hair trimmed neatly in a short bob approached her. She pulled Tae’s mouth open, and stuck a slightly blunted metal toothpick in, roughly scraping the inside of Tae’s cheek.
Tae winced a little, but tried hard not to resist, warily eyeing the officer who had retreated into a corner.
Next, while the female scientist had gone to analyse the DNA, her fingerprints were taken, and a male scientist activated a giant computer in another corner of the room. Tae mutely watched as the female scientist entered the results into the computer along with the fingerprints, and the pair of them sat back and waited.
After what seemed like an agonizingly long wait to Tae, the computer beeped, and printed out a one-page report with a black-and-white photograph printed on it.
The report was wordlessly handed to the officer, who snatched it and scanned through quickly.
“Yoshitaka Yuriko,” he read, a slight sneer in his voice. “Former witch. Well, well, isn’t this quite a big catch? I come here expecting to blacklist a civilian and get a witch instead!”
Tae remained silent, head down. She could just imagine the distaste in his voice.
Nodding to the scientists, the officer pressed a button, causing the metal band to retract into the chair. Yanking Tae up by her shoulder, he left the lab, stepping back into the stale air of the elevator.
The doors opened at the third floor, and another officer stepped in, shooting Tae a cursory glance.
“New prisoner just gone for the DNA test?” he asked curiously, and the officer holding Tae smirked, waving the report he had brought along.
“New witch,” he said smugly.
The other officer’s eyes widened, and Tae felt the glance he threw at her change from curious to hateful, disgusted.
“Going to schedule her interrogation sessions then?” he turned back to the officer gripping Tae’s shoulder, acting like Tae was no longer in the elevator.
“Later,” her officer growled. “I’ll send this thing back first.”
His grip tightened as he said the word thing, and Tae barely hid a scowl.
I am not a thing, she thought to herself sourly, but did not voice her thoughts out aloud - she had seen a rod dangling from her officer’s belt, and did not want to find out the hard way if it was indeed the one capable of electric shocks.
She held her tongue until the officer had shoved her back into her cell, handcuffs off, and slammed the door back, locking it and throwing her a last contemptuous look before stomping off down the corridor.
“Cheerful man,” muttered Tae, rubbing at her wrists where the handcuffs had left angry red marks.
Shizuna snorted.
“I guess he found out you were a witch, then?”
Rolling her eyes, Tae stretched her legs out in front of her, leaning against the wall.
“What do you think?” she asked dryly, and Shizuna smiled a small smile.
“At least you haven’t been for their ‘interrogation’ sessions yet,” she said quietly.
~
“What idea?” Kei asked, sitting up attentively.
“We~ll,” Naruse said slowly. “It has a lot to do with how I broke Naoto out of jail.”
“Do tell.”
Naruse smiled, obviously amused by Kei’s impatience.
“You remember my power, yes?”
“To create temporary solid clones, Naruse,” Kei cut in, very much wishing Naruse would get to the point. “I remember.”
“Well, I can now create clones that last for about a day, see, so I replaced Naoto with a Naoto clone half a day before his execution! They executed his clone.”
Naoto laughed at the over-simplified explanation, while Kei goggled.
“You replaced- what?”
“I replaced Naoto with a clone of him half a day before his execution,” Naruse repeated, a serene smile on his face.
Kei could only stare at Naruse blankly, jaw slack.
“How in the world did you manage that?”
Jerking a thumb to point at the stretch of tunnel behind him, Naruse cocked his head.
“District 8, which is a little further down the tunnel, is infamous for its black market,” Naruse said. “After Naoto’s capture, I went to visit the black market to see if I could find anything to make breaking him out any easier. What I came across was some old woman who did custom-made small-scale electronics. I got her to make me these.”
Naruse rustled around in a small pouch he kept at his waist, and brought out several small metal cylinders, one of which had a strange button on it.
“…What are those?” Kei asked after a long silence.
Naruse shrugged.
“No idea what they’re called,” he said. “The basic idea is that if you attach the control ring,” here he pointed at the one with the button, “to item A and one of the other rings to item B, the two items can switch places over a long distance. Of course, the process is slow, because it mainly consists of atom transfer, so items A and B need to be rather similar in size and shape, which is why I had to switch Naoto for a clone. Unfortunately though, while the control ring’s reusable, the others are not, which is why I got several.”
Kei picked up the control ring and rolled it around with his fingers, examining it.
“What if it switches places with the wrong ring?” he asked.
“It won’t,” Naruse said comfortingly. “You activate only one of the supplementary rings at any one given time, you see. And you don’t have to worry about deactivating it, you can use this control ring to send an order - again over a short distance - for it to self-destruct.”
“So if I can get one of these to Tae and get her to wear it, I’ll be able to switch her with a Tae clone?”
“That’s the basic concept, yes,” Naruse told him. “Now, we should come up with some sort of plan…”
~
Shizuna toed the scratchy thin mat that was meant to serve as a bed of sorts in their cell.
“Another week will pass soon,” she sighed, eyeing the officers as they bustled about.
“How do you know?” Tae asked curiously. “We have no windows, isn’t it very difficult to tell the time?”
Shizuna shrugged.
“Once a week, they open the prisons to the public and let the people come in and have a look at us. They turn off the electric system on the doors that day, and people come in, shake the bars, spit at us, and generally do a lot of disgusting things.”
Scrunching up her nose, Tae shuddered at the thought.
“They really hate people like us, huh.”
“Brainwashing,” Shizuna replied simply. “It’s everywhere - even in that new revised syllabus they’re beginning to feed the next generation.”
One of the officers passing by their cell cast them a sharp glare, and Shizuna shut up immediately, shrinking back into the shadows of their cell.
~
“I will have to head to District 7 with you, of course,” Naruse told Kei when they had finished outlining the basics of their plan, which involved a lot of running and some undercover work.
“Why?”
“I’ll need to know what your friend looks like, won’t I?” smiled Naruse. “How else will I make a clone of her?”
Kei shot a discreet glance at Naoto and his bandaged appendages, but Naoto got the message.
“I’ll be fine,” he told Kei. “When Naruse drove back here from District 7 I was in a worse state.”
“So we head out tomorrow then?”
Naruse nodded.
“Tomorrow.”
Kei’s spirits soared.
~
When the officer next appeared at the door and yanked Tae out, she instinctively guessed that it was for her first torture session.
She was right - the officer dragged her to a metal room with no windows save for a one-way mirror that spanned half of one wall. A metal chair sat in the middle of the room, this one looking significantly more sinister than the one at the lab had.
Without saying anything, the officer forced her into the chair and strapped her hands down to the armrests, before activating a metal strap that stretched across her chest, and another across her waist. After that, he left the room, and another man walked in, this one with a toothbrush moustache and a long white coat.
The new officer consulted his clipboard.
“So…Miss Yoshitaka, was it?”
Tae said nothing, but the officer’s expression did not waver in the slightest. He pulled over a wooden chair from the desk in the corner and sat facing her, before glancing at her intently.
“What is your connection to that child you were captured with?”
Still, she said nothing. Letting out a little sigh, the officer pulled a slim remote control from his coat pocket.
“I don’t want to have to do this, you know,” he told her kindly. “We may not inflict any major injuries on you, but that does not mean we are not capable of using…painful methods to get your information.”
Don’t give in, Shizuna’s advice echoed in her head.
Shaking his head, the officer pressed a couple of buttons on the chair. Suddenly, Tae stiffened as a small electric shock coursed through her.
The officer watched her dispassionately, the small smile from before completely gone now.
“Not so pleasant, was that?”
He was met with stony silence, and sighing, he pressed another button, leaning back in his chair as he did so.
A stronger electric shock this time, but Tae was slowly getting used to them, having had to suffer them regularly since her capture. She was confident that they would not give her a lethal voltage yet - they had not extracted any information from her, after all.
Time crawled by slowly.
Finally, the officer sighed, glancing at his clipboard again.
“I don’t wish to have to keep feeding you electric shocks, you know. Why don’t you tell me all you know - I’ll stop then.”
Mustering up all her courage, Tae spat in his face.
Calmly, the officer wiped his face with a handkerchief he had produced from his pocket, then turned to the one-way mirror and nodded. Almost immediately, the previous officer stalked in and released Tae from the chair, before wrestling her back into handcuffs.
He nodded curtly to the officer who had been questioning Tae, before pushing her out the door.
Tae remained tight-lipped all the way back to the elevator, and only after she had been deposited back into her cell did she allow herself to sink the floor, heaving a small tired sigh as Shizuna looked at her in concern.
“Interrogation session,” Tae murmured in response to Shizuna’s questioning look, and the other nodded.
“Once they notice you’re getting immune to one kind of punishment they’ll start another though,” Shizuna warned.
Tae could only nod, too drained from the session to do anything except curl up on her half on the mat and fall asleep.
~
Naoto went to sleep first, while Kei and Naruse stayed up late to discuss and fine-tune their plan.
“It’s risky,” Kei murmured, and Naruse hummed in agreement.
“We live to take risks,” the other man replied. “Life is not without risk.”
“I guess,” Kei sighed. “I just hope it succeeds…”
Title: Breaking Zero Kelvin (Multichapter)
Author: Luna (dreamweavernyx)
Pairing: Kazuyuri
Genre: Fantasy/Scifi
Summary: AU. They are two runaways, chased out of society through a deep-rooted stigma though they have no say in it at all. Only relying on word-of-mouth rumours and a set of sketchy directions, they now have to set out on their own journey to accomplish the impossible: escape.
Notes: Character list here.
Previous chapters: Prologue | 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09
~
10: The Black Market
The next day, another officer came for Tae. Hauled to her feet, she was roughly handcuffed and then prodded back into the elevator, which brought them zooming upwards to the fifth floor.
The doors opened, and a gust of sterile air smelling slightly of a hospital greeted Tae as she stepped out of the elevator. Her surroundings looked like a cross between a science lab and a hospital, and she quickly guessed that this was where the DNA test Shizuna had informed her about would take place.
“Sit,” the officer growled at her, pointing to a metal chair in the middle of the room. Gingerly trying her best to sit down with her hands still awkwardly cuffed to her back, the moment she sat down properly a metal band shot out to wrap around her waist, binding her in place.
An emotionless lady with black hair trimmed neatly in a short bob approached her. She pulled Tae’s mouth open, and stuck a slightly blunted metal toothpick in, roughly scraping the inside of Tae’s cheek.
Tae winced a little, but tried hard not to resist, warily eyeing the officer who had retreated into a corner.
Next, while the female scientist had gone to analyse the DNA, her fingerprints were taken, and a male scientist activated a giant computer in another corner of the room. Tae mutely watched as the female scientist entered the results into the computer along with the fingerprints, and the pair of them sat back and waited.
After what seemed like an agonizingly long wait to Tae, the computer beeped, and printed out a one-page report with a black-and-white photograph printed on it.
The report was wordlessly handed to the officer, who snatched it and scanned through quickly.
“Yoshitaka Yuriko,” he read, a slight sneer in his voice. “Former witch. Well, well, isn’t this quite a big catch? I come here expecting to blacklist a civilian and get a witch instead!”
Tae remained silent, head down. She could just imagine the distaste in his voice.
Nodding to the scientists, the officer pressed a button, causing the metal band to retract into the chair. Yanking Tae up by her shoulder, he left the lab, stepping back into the stale air of the elevator.
The doors opened at the third floor, and another officer stepped in, shooting Tae a cursory glance.
“New prisoner just gone for the DNA test?” he asked curiously, and the officer holding Tae smirked, waving the report he had brought along.
“New witch,” he said smugly.
The other officer’s eyes widened, and Tae felt the glance he threw at her change from curious to hateful, disgusted.
“Going to schedule her interrogation sessions then?” he turned back to the officer gripping Tae’s shoulder, acting like Tae was no longer in the elevator.
“Later,” her officer growled. “I’ll send this thing back first.”
His grip tightened as he said the word thing, and Tae barely hid a scowl.
I am not a thing, she thought to herself sourly, but did not voice her thoughts out aloud - she had seen a rod dangling from her officer’s belt, and did not want to find out the hard way if it was indeed the one capable of electric shocks.
She held her tongue until the officer had shoved her back into her cell, handcuffs off, and slammed the door back, locking it and throwing her a last contemptuous look before stomping off down the corridor.
“Cheerful man,” muttered Tae, rubbing at her wrists where the handcuffs had left angry red marks.
Shizuna snorted.
“I guess he found out you were a witch, then?”
Rolling her eyes, Tae stretched her legs out in front of her, leaning against the wall.
“What do you think?” she asked dryly, and Shizuna smiled a small smile.
“At least you haven’t been for their ‘interrogation’ sessions yet,” she said quietly.
~
“What idea?” Kei asked, sitting up attentively.
“We~ll,” Naruse said slowly. “It has a lot to do with how I broke Naoto out of jail.”
“Do tell.”
Naruse smiled, obviously amused by Kei’s impatience.
“You remember my power, yes?”
“To create temporary solid clones, Naruse,” Kei cut in, very much wishing Naruse would get to the point. “I remember.”
“Well, I can now create clones that last for about a day, see, so I replaced Naoto with a Naoto clone half a day before his execution! They executed his clone.”
Naoto laughed at the over-simplified explanation, while Kei goggled.
“You replaced- what?”
“I replaced Naoto with a clone of him half a day before his execution,” Naruse repeated, a serene smile on his face.
Kei could only stare at Naruse blankly, jaw slack.
“How in the world did you manage that?”
Jerking a thumb to point at the stretch of tunnel behind him, Naruse cocked his head.
“District 8, which is a little further down the tunnel, is infamous for its black market,” Naruse said. “After Naoto’s capture, I went to visit the black market to see if I could find anything to make breaking him out any easier. What I came across was some old woman who did custom-made small-scale electronics. I got her to make me these.”
Naruse rustled around in a small pouch he kept at his waist, and brought out several small metal cylinders, one of which had a strange button on it.
“…What are those?” Kei asked after a long silence.
Naruse shrugged.
“No idea what they’re called,” he said. “The basic idea is that if you attach the control ring,” here he pointed at the one with the button, “to item A and one of the other rings to item B, the two items can switch places over a long distance. Of course, the process is slow, because it mainly consists of atom transfer, so items A and B need to be rather similar in size and shape, which is why I had to switch Naoto for a clone. Unfortunately though, while the control ring’s reusable, the others are not, which is why I got several.”
Kei picked up the control ring and rolled it around with his fingers, examining it.
“What if it switches places with the wrong ring?” he asked.
“It won’t,” Naruse said comfortingly. “You activate only one of the supplementary rings at any one given time, you see. And you don’t have to worry about deactivating it, you can use this control ring to send an order - again over a short distance - for it to self-destruct.”
“So if I can get one of these to Tae and get her to wear it, I’ll be able to switch her with a Tae clone?”
“That’s the basic concept, yes,” Naruse told him. “Now, we should come up with some sort of plan…”
~
Shizuna toed the scratchy thin mat that was meant to serve as a bed of sorts in their cell.
“Another week will pass soon,” she sighed, eyeing the officers as they bustled about.
“How do you know?” Tae asked curiously. “We have no windows, isn’t it very difficult to tell the time?”
Shizuna shrugged.
“Once a week, they open the prisons to the public and let the people come in and have a look at us. They turn off the electric system on the doors that day, and people come in, shake the bars, spit at us, and generally do a lot of disgusting things.”
Scrunching up her nose, Tae shuddered at the thought.
“They really hate people like us, huh.”
“Brainwashing,” Shizuna replied simply. “It’s everywhere - even in that new revised syllabus they’re beginning to feed the next generation.”
One of the officers passing by their cell cast them a sharp glare, and Shizuna shut up immediately, shrinking back into the shadows of their cell.
~
“I will have to head to District 7 with you, of course,” Naruse told Kei when they had finished outlining the basics of their plan, which involved a lot of running and some undercover work.
“Why?”
“I’ll need to know what your friend looks like, won’t I?” smiled Naruse. “How else will I make a clone of her?”
Kei shot a discreet glance at Naoto and his bandaged appendages, but Naoto got the message.
“I’ll be fine,” he told Kei. “When Naruse drove back here from District 7 I was in a worse state.”
“So we head out tomorrow then?”
Naruse nodded.
“Tomorrow.”
Kei’s spirits soared.
~
When the officer next appeared at the door and yanked Tae out, she instinctively guessed that it was for her first torture session.
She was right - the officer dragged her to a metal room with no windows save for a one-way mirror that spanned half of one wall. A metal chair sat in the middle of the room, this one looking significantly more sinister than the one at the lab had.
Without saying anything, the officer forced her into the chair and strapped her hands down to the armrests, before activating a metal strap that stretched across her chest, and another across her waist. After that, he left the room, and another man walked in, this one with a toothbrush moustache and a long white coat.
The new officer consulted his clipboard.
“So…Miss Yoshitaka, was it?”
Tae said nothing, but the officer’s expression did not waver in the slightest. He pulled over a wooden chair from the desk in the corner and sat facing her, before glancing at her intently.
“What is your connection to that child you were captured with?”
Still, she said nothing. Letting out a little sigh, the officer pulled a slim remote control from his coat pocket.
“I don’t want to have to do this, you know,” he told her kindly. “We may not inflict any major injuries on you, but that does not mean we are not capable of using…painful methods to get your information.”
Don’t give in, Shizuna’s advice echoed in her head.
Shaking his head, the officer pressed a couple of buttons on the chair. Suddenly, Tae stiffened as a small electric shock coursed through her.
The officer watched her dispassionately, the small smile from before completely gone now.
“Not so pleasant, was that?”
He was met with stony silence, and sighing, he pressed another button, leaning back in his chair as he did so.
A stronger electric shock this time, but Tae was slowly getting used to them, having had to suffer them regularly since her capture. She was confident that they would not give her a lethal voltage yet - they had not extracted any information from her, after all.
Time crawled by slowly.
Finally, the officer sighed, glancing at his clipboard again.
“I don’t wish to have to keep feeding you electric shocks, you know. Why don’t you tell me all you know - I’ll stop then.”
Mustering up all her courage, Tae spat in his face.
Calmly, the officer wiped his face with a handkerchief he had produced from his pocket, then turned to the one-way mirror and nodded. Almost immediately, the previous officer stalked in and released Tae from the chair, before wrestling her back into handcuffs.
He nodded curtly to the officer who had been questioning Tae, before pushing her out the door.
Tae remained tight-lipped all the way back to the elevator, and only after she had been deposited back into her cell did she allow herself to sink the floor, heaving a small tired sigh as Shizuna looked at her in concern.
“Interrogation session,” Tae murmured in response to Shizuna’s questioning look, and the other nodded.
“Once they notice you’re getting immune to one kind of punishment they’ll start another though,” Shizuna warned.
Tae could only nod, too drained from the session to do anything except curl up on her half on the mat and fall asleep.
~
Naoto went to sleep first, while Kei and Naruse stayed up late to discuss and fine-tune their plan.
“It’s risky,” Kei murmured, and Naruse hummed in agreement.
“We live to take risks,” the other man replied. “Life is not without risk.”
“I guess,” Kei sighed. “I just hope it succeeds…”