Before the Dawn

~ ~ ~

Sometimes, when she looked back on it, Max might have been recalling a particularly vivid dream; other times, the memories had a strangely detached quality, as if these events were the stuff of a story she’d heard, things reported to her that had happened to someone else, or maybe one of those TV shows she’d seen when she’d lived with the Barretts.

But in moments of clarity, she knew the “story” was none of those things.

No matter how some inner censor tried to distance her from the pain, Max knew she had experienced what she remembered. Even though she saw herself from the outside looking in, the young woman still recognized that all of this had happened to her, really happened, the entire experience a part of her as much as the barcode on the back of her neck.

Normal people weren’t marked that way, as if they were a box of frozen peas or one of the packages she delivered, in the job she’d taken, in the normal life inside of which she was hiding.

There were those who considered Max a cold one; but behind her unreadable gaze, Max still felt emotions, a flood of feelings that she wasn’t supposed to possess, the humanity Manticore had tried to prune from her personality, from all of their personalities.

Closing her eyes, Max — for the millionth time, it seemed — allowed the movie to run again on the inside of her eyelids...