Final Truth

Chapter 52: Hopeless Knowledge

Julia's point of view:

Too soon I am back in the lab, a needle in my arm filling me up with that atrocious liquid that makes me feel things that aren't really there and damages my mind almost beyond repair.

It's only been a day since my last test, and I don't feel okay whatsoever. I'm thinner than I've ever been in my life, for they have also started pulling back on my food just like they did Peter. I feel frail, weak, vulnerable, heartsick, and above all else, damaged.

I've thought almost obsessively about Peter, my insides twisted in a Gordian Knot over the very idea of him. Nobody speaks his name anymore, nobody answers me when I ask about him, almost as if he never existed.

That scares me most of all; I've tried to hold onto my old memories of him, the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled and how he used to hold me like I was a gift and how he would look at me with nothing short of adoration, but as my time here grows longer, my good memories of Peter grow fainter.

As of late, I've begun to wonder if he ever existed at all, if he were a figment of my imagination created as a coping mechanism, but then lucid flashbacks of red eyes and a dark voice reminds me that he was real, both the good and the bad of him.

He's dead now. If I know nothing else, it's that. Nobody will talk about him, and he was already so far gone when I tried to escape with him. It's one of those things that you know without needing confirmation, a fact so deep I can feel in my bones. It's a fact that makes me feel like my chest has caved in, but at the same time, it also feels like quiet relief, because they can't hurt him anymore.

My actions can't make him suffer anymore.

When I blink myself out of my stupor, I realize that I'm not in the lab anymore, but rather an empty room with a single desk and chair in the middle of it.

A small packet lies atop the desk along with a pencil, and I have to fight the urge to roll my eyes as I go to sit, for I know what's happening next, that this test is probably going to be centered around knowledge.

I plop down into the chair and open up the stapled packet, my suspicions confirmed when I see equations on the first page.

Numbers and symbols cover almost every square inch of the paper, mathematical problems so intricate and complex that they would make even the most experienced engineers and physicists blanch.

I just feel sad looking at the page, however, for it reminds me of Adam and how much he would've enjoyed solving problems such as this, how patient he was with me when he made me learn stuff like this as per mastering the power of knowledge.

I pick up my pencil and begin to fly through the equations without much effort, internally wishing Adam were here so he could marvel over how much I've learned from him.

I think he'd be proud.

Adam always found beauty in math like this, almost if it were a puzzle with the answer so close that he would work at it no matter how long it took just to ensure that the solution could be found.

Problems with solutions. Questions with answers. Certainty in uncertainty. That is who Adam is.

I finish the first page, but I don't check my work because I know there's no need; they're all correct.

The next page is an excerpt of old text from a forgotten lifetime, a world long before powers were even a possibility.

Anna Karenina.