black veil ◦ scorch trials || thomas

24.

TWENTY-FOUR ; BENEATH THE VEIL

     There were small moments. Small fleeting moments of remembrance. The more she chased them, though, the vaguer they would become – until she forgot them altogether.

     Evan sighed as she missed the target for the umpteenth time. She was supposed to be good at this. For as far as her memory would allow her to remember, which, granted, wasn't that far, she had always been good at target practice. Knives, bullets – nothing had ever been a problem for her.

     Lately, though, she was so distracted. Her head would ache unbearably. Her eyes would blur. And sometimes, she would see a face. A vague glimpse of a face. All she ever remembered were brown eyes; calculating and determined. Everything else faded away as soon as she caught sight of it.

     She couldn't concentrate. It was an itch she couldn't scratch. And it was starting to annoy Janson. Evanna knew it. He was irritable, uneasy. After every meeting with the Chancellor he became worse, stricter. He took it out on her, told her to work better, work harder. Then he would take his leave. Pay a visit to the girl with the brown hair, no doubt.

     Evan had seen her walking the halls. She was well known inside WICKED. She was always dressed in formal attire, with short heels and her hair up. She would talk and smile, but as soon as she was alone again, Evanna couldn't help but see a shadow cross her face.

     The girl with the brown hair, despite her fame, seemed lonely. Troubled. Familiar. But Evan never approached her. She was merely a guard after all. She belonged to her own group, and that was nowhere near the one the girl with the brown hair was in.

     WICKED's headquarters became less and less tolerable by the day. Evan did nothing but eat, train, work, repeat. And at night, when she was supposed to be sleeping, she fought her own mind. She lay awake, trying to remember further back than five months ago, when she woke up in a white room with a nasty gash on her forehead.

     When she woke up with no recollection of what happened after a group of kids broke out in the WICKED facility in the Scorch. It was a blank space, a void. It irked Evanna. The annoyance grew with each day.

     There was nothing she could do about it, though. There wasn't anyone she could ask. No one who would tell her. There was no medicine for her amnesia. There was nothing that would help her remember.

     So she learned to live with it. With the itch she couldn't scratch, with the void in her mind and the eerie familiarity of the girl with the brown hair.

     With the calculating eyes that sometimes, for the smallest of seconds, turned soft and tender.

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