Chained Soul – Part Thirteen

Welcome back to Chained Soul, my new serialised novel that I’m releasing right here on my blog, as well as on Tapas and Wattpad. Quick warning: this series does contain strong language, so if that’s not your thing, you’re free to skip this one!

Check out Part One, including a synopsis for the whole series, here!

If you missed Part Twelve, you can read that here!

Day Thirteen

I have to admit, when I wrote out all of those demands yesterday, I think it was more for the catharsis than anything else. Part of me knows that I’m stuck in a role here, and that role is not anywhere near any sort of power. Plus, I don’t think I’m ballsy enough to demand too much from the psychologist lady. A little, sure, here and there. But I know that she’s heavily tied into whatever’s keeping me here.

Pissing off the people in control of my entire life doesn’t seem like the smartest idea.

However, there have been… developments. It all happened before I sat down to write today – to be fair, they didn’t give me much of a chance, so I’ll just recount it as best I can.

The Random Shit That Happened Today

So I woke up, right. Pretty normal – probably the most normal part of being in here, anyway. Except it wasn’t… right. There was something weird that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, like when you wake up and you’re not sure if you’re still dreaming. I would’ve pinched myself, but then I realised what was wrong, so by that point, minor bodily harm would have been fairly useless.

Someone was knocking on the door, and there was a voice behind it. Usually, there’s just knocking before the psychologist lady lets herself in anyway, but this was definitely a voice. I was still groggy as fuck, so the voice was more of a weird murmur for a few seconds before I could actually start figuring out the words.

Then, I was just confused. I sat there for about a minute trying to figure out if I was actually hearing the words that my brain was telling me I was.

Someone was asking for permission to come in. It was completely wild – they didn’t ask for my permission to lock me up in here, or if they did, I can’t remember that now. Still, someone was pretty insistently asking me for a response, and that was definitely… different.

I have to admit, I took a little time getting up from the bed. I even had a bit of a stroll over to the door. Not that I have much room to stroll in here, but I did my best. When I got to the door, I let the person outside ask me again, one more time, just to savour the feeling. It was the slightest drop of normality – of control – and it felt amazing.

But then I replied to the voice beyond the door, because I was starting to feel like a bit of a prick. And of course, I told them they could come in. What else was I gonna do? Refuse?

The door swung open, and the person came inside. It was a man, pretty slim and wiry-looking, wearing a dark blue cardigan over some sort of white uniform. He had a lanyard around his neck with some sort of card at the bottom of it, but I couldn’t get a good look at it to see if it had a name on.

The guy didn’t really introduce himself. He said he was a part of the facility, almost like he was describing a room or something, and that he was here to escort me to a secure exercise session. I’m pretty sure he said some other words too when he was describing it, but I couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to them the first time I heard him say them, so now I’ve got no chance of remembering what they were.

Once he got me to sign a form – a real simple one that only needed my signature, thank fuck – he went out again, and I had a little time to sit on my bed and think. I guessed I didn’t really need to lay out all of my demands at once if they were taking it upon themselves to give me the outside time already, before I even asked for it.

It was a very, very rare feeling for me, but I actually felt like things were going kind of okay for a little bit.

Then the dude came back with some guards, and I had to go through the motions of being secured before they let me go out into the corridor. Part of me was excited just for that – the chance to stretch my legs outside of my room – but I was buzzing at the thought of going outside. Outside. There would be fresh air, hopefully, and maybe the sight of… something else. Some other place that wasn’t a part of this facility.

We went in a different direction than the last time, further down the corridor in a different direction, and then a couple of turns that I kind of tried to remember. Just in case I ever wanted to try and hatch some sort of grand escape plan. It would be pretty impossible with my memory, but at least the thought gave me another helping of hope.

Finally, we got to a weird door where we had to be buzzed through with an intercom and all that fancy stuff. I knew what that meant. Outside, finally.

That door opened with a beep, and the first thing I saw was metal. Fencing, taller than two people with barbed wire curling around the top, growing into it like a monstrous grey weed. The space was… fuck, it was disappointing.

It was smaller than the space in my room. The ground was concrete and beyond the fencing, all I could see were towering grey walls. Not even brick. It was grey slabs, and I spotted at least one security camera with a beady red eye staring down at me before I got turned around and my wrists were released from the restraints.

They let me pace around for all of ten minutes, looking up at the sky – grey as well – before they decided my time was up. The restraints were slapped back on, and I only got a few seconds to appreciate the ugly fencing before they spun me around and took me back inside. There wasn’t even that much of a fucking breeze.

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