She woke up drowning. Her lungs burned as she struggled to suck in a breath but got liquid instead. Warm liquid that burned like acid. Viscous, acrid liquid filling her lungs. She tried to flail her arms and legs, to get above the water. Something restrained her. She tried to scream but sucked in more liquid. More burning. Oh God, she was going to die. And it would hurt like hell.
The restraints on her arms and legs popped free. Hands reached into the water to grasp her upper arms, lifting her out of the liquid. She coughed it up, hacking over and over, almost vomiting from the pain and effort. Then, with one long gasp, she breathed in clean, dry air. It tasted like salvation.
The hands that had rescued her let go, leaving her sitting up with her legs stretched out in front of her. She clung to the edge of the pool. Her entire body shook with a violence that rattled the glass.
She blinked. Glass? Her vision was blurred. She blinked repeatedly until enough of the bleariness cleared that she could make out her surroundings. She sat inside a glass coffin — at least that’s what it looked like — with wires attached to her chest and head, held in place by sticky pads. Her head pounded. Her heart beat so fast it hurt. The lighting, though dim, seemed too bright for her eyes. She squinted, blinked some more, and tried to make sense of what she saw.
The glass coffin was filled with a pale blue liquid, the thick, acrid-tasting stuff that had nearly drowned her. The coffin sat atop a table or dais. The wires attached to her body stretched down from the coffin, draped across the concrete floor, and snaked upward to a bank of electronic equipment along the nearest wall. Lights flashed on the equipment. Beeps echoed through the room. More equipment populated the rest of the room. A video camera on a tripod stood several feet from her glass coffin, its lens pointed directly at her. She felt it watching her as if an evil spirit inhabited its circuits and chips.
Mirrors lined half of one wall of the room. An instinct told her those were two-way mirrors, designed to let people on the other side view this room without being viewed themselves. The mirrors revealed a wet, bedraggled young woman hunched inside a glass coffin. It was her, she realized. Long, dark red hair hung limp and wet, stopping just short of her breasts. Her fair skin looked even paler in the sterile lighting. For some reason, her own image seemed unfamiliar. She was too far away from the mirrors to see the color of her eyes, yet she felt they must be hazel.
Now that the warm liquid had run off her arms and torso, a chill seeped into her flesh. Goosebumps prickled her skin. She shivered a little, rubbing her arms. That’s when she noticed it.
She was naked. Not half naked either. Completely, one hundred percent naked.
Before she had time to ponder that, she noticed him.
