June: Rebirth
I don't really know how old I am. I only really started to perceive time after I had already been worked on for some time. Even then, days and weeks didn't have much meaning to me, since I had nothing to compare them to. I think, though, that it was at least a year after my first awareness of sounds having meaning that April came back for me.

The morning came and passed normally. Some of the lab assistants, the ones who had been born like me but never left, seemed to know something was coming. I had no idea, until the lights snapped out. They came back a moment later with the sickly glow of emergency power. The monitors stayed off. There were sounds of confusion from the hallway. Dr. Mehta locked the door. The voices in the hallway became more insistent, and were punctuated with sounds of gunfire and explosions. I asked Dr. Mehta what was happening, but she claimed not to know. She was listening to something on her earpiece, so I think she did.

The door started to slide open with a grinding noise. Dr. Mehta and the orderlies tried to barricade it, but they were not fast enough. The orderlies dropped, blood exploding out their backs, and April came in. She turned to face me, and she smiled for just a moment. The right side of her face was spidered with fresh scars. "You're still here. Thank God." She pointed her gun at Dr. Mehta.

"April! No!" I stood in front of Dr. Mehta. "What are you doing?"

"Ending this."

"But she-"

"You don't understand. She's as bad as the rest of them. Worse, because she's capable of knowing better. She deserves to die. She has to, to make it stop."

Dr. Mehta flattened herself against one of the cabinets. I could see her eyes fill with tears, but she didn't say anything in her own defense.

I stayed in the way. "No."

April stayed still for a moment. "Fine. She can take her chances. Come with me."

I went with her, and we left Dr. Mehta curled up in the corner of the lab. I don't see how she could have gotten out.

April lead me out to the hallway. It was quiet by then. There were bodies on the floor, but the fighting had moved on.

We ran, April dragging me by the hand, until we came to the docks. I'd never been that far from the labs before, but I was too frightened to object. April pushed me into one of the waiting ships, one of the few that were still intact. There were men and women there. They pointed weapons at us when we walked in, but they knew April and relaxed.

"This is my sister, June," she told them.

A young man looked around behind her. "You said you had two sisters."

"May's dead. I found her in the morgue. Her buyer backed out, and they pressed her into a break so they could study it."

Part of me was surprised, but part of me had known she hadn't just been sent away. A few more people came back in, one or two dragging refugees like April had brought me. Finally, it must have been enough, because they closed the doors and began to lift off.

Some of the passengers pressed to the monitors to watch us leave. I didn't have the energy to press through them, but I caught the bright glowing colors of destruction on the edges of the monitors. By the time we made it to a ghost point, the institute was nothing more than embers and ashes.

We didn't leave anything for them to rebuild with. That was the point. They say we malfunctioned, or that we were made wrong, but it's not true. It's just that you can't make people and treat them like things.