The Search for Artemis - By P. D. Griffith Page 0,17

streets had hardened him. His naiveté and innocence were stripped away and replaced with instinct and loneliness. His face looked worn from numerous sleepless nights trying to get comfortable on the asphalt or a bench. His shirt, which once was a warm yellow, was now some semblance of brown and black, with tiny holes that bore their way through the fabric around the shoulders and back. Dirt and grime coated his face, leaving no piece of skin untarnished. He ran his fingers through his dark brown hair. It was long and unruly, tangled and matted into a heap of greasy dreadlocks.

“Landon? Is everything all right?” Dr. Márquez asked, speaking loud enough so that Landon could hear him through the closed door. His voice drew him back to the present. It seemed like he’d been staring at himself for hours, dumbfounded by the battered doppelgänger staring back at him. “Please be quick. We have quite a few tests to run.”

“Oh yes, everything’s fine.” Landon reached into the shower stall and turned on the hot water before he started to undress.

When Landon reopened the glass door, steam exuded from the shower stall. Landon hesitantly stepped into the stream of running water. It felt like a blanket that was just pulled out of a hot dryer. It was comforting and familiar. It was amazing. As he washed himself, he felt as if he was slowly shedding off pieces of his harsh reality and watching them swirl down the drain. Like a time machine, it slowly peeled back the days, erasing the remnants of dirty streets, of the sweat from his bloodcurdling race through the city, and of the countless nights rolling around on asphalt. As he bathed, he was transported back to the normalcy of his life before everything happened. He was back in his room, listening to music on his bed, dreading the end of the summer. He could smell his mother’s delicious cooking as she prepared dinner. He even welcomed the memory of his father sitting on the couch yelling at the television.

He meticulously cleaned himself, ensuring that he removed every speck of dirt from his body. He even washed his hair four times, not satisfied with its cleanliness until it squeaked under his fingertips. The entire process took quite a while longer than he anticipated, and after that shower, Landon felt so relaxed and rejuvenated that all of his worries became a distant memory from where he was at that moment.

With his towel around his waist, he walked over and sat on the bench, staring at the set of white clothes beside him. He grabbed the top garment and pulled it toward him. It was surprisingly soft compared to what he had expected. Meticulously sterilized clothing didn’t really give Landon much hope.

He unfolded the shirt and began to pull it on, but as he threaded his arms through the sleeves, he started to feel uneasy. What is going on here? What is this place? To Landon, everything happened so quickly and so strangely. He obeyed these random people who said they could help him, but he had no idea what he was going to find out, or if they were really going to help at all. With a loud knock on the door, Landon was startled back into reality.

“How’re you doing?” Dr. Márquez asked through the door.

“I’m . . . I’m fine,” Landon replied. “I’ll be out in a second.”

Landon stood up and finished changing his clothing, donning the white drawstring pants, loose shirt and awkward slippers. Upon re-entering the hallway, Dr. Márquez was waiting, now with a clipboard in hand.

“Shall we?” Dr. Márquez asked rhetorically.

Over the next few hours, Landon was taken through a series of exams. As they progressed, Dr. Márquez always seemed to explain what was happening in far too much detail for each test. They seemed to want to measure things that made little sense to Landon, and the sheer thoroughness of the tests was strange. He was weighed, but the process included numerous different scales that Dr. Márquez said measured the weight of different parts of his body, like each individual internal organ and his bones. He was measured, which seemed to take forever, because they recorded distances as small as the space between each knuckle on his fingers and toes and the distance from the top of his lip to the base of his nose. Landon was even put through an extensive amount of other medical tests he had heard of before but never