Chapter 16

Sixteen

Voices.

Boots on the ground.

I slid my eyes open, not totally, just a fraction. Two guards stood outside of my cell. The first one entered the code. I followed the track of his fingers. I had the first three and the last two. I just needed one more number.

The squeak of the cell door opening registered. I didn’t react though. They were coming in whether I liked it or not. The past couple of “sessions” had been brutal. They’d gone to drugs for questioning. If I focused enough on songs, it worked. I didn’t do anything other than sing and scream.

I’d half-destroyed my voice. This morning, like the past couple, a pair of guards strode in without a word and dragged me upward by my arms. They hauled me between them like a pair of silent ghouls all the way down the hall.

The click of their boots against the tiled floor played like some countdown to my next horror-filled hours. The room they pulled me into was painfully white.

The light seemed to reflect off every surface. I squinted, then had to close my eyes. The brightness assaulted me with sharp jabs at my eyes and lancing cuts to my eyelids. Even squeezed closed, I couldn’t escape it.

They slammed me into a chair, the bruising went up my spine and forced all the air out of me.

“Good morning, Miss Brady,” my tormentor greeted me as he strode into the room. I could barely slit my eyes apart. They hadn’t lashed me to the seat and it was taking way too much effort to not just fall over.

My tormentor dressed in a buttoned down shirt, and tie. His shirt was pale blue. His pants were a darker shade of blue. A contrast for his white lab coat.

“Are you feeling more cooperative today?” He cupped my chin and lifted my face up so he could examine me. I didn’t bother with responding. The only answers he wanted were not answers I would ever give.

Playing at being broken was not all that difficult. The pain was almost constant now. The pain in my extremities. In my chest. The cramps. They barely fed me. Fluids were regularly given during these sessions, but only to make feeding me drugs easier.

I had no idea where I was. What time of year it was or day.

Hell, I wasn’t even sure how long I’d been here.

Time no longer had meaning. I stared at my tormentor without staring at him. I barely flinched when he shone a pin light in my eyes. This room was so damn lit, how else was I supposed to react?

“Hmm…” He continued to flick the light from one eye to the other. I just kept them unfocused and staring into the distance.

It was impossible to miss his tense expression. The salt and pepper of his hair gave him a distinguished air. But his face was narrower, his cheekbones a slash. Worst, he had the palest blue eyes. So pale they might as well be colorless.

I hated looking in his eyes.

If they really were the window to the soul, then his was utterly absent.

“Problem?” A second interrogator entered the room. This one didn’t usually speak. Though he had been the one working over my neighbor. I’d seen him slapping her repeatedly.

The fact he didn’t enter my line of sight kept me from getting a better look at him. Every other time he’d been present, he’d been behind me. My would-be Tomás de Torquemada dug his fingers into my chin. The bite of his nails threatened to break the skin.

Leaning closer, he exhaled his coffee breath all over me. There was a fresh new hell. I hadn’t had coffee since I’d woken up in this hellish place.

I missed coffee.

My eyes watered when he angled my head back so I ended up staring at the lights. A single tear tracked down my cheeks.

“Maybe we should just give her to the guards,” the second man suggested. “They can have a bit of fun and she’ll finally accept that we can and will do whatever we want with her.”

Tormentor number one gave my jaw a shake then let me go. I just let my head drop. It hurt the back of my neck, but I didn’t care. Now my vision was fixed on the floor. The tiles hadn’t changed. There was still a drain near the center.

If there had been blood from earlier interrogations, it was washed clean. Everything sparkled. Sanitized. When they killed me, they’d do it again. Erasing any sign of me from the world.

Then I would just be gone.

Like I never existed.

The second interrogator appeared in front of me. He shoved my head up and stared down. Right. I didn’t need to have a memory of his face.

There was something inherently cruel in his expression. A scar bisected his upper lip and down through the lower at a diagonal before disappearing under his chin. Pock scars marked his cheeks, and his eyes were dark and sunken in. The shadows under his eyes added to the impression of darkness.

His slap ripped across my face and set my cheek on fire. I just let my head flop. When he straightened me again, he stared silently. His next move involved backhanding me, it toppled the chair and I hit the floor.

It hurt. Another bruise atop a layer of bruises. I refused to react though. It took everything to not try and save myself. But why bother?

Maybe if I pissed them off enough, this would just be over.

“This could be a problem,” the first interrogator said and his companion kicked my leg. The blow rocked through to the bone and shoved my leg to the side.

“You think, we still don’t have the answers we need yet. If she’s shattered then we won’t get them. Failure is not an option.” They weren’t talking about me so much on that last one. There was actually a kernel of fear in the second man’s voice.

Huh. Well, I hope they didn’t expect sympathy from me if they got killed over this. Too bad, so sad, and I wouldn’t be mad. A laugh escaped me. A titter of a sound.

It yanked their attention back to me. Their scowls were almost mirrors of each other. Where tormentor one was buttoned down and cold, tormentor two was dark, unkempt, and violence seemed to just eddy around him.

Of the pair, he scared me less. Nothing about him offered safety. In truth, nothing about the first guy did either—but he played perfectly pleasant while filling my veins with drugs that set my skin on fire.

At least the second guy didn’t pretend to be nice.

“Take her back to her cell,” the first one said. “We’re not getting anywhere like this. We need a new plan.”

The guards seized my arms in their bruising grips and dragged me back out. They didn’t turn me around, so I had full view of the room as they walked away.

For some odd reason, the trip back to the cell didn’t take near as long as the trip to the room. More warping time in my perception. At my cell door, one of the guards let go of me and I half-twisted, just hanging by an arm.

When he entered the code, I repeated the numbers and my guess for the missing digit had been correct. Door open, they dropped me inside and locked it. Then they left via a different door.

Same code.

Different door.

That was useful information.

Over my head somewhere, there was a bang and clank. Then another before the air began to move. Air conditioning of some kind. Didn’t do anything for the cold floor I lay on or the rapidly stiffening bruises on my leg and side.

My face also hurt, but the pain wasn’t that bad. Not when you considered all the other shit that’d happened. I listened for any movement or comments, but my neighbor hadn’t been in her cell.

Had she been there when they came to get me?

I really didn’t remember. Every time they took her to be tortured it just—felt wrong. Performative. When she came back, she had real injuries, so why didn’t I believe her?

‘Cause everything was a lie. Everything and everyone.

Instead of forcing myself up, I closed my eyes. I needed to conserve my energy. The more they thought I was through the less they’d watch me. They already thought I was useless.

Let them continue to think they’d broken me irrevocably. Then when dark came, I was getting out of here one way or another. I had the code to get out of the cell and to open the door. If I escaped, they would more than likely try to kill me.

Either way, I was out of this cell.