“Have you ever tortured a girl?” I ask abruptly, taking him by surprise. “Like, a little one, or even a teenage girl – like me.”
After a moment, he answered my question, but carefully selecting each word. “No, I haven’t.”
I stared down at my knees, trying to appear solemn. “So I guess I’m proof that you would, then.”
He stood up and walked away from me, calmly and composed. “If you’re trying to guilt me into letting you go it won’t work. I don’t want to go through with this, but the war is forcing my hand, and you’re just another casualty.”
I laughed in terrified disbelief. “You people keep telling yourselves that!”
Brakewater stormed over to the chair – his eyes as hard as diamonds. “I am trying to save this country!”
I stopped, taking a moment to collect myself and lower my voice. I could not show fear. I could not show desperation. “Mr Brakewater,” I began as softly as a mouse, “you torture people for a living. In my eyes, that makes you a monster, not a saviour.”
“I am not a monster,” he retorted.
I was by this stage beginning to wonder when he’d start breaking my bones, one by one, or begin administering electric shocks and slowly raising the voltage. I saw no such tools in the room… only the IV drip. I pulled my best defiant face on Brakewater. “Oh, then how would you describe your job?” I asked him.
He leaned towards me in an incredibly powerful manner. “A necessity.”
Now the torture was beginning, or at least I thought it was. Brakewater collected the needle that was attached to the IV and inserted it into the pale flesh of my left arm – it stung a little, and then that was it.
“I’ve had enough chit-chat,” he said as he slid the needle into my bloodstream. “We’ve wasted too much time already. Shall we begin?”
“What are you going to do?” As I was asking I saw him click a button on the machine next to the drip.
At first there was nothing and I was still rather confused, but then I felt it enter my blood, and I realised that I, until that exact moment, had never truly understood pain. It was as if he had delivered into me something that was beyond science, as if he had found a way to put suffering into a bottle and then force-feed it to me. I cried after about thirty seconds, I’d say, and that was the first time I had cried since I was twelve – but those tears were due to a fight that had occurred between my father and my mother. These tears that I cried now could not be explained by mere emotions, they were governed by pain – pain that was born in the spot where the needle had been. The agony sliced through my arm like butter and then gashed its way into my shoulder, and then my chest, my neck. I felt my muscles tensing harder than they ever had before, to the point where I thought my bones would be shattered.
And then it stopped – merely disappeared like a ghost, leaving behind nothing other a consuming numbness. I became aware that the world was still here, I listened to the anguished rhythm of my breathing and the chaotic rise and fall of my chest.
Mr Brakewater was still there, just staring at me with his diamond eyes. There was no sorrow in his features, no pity nor regret, and it made me consider the off possibility that some men could be born without souls. I jumped at the mere opening of his mouth. “Do you understand now, Mrs Abigail?”
If he was expecting an answer I didn’t give him one – I wasn’t sure that I could, given the state I was in.
“Do you see it?” he asked again. “The futility of your resistance? You don’t have to go through all that pain, just give me the code and I won’t be forced to do that to you again.”
I tilted my head towards the drip. “Wh… what was that?”
Brakewater seemed resentful, like a teacher who’s student refused to grasp a certain and simple idea. “What I injected into your body was a drug that has been chemically engineered to stimulate your pain receptors – in short it’ll hurt like hell but it won’t do too much damage, that is, as long as you don’t go into shock.”
I managed a weak smile, striving for that wickedness I had perfected last night, although based on Brakewater’s reaction I must have fallen short of the desired result. Still, I had my wits about me – for now at least. “I won’t talk,” I told him, a little more steadily this time. “Aizel will come for me soon enough, so you can just go and pump as much poison into me as you want.”
I took note of Brakewater’s sorrowful grin, and the way his eyes told me how foolish I was. “It isn’t a matter of how much of the drug is administered,” he stated. “It’s all about the concentration, and what I gave you just then was very low – call it level one, if you will.”
I had suspected as much, although I wasn’t looking forward to it in the slightest. In a way I guess I had hoped that he was kidding, and that the drug wasn’t diluted at all.
“How many levels are there?” I asked.
He flashed his sad diamond eyes one last time as he held his hand over the button. “Twenty,” he answered, and then he clicked the button and began to make his way out. “I’ll see you in an hour.”
The second after he left the room, after having uttered those words ‘I’ll see you in an hour,’ I knew right away that time was my enemy… How long will I be able to take this? When will I break? How much time will pass?
And yes, I did say when, because I knew that I was human, and not a particularly strong one at that. I was no fool, I knew that eventually I would brake and that is why time was my enemy. I would certainly try to keep the code secret, but it was useless to think that I would make it to level twenty and still have my sanity about me – chances are by that stage I would be a totally different person. All I could do was wait, and pray that what Brakewater told me about Aizel was a lie.
The heart retching pain was a friendly reminder that that was easier said than done. Once again it began in my arm, both a burning inferno and a blistering blizzard, and before long it had not only consumed most of my body, but it was eating away at my very being. I had to remind myself that this was only level one, and that gave me the incentive not to scream – I needed to save my breath for the higher levels.
I think the worst part though was that Brakewater neglected to put a clock in the room, although I suppose he did it deliberately. Of the sixty minutes that level one incorporated I had no idea how much time had passed or how much time there was to go. In this place time was invisible, and the most dangerous enemies were the ones that we couldn’t see. Of course, I could always guess how much time had passed, but it was incredibly hard to maintain a train of thought when every cell in your body was screaming at you. I shook my head. Fine, I eventually decided, I guess time shall elude me then.
It certainly did. The pain became my new sense of time seeing as the old version had deserted me, but even the pain was beginning to lessen its endeavour and I then understood the purpose of having levels. All the same, I began to suspect that Brakewater was playing tricks on me – either that or time had stopped. I even counted to three thousand six hundred at least twice. In the end, I didn’t bother expressing any hatred towards time because I didn’t think it would understand – I imagine it would just sit there oblivious and unmoved by my words.
And then the door opened and Brakewater strolled in with a peculiar smile upon his lips. “Hello again,” he said, far too casually. I noticed the mockery. “Did you enjoy your first hour?”
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