--XLV--
As the black fog slowly vanished, and as the walls- two into the floor, and two into the ceiling- retracted, and as the tiny, sinister, upsetting, disturbing limbs and arms and tentacles consumed the blood that oozed from the holes that simply rotted onto my skin from the outside, I understood what it was; it was a contraption- one of the contraptions that the torturers forced into the skin and onto the bones of my left hand.
Nightingale
Day #45
Subprocedure Nine
As I laid there, on the floor, breathing pure fear and with water still streaming like a small faucet from both my eyes, I repeated myself.
"Who is 'we?'" I said, not demanding but rather begging for an answer.
Kaylee's telepathic voice spoke to me, to me only.
"The Union of Stars." It was a whisper.
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Just muddled thoughts, I spoke back- only mentally and only as though it were a dream- hoping she would answer, because Jeff wouldn't.
"But..." Even in my mind, I sobbed, into my hands, into the blood of the woman whose name I'll never know. The blood that was on the floor but now on the hands that only people like Kaylee will see. And while I cried on the floor, I mentally spoke the next words.
"But..." I said again, "...but they're supposed to be the good guys."
"It's just some of them, Danny."
About a dozen or so, men and women, men or women because really I didn't know, wearing masks and gloves; scrubs or surgeon's uniforms, or whatever they were called- swarmed in to put more chemicals into my small, underfed, malnourished, damaged, injured, and broken body.
"We'll just test it on someone a bit older than you," Jeff said.
I didn't know how I dared to say the words I spoke next.
"That's what you should have done to begin with," I said. I swallowed blood and then coughed it out again before I said, "If you even had to do it at all!"
There was silence, as the torturers all stared at me for a moment- perhaps astonished at the fact that I spoke the words with all the conviction that I possibly could- at a man that could have me killed, or worse, at any time that he wanted.
"There's no one part of you," I said, "no one part of you that's even human."
He let me sleep in his bed that night, but he wasn't there. If there was one night in Nightingale where I got anything even remotely close to a full night's sleep... It was that one.