"You're almost there, Abie," my dad told me gently, setting a steaming mug on the table between us. "You're so close."
We were sitting side by side, in my real house, in my real home, the one that didn't exist anymore. It was smaller than the house in the Skip, smaller than my mother's house in Old Town, but it still felt gigantic. There was so much more in this house. More memories. More love. It was crowded and cluttered, largely with the overflow of his analogue filing system, but felt like a jungle, like a land ripe for exploration, even though I already knew every single inch of it. It felt exactly how it had when I was eight.
He was dressed as he always was, in a worn tan suit, always ready to see the next patient, always on call. His face was lined with worry, and it made him look old. He would always look older than me, no matter how old I ever got. But his eyes always would always be young, dark, and most of all, kind. Mom had told me, once, that I had his eyes. Aside from their shape, color, and placement, I hadn't seen the similarity.
He motioned for me to take the cup, and I did. Despite the cloud of steam above it, it didn't feel warm.
"Is this going to do anything if I drink it?" I asked.
"That depends on you, I guess," he said. His voice was low and quiet, but carried the strength of aeons. "How good is your imagination?"
I shrugged and gestured around to our general environment.
He smiled and looked around fondly. "Fair enough."
I took a sip, and for a moment, felt icy liquid enter my mouth. But that was wrong. It was steaming. If it was steaming, it should be hot.
And then it was. It was hot, chocolatey, sweet. It was pure comfort in a mug.
I swallowed and felt it burn all the way down into my chest.
He watched me, eyes crinkling at the corners. "Good. This is your place, Abie. Don’t let them take it from you."
"I'm trying," I said, hearing the strain in my voice. "I don't know how much longer I can keep them out."
He leaned forward and put his arm around my shoulders, pulling me into him. I buried my face in his shoulder and breathed in the scent of him, which I remembered with such startling perfection that didn’t even feel like a memory. There's no way I can accurately describe it. He smelled like tobacco and Irish Spring. He smelled like copper and stale effort. He smelled musty, but not in a bad way. He smelled like home. He smelled like Dad.
"But I know," he whispered. "I know how strong you are. I know how stubborn you are. I know that everything they have is nothing compared to who you are." He pulled back and took my cheeks between his hands, pulling my eyes up to meet his. "I know that no matter what happens, I'll be with you. I know that you'll always be loved, even when you don't love yourself. And I know that if you look inside, you’ll feel that love, and it will carry you through the darkness."
"What if I can't make it?" I asked, feeling eight again, feeling small, feeling like I was asking about the boogieman in the closet. “What if there’s nothing there?”
He looked out the little window above the kitchen sink. It was dark, but deep blue, not black. The earliest hours of the morning.
"Burn," he said, voice intense enough that it could have ignited darkness. "Burn, my little dawn star."
I opened my mouth to speak—
—and they pulled the wet cloth away from my face, allowing me to suck in a breath at last. I gasped for air and thrashed futilely.
I was in an uncomfortably chill concrete room, bound painfully tightly down to a cold metal table, surrounded by masked SCAR officers. I reflexively reached for my powers, and felt that peculiar, exploding numbness again in response. Imagine walking up to something that was vibrating and pressing your forehead against it, and then imagine it was only your brain that felt the sensation. They had attached some kind of ultratech device to my skull, a steel, lattice-like helmet. It shot pulses into my brain targeting the areas that controlled my psionic abilities every time I tried to use them. I wanted to scream just from that.
They’d taken my powers away.
Mostly. The active powers, telekinesis, intrakinesis, telepathy (not that I would use it anyway), they were all gone. I still felt the emotions, the leering disgust, of the men doing this to me.
And the woman.
Sheriff Grey paced around the edge of the room slowly, not taking her cold eyes off me. "How are you feeling, Darkstar?"
"Oh, y-you know," I said, barely able to speak through how hard my teeth were chattering. "T-thirsty. Hot. It's k-kinda balmy in here. You guys r-really need to get your central air f-f-f-figured out—"
"Again," Grey said, curt.
They put the cloth back over my face and pulled it down taught. It was already wet enough that the panic set in immediately.
It was also Paragon's cape.
They poured water over it, and I began to drown.
My dad once again sat next to me at the table in our old kitchen, frowning.
He said, voice dry, "But maybe stop mouthing off to the people waterboarding you, Abie."
----------------------------------------
Eventually, they dumped me back in the absolute blackness of my cell.
I had first woken up there after Grey had shot me. I assumed she had a stun setting on her gun similar to the rifles Siege had used—or I’d died again. I was pretty sure I would remember that if I had, though. It’s not the kind of thing you forget.
I’d been taken for two sessions on the table since.
I tried to get the helmet off again. It wasn’t tight, but it seemed to be inseparably adhered to my skull, and it definitely wasn’t comfortable
It didn’t work, and I didn’t expect it to. If headbutting the wall as hard as I could hadn’t worked, nothing would.
I had already explored what little space I had and immediately dismissed any possible chance of escape. As far as I could tell, I was in a chilly concrete box. It was perfectly square, unbroken, and I judged the ceiling to be about ten feet in the air, from how it echoed. There was something I recognized by smell as a small toilet in the corner. It was a kindness I honestly hadn’t expected. Once per day, I heard a whooshing sound from above, near the center of the room, and then food—hard, tasteless tack—would plop to the ground along with a single bottle of water. I’d had no idea what to do with the bottle after I’d finished with it, so I’d thrown it in the corner. After waking up the next day, I hadn’t been able to find it, and a new one had come with that day's serving of hardtack.
I figured...that was that. That was the rest of my life. I'd been caught by SCAR, and they did what they existed to do. They had put me away. There I was, away. End of story. Thanks for reading. I hope you learned a valuable lesson from The Tragedy of Anna Jones: A Stupid Idiot’s Tale. Leave a five star review on your way out.
I settled in, because it was the only thing I could do.
It left me with a lot of time to think.
My life had been pathetic. A waste. All I had done, been able to do, was bounce around from pain to pain, hurting and being hurt. I had dreamed of being a superhero and ended up as a two-bit lackey to a wannabe robber baron. And at the end of it, after everything, this was all I had to show for it. All of my plans had come to nothing but a dark, empty box in some unknown SCAR blacksite.
I had nothing.
I was nothing.
----------------------------------------
“You could call him,” my dad said.
He was standing at the kitchen sink, back to me, looking out into the darkness.
I sat at the table nursed my hot chocolate. “Call who?”
“You know who.”
My lips twisted. “No.”
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“He would help you.”
“He can fuck off.”
He looked over his shoulder at me sharply.
I met his dark eyes only for a couple seconds before looking away. “Sorry.”
“He would help, Anna,” Dad said, firm.
“Just like he did last time?”
Dad sighed, turned, and walked back over to the table. “That wasn’t his fault.”
I scowled and rested my head on my hands.
He watched me for a few moments. “You’re falling asleep.”
My eyebrows raised. “I’m not already asleep?”
He sat next to me again. “No, you’re not. You know that.”
He was right. I did know that. This was just the advanced version of my daydreams—full on delusion. My daydreams gave me the things I wanted most in the world. Right now, it was this. My old home. My old life. My dad. The only person who has ever loved me.
“That’s not true,” he said.
I frowned at him, then laid my head in my arms. “No fair. How are you reading my thoughts in my thoughts?”
“Oh, now you’re interested in the mechanics of psionics,” he said, smiling wryly.
I shrugged my shoulders grumpily. “Stupid powers. Don’t even work right.”
“They work exactly how they’re supposed to.”
I felt my eyes fluttering shut. “For dum-dums.”
“Go to sleep, Abiejay,” he said. “No dreams tonight.”
I frowned up at him, settling my head more comfortably onto my arms. “You can do that?”
“I can. For a little while.” He stroked his fingers through my hair and started singing, “Bayu-bayushki-bayu, ne lozhisya na krayu. Pridet seren'kiy volchok, I ukhvatit za bochok…”
I was asleep before the second stanza.
----------------------------------------
The door opened some time later.
Could have been hours. Could have been days.
The wall hummed as it split apart, two thick slabs of concrete so expertly joined I hadn’t been able to feel the seam in any of my many searches. I jerked into awareness at the sudden, searing light.
I squinted, willing my eyes to adjust. The light wasn’t even particularly bright. It had just been a long time since I’d seen any.
Figures appeared in the doorway, silhouetted.
One was, of course, Sheriff Grey.
She strode in and looked down at me in undisguised hatred beneath the lip of her stupid hat. “Stand up.”
“No,” I shot back. “You sit down. Take a load off. You look stressed.”
She didn’t bother responding—she reached down, grabbed me by the shoulder, and hauled me to my feet. I struggled, ineffectual, more out of form than anything else. Her grip was literally iron. We’d done this dance before.
With that, she marched me towards the door and out of the room. The concrete sealed itself behind us.
The hallways of the SCAR compound were as empty and featureless as the cells, save for the strips of yellow-green chemlights running the length of the floor and ceilings, as well as the occasional cell designations on the walls. There were no obvious doors. I assumed the rest of the cells opened and closed like mine did.
We turned a corner, and came to a hallway lined with real doors. My eyes immediately locked on the one that, behind which, I would be subjected to involuntary land-based swimming lessons. As we got closer, I started trying to pull away again, and the Sheriff dragged me along inexorably.
Then we passed it, and kept walking.
I stumbled on, confused, as we rounded another corner. This hallway actually had real lights, dim, but at least a welcome break from that sickly chemlight glow. There was even a water fountain down the hall a bit. There was also a notice painted in yellow on the wall with an arrow pointing back the way we had come:
MINIMUM SECURITY WARD
←
Ouch. My poor ego.
No, that isn’t a joke. That little sign was the most pain they’d inflicted so far. I didn’t really have much in the way of self-esteem, but ever since I had gotten powers, I’d at least had pride in my ability to cause a fuss. Create a hubbub. Initiate a ruckus.
Grey led me to one of the doors, opened it, and pushed me inside in front of her.
Inside was the first actual room I’d seen since my capture, insofar as it was more than a grey concrete box. This one actually had tiled floors and paneling on the wall. The decoration was still a bit lacking. There was one chair in the center of the room with thick, durasteel manacles built into the armrests. It was surrounded by what looked like a professional lighting studio setup, and a single ultratech camera mounted on a tripod.
I really, really did not appreciate the vibes of the layout.
"You guys branching out into snuff films?" I asked.
Two guards replaced Grey, coming from behind and hauling me forward by my upper arms to the chair. They forced me into it, and then one held my arms down while the other secured the manacles to it. That meant I had one free hand, which I promptly used to repeatedly punch the officer holding my arms down. It did nothing—he was fully armored and I had the strength of a malnourished teenage girl—but it did make me feel a little better.
They got my other arm secure, and meanwhile Grey positioned herself behind the camera, fiddling with buttons on it. When they were done, she motioned for them to step back, presumably out of the shot, and then the lights flared to life, blinding me to everything behind them.
"State your name and alias for the camera," Grey's voice said.
"Don Quixote," I said promptly. "Ladies want me, windmills fear me."
There was a brief pause, and right as I was about to add something about knightly steeds, Grey spoke again.
"Miss Jones, can you describe your relationship with Noah Tomorrow, also known as the superhero Paragon?"
My eyebrows furrowed. "Uh. No. We didn't really have a relationship. We only met the once."
"Would you say that it was romantic in nature, or purely sexual?"
I drew back. "Excuse me?"
Look, I know it's kind of odd getting outraged by a question like that in my circumstances, but in my defense, I'm crazy.
"Did it begin before December 23rd of last year?" she continued.
That was my birthday, the day I turned eighteen. "It didn't begin at all, what are you—"
"Miss Jones, describe the first time the issue of leading a revolt in the Sanctum City Industrial Park was brought up," Grey said. "Was it your idea, or Tomorrow's?"
I blinked at the barely discernible camera lens in utter bafflement. "What is this, a really half-baked attempt to smear Paragon?"
After a moment, the Sheriff walked around the camera and took a knee in front of me. "We're just trying to answer some pressing questions on behalf of the public, Miss Jones. And something tells me you have the answers we're looking for."
"To your made-up crap?" I scoffed. "Is that what this is all about? Do you really think anyone is going to believe that Paragon, one of the most celebrated, respected, wholesome superheroes in history, was sneaking into the Skip to bang a scrawny teenager and start a rebellion? Are you all really that desperate?"
She took off her hat, fiddling with it as she appeared to think the question over, then shrugged. "Some people will. More than you think, probably. He had, what, seven ex-wives? Clearly he's got a libido. There was a seventy year age gap with the latest? Really, when you're that old, what's the difference between twenty-seven and seventeen?" She put her hat back on. "Not a hard sell. It wasn't for Hyperion, was it?"
I stared at her.
"Now, here's what's going to happen," she said. "I'm not going to give you a script to read from. I don't see you as much of an actor. But you're a creative girl, aren't you? I've read your diary—I've seen some of the stories you wrote in there. What you're going to do is use that wealth of creativity and free time you have, and you're going to think up a really, really good story to go along with the questions I asked you, and maybe a few others besides. A very convincing story. And if my superiors like it enough—" She brushed her hands together. "—we're done with you. We'll get you a bed, upgrade you to an MRE diet, maybe even get you some paperbacks to pass the time with. Until then—" She signaled to the guards standing behind the lights.
They swarmed into view, surrounding me and unlocking my manacles.
"She still looks thirsty," Grey said. "Make sure she drinks deep."
They did.
----------------------------------------
"Verschärfte Vernehmung," Dad said. "A term coined by Heinrich Müller, director of the Gestapo."
I frowned at him and leaned back in my chair. "What does that mean? I don't speak German." I blinked. "Or... do I?"
"Its direct English translation is 'enhanced interrogation,'" Dad said, glossing over my potential bilinguality. "Of course, it's never really been about 'interrogating' anything. It's never provably produced reliable, actionable information at all."
"That's not even what they want from me," I noted.
He nodded. "It's about terror and compliance. It's about retribution. It's torture. Never for one second believe anything else, or that the people who do it aren't perfectly aware of what it is that they're doing. They picked the name, after all."
I drummed my fingers on the kitchen table. "Should I just...do what they want?"
"I will never tell you that you should let yourself be tortured, Abie," he said. "Do what you have to do."
I looked at the walls. Water leaked from cracks in the trim along the ceiling, running in little dirty streams down the walls, into Dad's files.
"It's not about me, though," I said slowly. "Or even Paragon. They're trying to undermine the entire superhero institution. They're...eroding it. Inch by inch. Tearing down its pillars. Somebody new is going to believe whatever stupid conspiracy they come up with, and if they throw out a thousand, that builds up over time. Factor in a hundred good reasons people have to want change..."
Dad watched me think, eyes somber.
"I don't love the heroes," I said. "But I don't think I can tear them down while SCAR is allowed to do whatever it wants, because nobody expects better from them. I can't contribute to that. It's not right." I looked at him. "Is it?"
In response, he leaned forward, and drew me tightly enough into his arms that it was hard to breathe.
He said, voice ragged with emotion. "I love you, Anna. I'm so proud of you. And I'm so sorry I'm not there."
I wanted to comfort him, but I didn't get the chance, because they finally took Paragon's cape away from my face.
----------------------------------------
I was back in my cell. Three more times in front of the camera. Three more sessions on the table.
I realized that it didn't matter if I wanted to help them or not. Eventually, I would.
That was, I think, the point of the entire process. It wasn't about any one waterboarding session. It wasn't about my will. It was about inevitability. It was why I daydreamed about my dad when I was on the table. Because there was no danger. There was no fighting. There was nothing but the next time, forever, until I gave them what they wanted. They would keep going for as long as it took, and even if I never gave in, it was no big deal. It wasn't about winning all at once. It wasn't about the masterstroke. I was just a tiny, inconsequential piece of their plan. I was a matter of convenience and opportunity. This beast of blind, idiot malevolence that they had created would use me and discard me.
I was nothing.
And now they were going after Paragon. I should have gone with him when I'd had the chance. Or I should have gone to bill and—
I frowned and thought, bill.
It unsettled me that his name was still impossible to even think about without that strange dampening effect. Magic was strange and unknowable by design, and even here, it could reach past all of the defenses that SCAR could put up—defenses that were more than capable of keeping me locked up and locked down—and keep me from even thinking a demon's name correctly.
Just to test it out loud, I said, "bill."
And from the darkness, he answered, "Yes, Darkstar?"