I cracked an eye open and dared to believe for one penetrating, all-consuming moment that this was really happening.
I’d lived within these four walls for a thousand days of hell. Maybe two. Brick walls, metal and blood were more familiar to me than my own voice.
I’d stopped speaking after a month in this cell. They beat and battered and burned me, so I stole away the single thing they wanted more than my screams, pushing it down, down, down deep into my belly. Silenced forever. My words, swallowed and locked away. I didn’t have an answer to their question, the one they’d asked an impossible amount of times.
What is the code?
What is the code??
What is the code???
I only had one honest answer to give, because I had no idea who I was, let alone whatever code it was they wanted. But they thought it was an act. They thought I was a liar when I gave them the only answer I had: I don’t know. I don’t know! I don’t know!!
Even they couldn’t tear the truth out of me. So I’d stopped speaking altogether. I retreated into my own body like a snail coiling up in its shell. I reinforced my walls, built them high and made them impenetrable until I was so deeply buried that nothing which happened to my flesh could reach my soul. But now it might have been time to emerge at last.
The slit of light ran vertically down my body, making me squint. And hope. God was I hoping. I rose to my feet, the too big shirt I wore hanging over the ripped leggings which I’d picked holes into. There was nothing else to do in the silence and the dark. And if I wasn’t doing something, then I started thinking. And when I started thinking, I started remembering. And I never wanted to do that. Because the only memories I had were of this room and the hell I’d endured here.
Don’t let the demons haunt you in your mind as well as in the flesh.
I walked silent and bold, wondering if this was really happening or if the gift of death had finally come to steal me away from here. But I hoped it wasn’t that. I’d dreamed of death, made friends with it, begged for it to take me countless times, but death always whispered in my ear, deliver me to them first. That was what I held onto. The image of the five of them bloody at my feet. I may have been small, delicate, but only on the outside. Inside, I was a raging inferno waiting to be unleashed. If only I were bigger, more powerful. If only I had a weapon strong enough to cleave them apart and make them bleed like I had bled, make them scream like I had screamed.
I pressed my palm to the rough wood of the door, every rivet memorised. There were fingernail marks and dents where I’d kicked and thrashed. I’d tried to get out so many times I’d lost count, but eventually I’d given up. And now, in a twist of fate, Jax had left the door open.
Jax: the big one with the greasy hair and lack of brain cells. The one who’d held my wrists while his brother punched me until bones shattered. The one who’d smiled while I’d screamed, the one who cheered on the others, but never had the gall to do anything more than hold me down.
I pushed the door wide and the familiar creak that always preceded the start of pain or marked the end of it sounded in my ears like a klaxon.
I stepped forward and my bare foot hit something soft. A breath fluttered past my lips and my heart thudded in time with it as I spotted Jax on the ground. His tongue lolled out of his mouth, swollen and blue and his eyes were bulging, his lungs labouring. His arm was twisted awkwardly where he’d fallen, his poorly-bandaged hand swollen and turning a nasty shade of purple. He’d turned up with the cut a few days ago and clearly hadn’t thought a trip to the hospital was worthwhile. Lucky for me.
Sepsis. The word rang in my head from some past memory I couldn’t grasp. From a time before they’d taken me, before my memories had been stolen away, my identity, my humanity. I was no one to me, but someone to them. And I didn’t know who that someone was.