Juncture 5.7

Three weeks had passed. Three weeks, and I was no closer to finding out anything about King and his crew than I was before I had captured his agent. Although I wasn’t torturing her in any real way, I was strictly limiting her food and liquid intake. My hope was that at a certain threshold, she would become delirious and details would pour out like water.

If that didn’t end up happening? I could resort to other, more extreme forms of questioning. During the years that I had been working for the OST I had been in a large number of sticky situations, in which I would have to simply endure whatever was being dealt to me in order to escape.

Unconsciously, I straightened and bent my arm, the joint clicking as I did. It was still difficult to think about many of the things that I had gone through. They all felt fresh, as if the memories had been imprinted yesterday. But that tends to happen with physical trauma; the memories don’t lessen over time.

I unlocked the door to the warehouse. She was sitting in the chair, her head leaning forward; her hair greasy and matted. I walked over to her, and picked up the plastic bucket that was next to the chair – I had to be careful to breathe through my mouth. It was disgusting. I carried it over to a plumbing unit on the far side of the building and slopped it into the open, waiting pipe.

“So, have anything to tell me?” I asked as I walked back over to my prisoner. “If you do, I might even be persuaded to give you a little extra water this week.” I kneeled in front of her, putting my hand on her chin and pulling her face up so she was looking at me.

Her eyes were dull – as they had been after the first two weeks. She smelled terrible; almost as bad as the bucket.

She refused to meet my gaze. I gripper the lower half of her face, pinching her cheeks in, dragging her eyes to mine. She finally acceded, and a layer of steel that hadn’t been there enveloped her. Her eyebrows knit together in a look of defiance.

“Fuck… you,” I heard in an undertone. Her voice was dry and scratchy. Anger bubbled up, and I gripped her jaw harder. When I released her, she grunted and her head fell – she didn’t have the energy to hold it up. There were small marks where my fingernails had dug into her skin.

All of a sudden bile bubbled up in my throat.

This is wrong.

I felt it almost too late. Revulsion for what I was doing washed over me, and I ran outside, trying to look casual. As soon as I had closed the door to the warehouse all of the food that I had eaten in the past day escaped through my mouth.

I stayed there for the better part of ten minutes; kneeling on the floor waiting for the next round of bitter nausea to gut-punch me. I couldn’t explain just what had overcame me, but the entire situation felt immensely, abstractly wrong.

It was as if I was still that dumb, impressionable teenager. As if I hadn’t gone through all hell since I joined the OST. All at once I was certain that something weird had happened.

My immediate thought was that some wonky stuff was happening with time travel. I’d experienced time travel though, it was nothing like this. There was no sudden realization, it was just – travel, only you ended up in a different when instead of a different where.

No, this was something entirely different. I would have to contact someone at OST to ask them if they had any information on this type of thing.

Maybe Seph, she was – there was a momentary hitch in my thoughts. For a second, all I had was a name. Then, information and memories flooded in, and I remembered who she was.

That clinched it – something was up. It was like my current existence was a bad computer simulation, and it was taking some time to retrieve the information.

In the meantime, I had to finish. I still needed the information from this woman; she was a danger to her current society. I steeled myself and re-entered the dark room.

Her head twitched a little as the door squealed shut. I didn’t exchange any words with her, just walked over to the side of the room where the storage was. I grabbed a bottle of water and turned to walk back over to the prisoner. I had another thought, and turned back around, grabbing a second bottle and a can of beans.

I put the water bottles down in front of her, then opened the can and poured it into a clean, curved, plastic bowl. I didn’t want her to be able to slice my face open with the metal can.

I gently placed the bowl down in front of her. She managed to lift her head up to lock eyes with me.

I saw hatred – but deep in the back, in the darkest recesses of her pupils, I could see that she was just as scared as I was. I felt her see the same fear in my eyes. I broke off the contact.

As I began walking out, I heard a noise behind me. I turned. She had said something, but I hadn’t heard it. She was looking down again.

I walked out of the building, breathing in deep gulps of the fresh air. I would come back tomorrow, instead of waiting multiple days. As much as it pained me to do this, I would go back. I would get the information that we needed.

In the meantime, I had a lot to discuss with Seph, and quite possibly a whole host of other people at the OST. This sudden phenomena needed to be explained, and it needed to be explained fast.