“Are you awake?” the familiar voice from before asked.
Eva nodded yes. She’d just woken up.
He can’t see you, she told herself, and she croaked her reply.
“Yes.”
“Can you talk now?” he asked.
“Hungry,” she replied.
“Your guard said you threw up your food yesterday. You should eat more slowly.”
“Hungry,” Eva repeated. Had it already been a day?
“Push your bowls close to the door. I’ll get you some food and water.”
“Dark. Can’t see.” It was the most Eva had said since her flogging.
“I’m s...,” he stopped himself, then said angrily. “No. I’m not sorry. You’re getting what you deserve. More mercy than you showed everyone you killed. Just slide your bowls to the door now.”
Eva tried to keep her blanket on her back and crawl toward the sound of the voice, but the blanket rubbed on her skin and she couldn’t stand the pain. She shrugged it off.
She tapped in the dark again and eventually found both bowls and pushed them in the direction she thought she needed to. They touched something and she reached up and felt smoothness. Metal, not rough hewn stone, and she pushed the bowls against it.
“By door,” she got out.
“Back up.”
She made her way back, her knees hurting along with the rest of her, and covered up inside her blanket.
Noises at the door, like something sliding to the side, and she heard the metal bowls scrape across stone.
“I’ll be right back,” her visitor said, but then added angrily, “But you probably don’t care.”
I do care, Eva thought. The man had judged her for some reason, but she did care. She didn’t want to be alone.
She replayed his words in her mind and wondered why he’d said, “Everyone you killed.” How would the Hrwang know who she’d killed? As far as she knew, the only people she’d personally killed were her attackers in Las Vegas, although she had been responsible for other deaths, including her dog’s.
She appreciated the distraction from her misery as she tried to figure out why he’d said what he’d said, but as soon as her thoughts wandered onto unspecified paths, all the pain returned. She started crying again.
The slot in the door opened and metal scraped on stone.
“Eat slowly. It doesn’t look all that appetizing, but it contains all the nutrients a person needs to survive. It’s made from...” and he said a word that Eva didn’t understand. It didn’t even evoke an image in her mind like other Est words did.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” he replied, although she recognized the words didn’t mean quite the same as they did in English. They meant more like, “Pleased to serve.”
She wanted to rush at the food again, to find the water and drink it all down, but she knew her visitor was right. It might be all she received for a whole day, and she needed to ration it. She also didn’t want to throw it all up again. If she didn’t keep enough water down, she’d suffer from dehydration.
She’d suffered enough; she didn’t want to add that to the list.
She decided to wait before eating. Talking to her visitor was a distraction, and eating and drinking slowly would give her something else to focus on after he left. She didn’t want to try to do both at the same time. She was also cold and wanted to warm up a little under her blanket. She needed to drag it with her when she went back to the food dishes.
“Do you remember your designation?” he asked.
“No.” Her voice sounded weak, pathetic. She wished she were stronger.
“You are Prisoner Five Three Seven Zero Nine Two Three. But I’ll just call you Three.”
Great. She was a number.
“How long?” How long until the Lord Admiral executed her?
“How long is your sentence?” he asked, misinterpreting the intention of her question. He barked a laugh. “The rest of your life. What did you expect?” He sounded incredulous, upset.
“I’m done with you,” he added.
“Wait,” she cried, her voice still feeble. “Wait.” It was just my job, she wanted to tell him. You, the Lord Admiral, your people attacked my world and I just did my job. For my people. I only came here because my boss thought I could find some way to save my world from you.
She wanted to tell him everything.
Never confess, she warned herself.
“Why should I?” he asked.
She thought about his question and realized he wanted something from her. She didn’t know what, but her career was all about manipulating men, and if a man wanted something from her, she could use that against him.
Haven’t you learned your lesson yet? she berated herself. Look where your poker face got you.
She still couldn’t say much, the pain too great, her mouth too dry.
“Why visit?” she got out.
“I don’t know.” He snorted. “I asked myself that all this morning, all the way here. Why am I doing this? Why am I visiting her? She doesn’t deserve it. She deserves to die in isolation for her crimes. “
Everything he said confused her and made her hunger overcome her desire to wait to eat until he had left. She shrugged out of her blanket, the wool dragging like claws down her tender back, and she crawled back in the general direction of the voice. She found a dish, put her finger in a lumpy, clay-like substance, the same as the food they had given her the day before, and she tapped around gently for the second dish, not wanting to tip it over.
She found it, took a small drink, and tried to sit on the stone to rest, but the cold rock hurt her backside too much. She crawled back to her blanket.
“Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?”
“Thank you,” Eva mustered.
“Thank you? For what?”
“Visiting me,” she replied.
He was quiet after that. Eva listened intently; it distracted her from her pain, and she thought she heard footsteps. She decided he’d left and depression washed over her.
She debated what to do next. The blanket provided some warmth and comfort and she didn’t want to leave it again. But her stomach growled and her head pounded and she knew she needed to try to eat more.
The decision was too much. She started to cry again.
“Not so tough when you’re not under his wing, are you?”
His voice surprised her. He hadn’t left.
She stopped crying.
“Don’t take it so personally. I’m sure the millions dead on your world didn’t take it personally. They probably never even knew who you were. You were simply at his side, is that it? How can someone be like you? How can you even consider yourself human?”
His words still confused her but his tone of voice was clear. She didn’t understand how to answer his questions and wasn’t even entirely sure she understood him correctly. His words didn’t make sense and now she doubted her understanding of his language.
She decided that she had to ask the questions and hope she could make some sense of her situation from his answers. She wished she could see his face, his reactions, any clue that would help her know how to proceed, but everything remained black. She cursed the darkness.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Who am I? Does it matter? We’re all just fleas on the back of a large dog, according to your Kafka.” He paused.
“Does that surprise you?” he continued. “That I read one of your books? Of course, I didn’t have time for that. I didn’t actually read it myself. Someone else read it and I heard him talking about it in an interview. But what your Kafka wrote was correct. My life feels perennially out of control. All of our lives are out of our control.”
Eva had no idea who Kafka was and she knew nothing of the book he
mentioned.
“But I haven’t answered your question,” he continued. “I debated telling you to call me K, just like in the book, but that is too close to a name for my comfort. I don’t understand your world’s obsession with names; I’m told it makes reading disconcerting. It’s like everyone in the story is your brother or sister. I suppose that will change once the translation of your bible into Est is completed. We’ll have to get used to reading other’s names. Just the excerpts alone that have been released so far are already bestsellers. Everyone wants to know how your people could kill God.”
Eva’s head spun. She must be delirious. He wasn’t making any sense.
“I’m just babbling, I know. So much is in my head. So much I want to ask and to know. But no, I don’t know how you should designate me. What do you call me in her your head when I talk to you?”
What? she thought.
“Oh, there must be something you call me.”
She closed her eyes and thought this guy must be a moron. She hurt too much for this kind of nonsense. How did she think of him?
“Visitor,” she managed to say.
“Visitor. That works for me. You’re Three and I’m Visitor. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Eva’s sleep conditioning in the alien tongue let her understand the formality of the greeting, much more formal than how she understood the words and much more formal than anything she would have said in English. She also knew she was supposed to respond formally as well, but she couldn’t say that much. Thinking in Est grew wearying.
“Likewise,” she replied simply, in English.
“I don’t know that word, but you’re slurring your words anyway. I barely understand you in Est, and I don’t know that English word, if it is English. I suppose you are getting tired. At least we have been formally introduced and can designate each other. I’ll see you tomorrow after you’ve had a chance to rest up some.”
The cheeriness in his voice contrasted sharply to his anger from before. She didn’t understand Visitor or what he was about, didn’t know how she could use it to her advantage, but she did concede that he was right. Tiredness overcame her and she closed her eyes. She didn’t hear him leave.
Hunger woke her.
The silence of her cell unnerved her. She listened carefully, but Visitor was gone. She cried for a while, then crawled out of her blanket, shivering in the chill. She pulled her blanket along behind her as she crawled to where she thought the food bowls were, but found herself bumping into a wall and realized that she had no idea where the door and the bowls were.
She followed the wall.
It reached a corner and she felt an opening. She ran her hand carefully along it and it was a quarter circle, the radius no more than about six inches. It must be her toilet pit, the pit the guard had mentioned earlier. The day before? Why hadn’t she needed to use it yet?
She hadn’t eaten anything.
People often escaped dungeons in books or movies by going out the toilet pit, but there was no way she could fit through this one; the sides were hewn stone. She couldn’t make it larger without serious power tools. Like a jackhammer. There was no hope in the toilet.
She continued her circuit of the too small cell and after another turn, found the door. She found her bowls, forced herself to sip the water, and broke off a small piece of the food. It was soft, almost mushy, and smelled terrible. She reluctantly put it into her mouth, wanted to gag on the taste, a sort of spicy manure flavor, and swallowed.
Her stomach fought, wanting to throw it up and wanting more at the same time. She’d better eat slowly and hope they brought her something else the next time. Like a steak dinner with mashed potatoes and gravy. Or better, a baked potato topped with sour cream, bacon bits, and grated cheddar cheese.
Turkey would be even better, a large turkey like they showed on television, basted perfectly brown and served on a silver platter decorated with garnish, fresh cranberry sauce on the side, heavenly rolls dusted with flour, yams dripping in melted marshmallows, corn on the cob, green beans covered in fried onions, and pumpkin pie.
The pie got to her. Its tender crust, its sweet, soft yet firm, filling, with a dollop of carefully placed whipped cream on top.
She couldn’t help but start crying as she forced a second mouthful of the spicy manure into her mouth.
She slept, woke up, ate, drank, slept, woke up, ate, and drank again several times. The water ran out before the food, and she didn’t take another bite without having water to wash it down. If that flavor remained in her mouth for long, she’d throw up again.
She woke up needing to relieve herself, but she didn’t want to move, didn’t want to leave the comfort of her blanket. Instead, she remained curled up next to her food dishes near the door. But the feeling finally overwhelmed her and she crawled around until she found her toilet pit.
She didn’t know how to use it, there wasn’t really room to squat over it, until she realized that she’d need to lean her back against the wall.
That was agony, but she clenched her teeth and didn’t cry out. A watery, pungent stool came out and she felt some of it run down the side of her leg. It ended and she fell forward on her hands and knees, gasping at the pain. She dreamed of toilet paper as she crawled back to her blanket, tried not to think of what was on her leg, and passed out.
She was fed twice more before Visitor returned. Unable to track time, she didn’t know if he was gone two days or if she was being fed twice per day.
During the long interval while she waited for his next visit, her back began to itch fiercely, burning like matches being driven into her skin, and the only relief she found was by lying on her back on the wool blanket and wiggling. The pressure and the gentle scratching from the coarse wool made the itchiness go away.
She stood once. She held on to the bars in the window of the metal door and pulled herself up. Thick metal rebar sat in a roughly four inch by four inch opening, and she could push her face into that opening by standing on her tiptoes. She saw nothing.
It hurt to stand, hurt to stretch her muscles, but it also felt good. If she could build her strength back up, if she could recover from the flogging...
She didn’t know what she would do. But it was better to be strong. In the Agency safe house, she had worked out despite the darkness. Although, she remembered with fondness, she’d had a battery lantern and a flashlight there. She would give anything for a source of light now.
“Could I have a light?” she asked when she heard someone outside her door, hoping it was her visitor, and hoping he would cooperate, like he did with the blanket.
“You’re sounding better, Three,” Visitor said.
“Can I have light?” she asked again.
“I apologize. I shouldn’t have even given you a blanket.”
The thought of not having her blanket horrified her. She’d be dead from exposure already if she hadn’t had her blanket. How cruel could her captors be? Why didn’t they just kill her? It would be more humane. The Lord Admiral must really have it in for her.
“My eyes will go bad,” she said. She suddenly worried about them, worried about the effects of being in continual darkness. She wondered how long it would take before her eyes looked like the creature’s in The Lord of the Rings. Years? Months? Weeks?
“My people don’t care,” Visitor replied flatly. “Your punishment would be harsher if our laws allowed it.”
Laws?
She wanted to rail on him, to yell at him about his people’s laws, to decry the injustice of her treatment, to decry the injustice of her world’s treatment, but she didn’t have the strength. She cared, but she didn’t. Nothing mattered anymore. If they didn’t execute her soon, she’d simply hang herself with strips of her blanket. She could tie them to the bars in the opening of the door. She ignored that the bars probably were
n’t high enough. She’d figure something out. She wasn’t going to spend years in the dark like this.
“You have to admit you deserve your punishment, Three.”
She huddled in her blanket, no longer wanting to respond to her faceless visitor. She hated that the Hrwang wouldn’t use names. She hadn’t minded it when the Lord Admiral’s soldiers called her ‘Lady’, but she wasn’t a number. She couldn’t even remember what the entire prisoner number was that he’d told her.
She decided to violate the man’s customs. She didn’t care. What could he do to her?
“My name is Eva,” she said. “Eva Estelle Gilliam.” It was still hard to talk, but she felt driven. “Don’t call me Three.”
She didn’t hear him leave, but he never replied. After five or six minutes, or maybe it was ten, she asked, “Are you still there?”
No reply.
“You left because I told you my name?”
She waited. Nothing.
“Moron!” she yelled in English. She didn’t know the word in Est.
But it felt good to yell.
“Moron!” she yelled again. She remembered the mouse. She had to be defiant. It was in her nature, it was her culture. She’d remembered the t-shirt of the mouse flipping the bird at the oncoming hawk because it struck a chord. Never give up, never give in. She wished she could recall Churchill’s words right now, the ones he said about fighting on the beaches and in their towns, fighting every step of the way and never giving up. Just picturing him speaking gave her courage. She wasn’t going to give up. She wasn’t going to give in. She wasn’t going to let the Hrwang win.
She stood slowly, painfully, grabbed the bars in the opening in the door, and pressed her face against them.
“Moron!” she yelled. She reached her hand out through the bars and demonstrated her defiance to the dark.
She healed.
She was always hungry, but whatever nutrition was in the glop they fed her must have been sufficient, because she grew stronger.
The wounds on her back stopped itching after four or five more feedings, and she could finally stand without pain.
She slept less and began exercising to rebuild her muscles. Her bruised back wouldn’t allow her to do sit ups, but she did pushups and jumping jacks and ran in place.
Eva tried to keep track of the number of times someone slid the slot at the bottom of the door and took her empty dishes and returned with full ones, but without a way to record them, it was easy to forget. She thought they fed her once a day, but she couldn’t be sure. Sometimes when she woke up she still cried, cursing the dark, until she decided to work out. Working out was her one solace.
She knew the dark and the silence, the loneliness and the emptiness would drive her crazy and sometimes she hung on to the bars and yelled, “Moron,” as loud as she could for as long as she felt like. It helped.
She hadn’t started tearing her blanket into strips yet. She couldn’t decide if killing herself was being defiant or just giving up. Until she decided that, she simply needed to regain her strength.
After her feeding the next day, she tried testing how well her back healed. She spread out her blanket and lay on it, attempting a few, weak pushups, planning on doing situps next, when she heard a noise at the door. She immediately stopped and pulled the blanket up around her.
“Who’s there?”
She usually asked that when someone came to get her bowls and returned with her food, but no one ever responded. She still had plenty of food left, though, so she didn’t think it was feeding time again.
“It’s me. Visitor. Sorry I’ve been gone so long. You’ve caused me many problems.”
Inexpressible relief overcame Eva and she fought back tears. She hated Visitor and she never wanted him to leave. She wanted to scream and yell at him, to call him ‘Moron’ to his face and she wanted to say whatever it took to make him stay near, to make him talk to her. Anything to relieve her despair.
“I apologize,” she said, using the formal Est. “I shouldn’t have told you my name.” If he wanted to call her Three, she decided in that moment, he could. She didn’t care. She just needed to talk to someone.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You’re an alien. I know your ways are different.”
If it didn’t matter, why had telling him her name caused him so many problems? Talking with Visitor was like trying to solve a riddle. Nothing made sense.
She didn’t care. She just needed to talk to him.
“I missed you,” she said.
“Really?” he barked. Eva flinched. “The cold, heartless, murdering traitoress of the god killers has feelings?”
She cried involuntarily. A week before, two weeks before (how long had she been in captivity?), she would have known how to respond. She would have controlled her emotions, she would have calculated how to act and done so, but now she could only cry. She curled up into her blanket and sobbed.
“I apologize,” he finally said. “I know you are human despite the way you are depicted in our media. You are often colored completely red, with fangs and claws and sometimes tentacles for legs, but that isn’t you, is it? You’re just a pretty girl who got caught up in his schemes, didn’t you? You fell for him completely. How is it you say it on your world? Hook, line, and sinker? I’m not completely sure I understand the phrase, but it means to be caught completely in, doesn’t it?”
Eva couldn’t process what he was saying. The words simply didn’t make sense to her. If they knew she was a spy, why would he describe her as a pretty girl caught up in someone’s schemes. Who’s schemes? The Lord Admiral’s?
She didn’t answer while she thought about it, but he didn’t wait for her reply.
“Why?” he asked simply. “Why? What did he promise you?”
“Who do you mean?” she asked. “The Lord Admiral?”
He laughed bitterly.
“You don’t understand anything, do you? When you speak Est, you speak like a child and you sound weak like a child, and now you show the understanding of a child. It almost makes me feel terrible. You aren’t being punished for your crimes. You’re being punished for a being a stupid, weak girl who fell into a powerful man’s trap. I pity you.”
“I apologize,” she said as powerfully as she could. No one had ever accused her of being a stupid, weak girl unless she was playing the part intentionally. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Who else could I be talking about?”
“Do you mean the Lord Admiral? The man who had me locked up in here and whipped?”
The long sentence exhausted her, and she wasn’t sure she had the grammar of it correct.
Visitor barked an astonished laugh.
“The man you call the Lord Admiral no longer bears that designation. His designation is now Prisoner Five Three Seven Zero Nine Two Two. He certainly isn’t the one who had you whipped and locked up.”
He paused, and Eva heard noises that made her think Visitor prepared to leave.
“Wait,” she cried. “The Lord Admiral is a prisoner? Like me? Why?” What did Visitor mean? How could that be? The Lord Admiral’d found her out and had her punished. He was going to execute her after her torture. He’d been deceived by her and now he was exacting his revenge.
“Did you not see him? Next to you? Being whipped like you were?” Visitor cried, sounding surprised.
What?
She hadn’t. What had happened?
“I don’t know.”
She meant she didn’t understand, but the right word didn’t come to her tongue at that moment.
“The Lord Admiral did not have you locked up. I had you locked up. I’m the one who sentenced you both to be whipped and you both to be interred for the rest of your lives. It is the maximum punishment I could administer for genocide.”<
br />
Eva reeled. Nothing made sense to her. The Lord Admiral was a prisoner like her? He had been whipped like her? Right next to her? How could she not have seen him? Why was he being punished? Why had Visitor said she was being punished for genocide? What was wrong with these people?
“I must go now,” Visitor said. “I don’t want to speak of this again.”
“Wait!” She dropped her blanket and rushed to the door, grabbing the bars and pulling her face up to the opening. “Wait. Please don’t go.”
“I must.”
“Will you come back?”
He didn’t answer. She heard steps fading away and she let go of the bars, falling on her blanket and bawling like a child, her body convulsing, her breaths short and uncontrollable. Her world ended when her only visitor walked away.
Not long after, her entire body thrilled when she heard clanking at her door. He’d returned! He’d felt guilty for what he’d said and done and he’d returned and was going to set her free!
A light shone through the opening, blinding her. She closed her damp eyes and covered her face with her arm.
“Get back from the door,” a different voice commanded, a deeper, harsher voice. She obeyed, pulling her blanket up around her as she did so.
The door opened and she tried to look, but the bright light burned her eyes as if she were staring at the sun.
The door slammed shut and suddenly Eva had a bad feeling. She only felt one blow to her head before losing consciousness.
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