by Gold, Amelia
“Open your mouth.” The squad leaders goes over to her. He has unzipped his pants and is not afraid to expose himself on national television.
She starts sobbing as another voice shouts out from the pen where our families are held. “Do it!”
I get the feeling that her “offer” has not been a willing one. Someone in her family is making her go through this just to save their own skin.
“Get that disgusting thing away from her mouth.” Heth is saying loudly.
“Heth!” I whisper. I want to stop her but I can’t. She’s going to get herself killed.
The squad leader zips his pants back up and then draws his gun. I turn my head away because I can guess what he’s about to do. But I still can’t block the sounds out. Sounds like a loud bang, a scream of pure terror and a muted thud. I don’t have to look back to know that Mira is now lying in the snow, after having been shot by the squad leader’s gun.
“I don’t like half offers.” The squad leader tells us. Then he turns his attention to Heth. “What about you, One-O-Nine? Are you a half offer?”
“No.” She replies.
“Prove it.” He tells her.
She steps forward from our line.
“You are going to kneel there and I am going to whip you. You are not going to move away. You are not going to tell me to stop.” He explains his plan to publically flog her.
She tries not to gasp in pain as lashes come down on her. They break her skin instantly and begin to draw red lines on her back. The flogging continues, mostly in silence, until the whip is held off and a boot is deployed instead, digging into her injured back. This time, Heth is unable to hold back her yelp of pain.
“Stop! Please stop!” Ath calls out loudly.
“Don’t.” I tell her but she doesn’t listen.
The next moment, before any of us can react, she explodes into fire midway through running in the direction of the squad leader.
“My offers do NOT engage in hostile behaviour.” The squad leader says as everybody stares at Ath, stunned.
She has been hit with a special bullet shot by another soldier that causes spontaneous combustion. The flame is intense and spreading outward from her torso. Her screams are beyond agony. Actually they got it wrong. She wasn’t trying to tackle the squad leader, she was trying to reach Heth – maybe even take some of the lashes for her.
“Roll in the snow.” Heth shouts as she turns and sees, for the first time, what has happened to her friend.
“You obviously don’t know how to follow orders.” The squad leader says as he draws his gun and presses its barrel against the back of her head.
He’s not going to shoot her right away because he is enjoying the spectacle of Ath burning to death a little too much but he will definitely kill her once the fires in the poor girl go out. If we were to try something, we have to try it now.
“Kneel.” I tell the girl next to me before placing my hands on my head and kneeling into the snow.
There is a pause and then she understands. She whispers to the girl next to her and copies my gesture. Eventually no girl in the line is left standing. The squad leader turns his attention away from the last flames on Ath’s charred body which are being put out with a fire extinguisher by another soldier. He is not impressed.
He comes over to me, bends down and places a hand around my neck. I close my eyes and apologise to mum and Mish in my mind. I hope that they will forgive me for gambling. Because I am gambling, not just with my own life, but with theirs as well. The squad leader squeezes my throat and my head feels like it’s going to explode from the pressure. I realise that I am holding my breath and not daring to breath.
“Padd. Look.”
The grip around my neck loosens as I open my eyes to see one of the soldiers pointing to the media. For the first time, the cameras are not trained on us. They are trained on our families, in the pen behind them, who are no longer standing. Every last person – men, women, children and the elderly – is down on their knees.
Padd is now in a difficult position. He wants nothing more than to shoot me and be done with it. But he can’t. So he does the next best thing.
“Get her up.” He commands.
Two of the other soldiers drag me onto my feet and lock their hands around my arms. Padd puts down his gun and pulls out a pocket knife. Before anyone has a chance to say anything, he plunges the knife into my abdomen, cutting through my pre-existing injuries.
“Myc!” Mish shouts loudly. But she’s not swearing. This time, she’s crying.
When the knife is pulled out, it hurts ten times more than it did when it was pushed in and forces a scream that I had been trying to suppress out of my mouth. As soon as it is pulled out, it is then immediately re-stabbed into the same area.
“Please…” I whisper as he continues to stab me.
He pulls my head up by my hair and draws out the knife before wiping the blade down the side of my face, smearing the blood across my cheeks. I’m glad that no one is trying to stop him because he would have lost it and actually killed me rather than what he was currently doing, which is just playing.
“Tell these people why you offered yourself.” He points at the cameras.
What I say will affect all the girls. So I speak in Venri. “For Hven.”
He lets go of my hair and I black out as my head falls forward and too much blood rushes to my eyes.
Assessment
I wake up to water being poured across my face and a strong smell of grease. I wait for the water to drain and I open my eyes to see the squad leader’s face next to mine. My wrists have been shackled to the wall above my head and my feet are barely touching the ground. I’m in some sort of a cabin. There is a table in the middle of the room where the soldiers are consuming their evening meal. They are making me watch them eat because I haven’t eaten in about three days, though we were given water on the road.
“You’ll be happy to know that you’ve been selected.” Padd tells me conversationally.
“Thank you.” I reply.
“That was quite a stunt that you pulled there. My colleagues are impressed.” He compliments me.
I don’t reply because I know that he’s stalling. He’s going to try to relax me before telling me their plans for the evening.
“Don’t you want to know what has happened to your mother and sister?” He asks me.
My answer surprises us both. “No.”
“Why?” He asks intrigued.
I try to formulate my words very carefully. “Doesn’t make a difference to me anymore. I will never see them again.”
Correction. I don’t want to see them again. Even if I survived whatever the army had planned for me, I would not go back to my family. It would only shame them. As far as they’re concerned, I’m already dead. And if the army had lied to us about the fate of our families – well then, there would be no family left to go back to anyway.
“If you are not doing this for your family then why are you doing this?” Padd shakes his head.
I hadn’t really considered that. I was trying to save my family. Now that our paths have separated, I have to look for a new reason for being.
“It doesn’t make any difference to you.” I reply. “I could be any one of the girls that your squad captured.”
“True. But it makes a difference to where you are going.” He tells me.
“What are you talking about?” I ask him.
“Depending on your condition, you will be used differently and that will determine where we put you.” He smiles.
I guess I was very naïve to think that it would end here. I actually didn’t expect to live beyond this night but the army seems to have different plans for me.
“This is One-One-Two?” Another man comes into the room. His uniform is very different from the ones worn by the squad.
“Captain Vinn.” Padd straightens immediately and the other soldiers drop their food and stand up.
The captain draws out his gu
n and shoots the wall between my head and my wrists. I try not to flinch or scream as my ears are deafened.
The captain approaches me slowly. I reject the instinct to turn away and keep eye contact with him. I can see his intent as his pupils tighten. Padd had wanted entertainment but Vinn wants retribution. Padd was indifferent to the Knax but Vinn is incensed by us. Furious anger and rage aside, there is hatred and loathing that I have never seen before in the Captain’s eyes.
“You.” He points his gun at me and I try to fight against the instinct to close my eyes. “You humiliated the Hven army. My army! On national TV.” Then he points the gun at Padd. “And you. You let her.”
“I didn’t have a choice, Captain.” Padd tries to explain himself.
“They don’t have a choice.” Vinn replies angrily. “Your job is to make their choices for them. Not the other way around.”
“You know what would please me now?” He presses the nozzle of his gun into my face.
“My death.” I whisper back.
He smiles as if to confirm my statement. Then he lowers his gun. “It’s too easy to kill you.”
A moment later, Padd is lying on the floor of his own cabin with blood draining through his uniform. He had spared my life at the cost of his own (though he didn’t know it at the time). I shouldn’t feel anything toward this man who has caused the deaths of my father and two of my friends (along with countless others). But he was still a person. Whatever his crimes were, he didn’t deserve to die. At least, not via murder.
Padd’s men are staring at his body in shock. But they do not protest his death. They do not even express their love for their comrade. At least not in the presence of Vinn. Their reaction is something that I will never understand. Even unarmed, Ath and Heth were willing to defend their friends. Yet these armed and trained soldiers did nothing.
“Move her.”
At the captain’s command, two of the soldiers unshackle my wrists and put a black bag over my head. Then I am taken out of the cabin.
*_*
I come to be aware that I am sitting on the ground of a small room with my back against the wall. There is an IV drip attached to my arm and there is a white paste spread across my body, covering all my injuries. I think the fake skin has been removed.
“Welcome to the hospital ward.” Says a man I’ve never seen before. His voice is thick with sarcasm.
I look up at the man and I hear a soft clanging sound behind me so I try to turn my head.
“Don’t bother. They’ve put a collar on you.” He tells me.
The man is not in military uniform. He’s speaking to me in Knav and he’s changing my drip. He’s a medic. Just like Iv, he was a Knax who had a skill that the army wanted to use.
“Thank you.” I tell him.
“Don’t.” He replies harshly. “You’re not going to get better. They will just make you worse.”
“Thank you for making me better before they make me worse.” I try again.
“You know how the system works.” He laughs.
“So do you.” I smile.
“I take it you don’t remember what happened?” He says in the same sarcastic voice.
“No.” I reply as I realize that my memory has gone blank after the shooting of Padd in his cabin. “What did I miss?”
“Right now, your mind is protecting you. If I tell you, you will probably go into shock.” He tells me.
Since my capture by the Hven army, there’s not a lot that hasn’t already been done to me. But somehow this was different. Something had been done to me that was so horrible that my medic is trying to avoid speaking about it.
“I was raped?” I ask him.
He pauses for a moment before telling me. “You will be.”
So it wasn’t rape. Something else has been done to me.
“How much of your situation are you aware of?” He asks me.
I take a moment to consider the fact that I’m still alive. “I’m annoying enough that they want to do horrible things to me but not annoying enough to kill.”
“That’s one way of looking at it.” He smiles at me. Properly, for the first time. There is some humour in his eyes which was absent before. “You know that Vinn is furious with you right?”
“Of course.” I laugh with him now. Clearly, he’s heard about what happened to Padd.
“Then you’ll know that he isn’t done with you yet.” His smiles wryly.
“Look, I know that you’ve seen too much.” I tell him. “But I need to know. If you don’t tell me, it eases your conscience but it makes no difference to my situation.”
“Then I will tell you what is done to every girl that has been selected by the army.” His voice is gentler than it was before.
“Which is?” I ask him.
“They are sterilized.” He explains.
So this is what he was trying to avoid telling me. I guess it should have been expected since they were planning on enslaving us sexually. If it was done to all the girls then what was so horrible about what was done to me that he couldn’t talk about it?
“You did it.” The realization hits me. “You performed the operation.”
“Yes I did.” He says. There is no shame in his eyes. He has performed the same operation many times before. But he still finds it difficult to talk about what happened. “Look, I don’t think you should try to remember. You’re right. It doesn’t change what happened. If it doesn’t make any difference then it’s better that you don’t remember.”
Why does he keep saying that? What does he not want me to remember?
Education
I’m standing in what has now become a familiar position for me – being shackled to the wall by my wrists with my feet barely touching the ground. The girl on the screen is also standing in the same position, except that she’s not watching a screen.
“Do you know what room this is?” Vinn asks me in the video.
“Doesn’t make any difference.” I reply on screen. “Whatever you’re going to do to me, it can be done in any room.”
It’s weird seeing myself. Watching footage of anyone being tortured is disturbing enough but when you are watching yourself being tortured, there are no words to describe it. It’s like having an out of body experience.
“This is a room that we like to call the interrogation room.” He smiles on the screen. “It is sound proof and the location of it is completely secret.”
I become aware that the footage is filmed in the same room that I am now being forced to watch it in.
“Let’s not pretend that you don’t know why you’re here.” Vinn says in the video. “You lost me a good soldier.”
“You shot him.” I reply on screen, anger seeping into my eyes for the first time.
“I may have pulled the trigger but you are the real gun.” He replies. “I know how you work. You manipulate people. You give them what they want and then you twist what they give you to bring them around to you.”
That is an awful assessment of my character that is somewhat closer to the truth than I would ever like to admit.
“I lost one of my best men. My own recruit. I trained him myself. To you. To a Knax. To a lying manipulative b**ch!” He leans over and slaps me across the face.
I’m not sure if my amnesia is a blessing or a curse. A victim and a witness will be traumatized in different ways by the same act of violence. Thanks to my amnesia, I am being forced to witness my own torture.
“I am not going to kill you.” Vinn tells me in the video. “But I can’t say that they will not.” He points off screen somewhere, presumably at Padd’s team. “They can do whatever they want to you. I will not stop them. But first, Hash has something to give you.”
The medic, who had been helping me with my recovery and probably saved my life, steps into view.
“I’m really sorry.” He apologizes to me before holding out a needle. “This will make you hurt more.”
“Don’t skirt around it, Knax. It’s a pain amplif
ier. Just say it. It will magnify whatever she gets given from here on.” Vinn says to the laughter of the other soldiers.
“It’s okay.” I can hear myself telling him in the video.
This at least partly explains the guilt that he was showing earlier when he kept trying to tell me to forget what had happened. It was because he had been forced to take part in it.
“Now, there are a lot of things that we would like to do to you but first, we need to undress you.” Vinn is saying in the video. “Iv has done a wonderful job with you. I daresay that you are her finest work.”
Now that I know what they are about to do to me, I look away. Even though the incident is in the past, it’s not something that I want to see repeated before my eyes.
“What’s the matter Knax? Can’t take a little home theatre?” The soldier that’s supervising my “education” asks me.
I want to say something to him that not even Mish would say out loud but I hold my tongue at the last minute. I turn back to face the screen.
One of the soldiers comes up to me and fondles my breast. “They feel good. Let’s see what they really look like.”
He takes some sort of a cream and rubs it into the tip of one of the skin pieces covering the drag mark on my chest. Then he pulls on the tip and rips the whole thing off.
The scream I produce is like nothing I’ve ever heard from my mouth before. Seeing that kind of footage normally induces empathic pain in a witness but since I am both victim and witness, my body reacts beyond what I can control.
“Word on the street has it that female Knax have nicer breasts than Venry girls. Let’s see if this is true.” Another soldier comes up to me and repeats the same actions of the first soldier.
By now, I am no longer trying to hide the amount of agony that I’m in. Something else creeps into my eyes. Something that I’d hoped I would not see: fear. My body remembers more than my mind and I am shaking from what I am seeing in the footage even though I can’t remember the actual incident.
One by one the soldiers come up to me, make some sort of derogatory comment about my body and then rip a piece of the fake skin off. My prior injuries are reopened and there is blood everywhere. When the patch of fake skin that Padd’s Knife had pierced through when he was stabbing me is ripped off, you can see the strain on my face as I close my eyes from the pain.