by Ethan Cooper
“Turn it off,” I spew out.
“I can’t. You got that question wrong. You’re failing the test.”
“You’re asking me questions about JACK and the other wirewitches? I don’t have any good answers, and even if I did, who are you to tell me I’m wrong? I might be lying. I might be in denial. But you’re not so fucking different. This isn’t a test. This is torture.”
As the intensity of the shocking increases, my toe—the one he broke like a small twig—begins to throb, pulses of rising fire that start at my foot and chase the trail of spasming muscles on that side of my body.
“Oh, little one, you have no idea what your future holds,” Calamity Carl says. “Pain is as much a certainty as death is for humanity, but some are selected for an extra portion. And your portion is cosmically big! The biggest I’ve ever seen!”
Pushing through the fog of pain, I roll onto my side, trying to locate the pulse dagger handle. I’m not exactly sure why, since it doesn’t work, but it provides some measure of comfort when it’s in my hand. I’m not seeing it though. Calamity Carl probably moved it.
“Just tell the truth, and the pain stops,” he says.
“I’m going to kill you.” My words are hollow sounds in the air, but images of doing just that flicker though my brain, a giddiness swirling around my stomach, muting the pain he’s inflicting. I’m smiling.
“Not today you’re not. And what a horrible thing to say to somebody!”
Not today, but
(someday)
“The warlock. Tell me about him. Is he not your friend as well?”
“He tried to kill me.”
“He tried to witchkiss you?”
“You already know the answer to that, don’t you?”
The pain intensifies, my gut cramping. Feels like somebody’s digging at my insides with a knife.
“He didn’t try. He did witchkiss me.”
(and part
of you
liked it)
No, that’s not true. I shudder at the memory of being trapped against him, between his body and the bed. The memory cuts through the buzzing like the edge of a blade sliding between the curled fingers of my rib cage.
What he did to me.
What I did to him.
Every syllable between my lips has to be forced out. “Wanted…to be…friend.” Feeling those words come out of my mouth—it feels like defeat, especially since it’s not the whole truth of what I wanted. The tendrils of my attraction to who 2-85 was before—to Tam—cling to me like spiderwebs, nearly invisible, difficult to grasp and shake away. Pleasure. Repulsion. Instead of mutual exclusion, the two coexist, an inexplicable contradiction that makes me want to scream. “Thought he wanted…too, but…he wanted…change me…into what he is.”
The buzzing in my body disappears. I wipe at my mouth because I sense that I’m about to drool on myself. The side of my hand comes away slick and streaked with rivers of red. Somewhere in there I bit my lip hard enough to make it bleed.
“This warlock. You have feelings for him. Of all the poor choices you’ve made, this may be the one you come to regret the most.”
I have no good response to that. Don’t like to dwell on how right he probably is, on how out-of-control some parts of me are. Have I always been this way? I’d kill to remember that.
“Wirewitches. Friends.” The laugh that follows scolds me: You’re a naïve little youngling. You’re going to keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over until one of them kills you.
“I’m not the kind of girl that fits inside a neat little box,” I retort. “And why don’t you tell me why you care anyway. If I’m immune to the witchkiss, then why does it matter to you that I was with them? They didn’t hurt me. Well, physically.”
“You’re so confident you’re immune to the witchkiss!”
I raise a hand, fingers spread wide. In the glare of the ceiling light, it’s a five-tentacled silhouette. “Do you see any metaskin?”
“No.”
“Then yeah, I’m pretty confident.”
“Nobody’s immune to the witchkiss, Blue.”
“It appears I am.”
Calamity Carl stops circling, going down on one knee beside me. He grabs my leg—the one that’s attached to my bandaged foot, which is attached to my broken toe—and guides me from my side to my back. I go where he leads, unwilling to resist. Under my knee, his hand pulls upward, causing my leg to bend. A bolt of fresh, jagged pain has me crying out when my broken toe brushes against one of the spikes protruding from his knee. “I have something I need you to learn, and nobody knows this as well as I do—” One gloved hand clamping down on my ankle, the other sliding lower, past my heel, across the arch of my foot, until his thumb and forefinger are holding my little toe, much like they did on my other foot. “—appearances can be deceiving.”
He drops my leg to the ground. When my foot hits, fire lances through my limb. The electricity is back on, sending my body into convulsions as the static roars into existence. My scream—that’s probably what that sound is—drowns in the storm of sensations that buffet me. I’m thrashing, but his grasp is inescapable.
He breaks my other little toe.
42/Submit
Unknown/Unknown
Somewhere in the pool of ink that is my memory, in the darkness where my consciousness retreats to, where my mind cowers in a safe space while my physical body suffers, a senseless verse wanders through my brain:
this little piggy went to market
this little piggy stayed home
this little piggy had roast beef
this little piggy had none
this little piggy got pushed backward until those tiny delicate bones inside it broke and the skin around it tore all jagged like paper and now this little piggy is red and angry and crooked and puffed up like a red balloon but look on the cosmic side of things at least this little piggy matches her twin over there on the other foot.
Where did that come from? Don’t even know what the fuck roast beef is.
“Please stop.” The words are weak on my lips, the dreadful voice of a battered child.
How long have I been here, on the floor, body broken and twitching? Things have been fading in and out, like one of those dreams that switches between settings with little in the way of transitions that make any actual logical sense. Hours. Days. Weeks. How long since I’ve had water? How long since I’ve had food? Can’t remember the last time I squatted over the drain.
Opening my eyes, the room is dark, the lights in the ceiling are off and the windows are blacked out. Calamity Carl towers over me. I can tell he’s there only because of those glowing red lines in his body armor.
“You’re stronger than this, Blue. You have to be stronger than this. Much stronger. If you can’t endure this, you won’t survive long enough to fulfill Devilgod’s plan for your life.”
“Please stop,” I repeat. “You’re hurting the baby.”
“I’m hurting your baby? Please, don’t be silly. I’ve been very clear about this. You’re hurting your baby.”
Both feet are throbbing. Any movement, no matter how small, sends a ripple of needles up my legs. I want desperately to push up to my feet, to confront him face-to-mask. I’m sending the commands, but nothing’s responding. Signals are getting lost in the noise. The automatic me could do it, but she’s not here right now, and she doesn’t appear just because I want her.
I need to unlock my past to unlock her.
I need to unlock her so I can survive this.
I need to survive this so I can unlock my past.
By this logic, I’m cosmically fucked.
The static is boring a hole through my skull while the electricity eats away at the rest of me. The world around me starts to dim, as if somebody’s drawing a blanket over my face. Only have a few seconds before I go under again, and I can’t let that happen. A big part of me is afraid that this is it—that he’s done with me, and he won’t let me wake up if I
pass out one more time.
“I’m sorry!” Forcing those two words out is its own sort of pain, but I do what I must. I will survive this.
Both the static and the shock stop.
“What did you say?” Calamity Carl asks, his voice a soothing chime in my head.
“You heard me,” I say. Apparently, the only automatic part of me is the one that controls my tongue. My muscles start to relax, and my vision clears. I take a deep breath and blow it out as quietly as I can.
“I want to hear you say it again.”
“Okay. I’m sorry. Does that make you happy?”
“It’s very encouraging! I’m very excited to hear those words on your lips! But you must tell me, Blue, what are you sorry for? You’ve been bad to me every single time we’ve met. And it’s not just me; it’s other people too.”
“I’m sorry for…everything.” There’s a little too much truth in those words; I want to grab them out of the air, shove them back in my mouth, and swallow them down deep.
The buzz that returns to my body then is barely perceptible. It’s a warning. I’m in dangerous territory, and I suspect that only a few more errant words are all it would take to get me writhing again.
“Everything? That’s a lot to be sorry for! You should be more specific. When you say you’re sorry for everything, it sounds like you’re not taking this seriously.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For not taking this seriously.”
He steps over me, lowers his body down so I can look into his face without turning my head, the spikes on his knees receding so he can rest his forearms there. Not sure what I expect, but it isn’t for him to just crouch there, not saying anything. The red lines in his armor are glowing fiercely.
“You can admit you’re wrong. I’m glad to hear you say that. Now, tell me who did this to you?”
“What the fuck are you talking about? You did! You’re the one doing it to me right now!”
He’s wagging a finger in my face. I’d love nothing more than to grab that finger and break it. Take it in my mouth and bite it off. Either one of those would work.
When he tilts his head to one side—as if I’m a scientific experiment he’s observing—his crown makes a metal-on-metal squeal that sends a shiver up my spine. I’m unable to suppress the shudder that follows.
“No, not that.” The tip of one of his fingers touches my belly. “Tell me who put the baby inside you, Blue.”
Oh that. “You know I can’t remember what happened. You seem to know more about me than I do. Why don’t you tell me who did it?”
Now his finger is tapping on my forehead, right between my eyebrows. “The information is in here.”
“Even if it is, I know you know I don’t remember.”
“Was it the Guardian? Was it before or after he got witchkissed?”
“No, it wasn’t him.” Calamity Carl knows everything about me. He knows it wasn’t Tam.
(2-85)
“It was somebody…” he teases.
(somebody)
(somebody)
(somebody)
(special)
I try to roll over so I don’t have to look at him, but my body complains and I end up flat on my back. The ceiling shimmers, washing everything in a blanket of shifting silver.
“Think,” he says. “Try and remember.”
“No, you tell me.”
“Let me tell you another secret.” He looks over both shoulders, leaning over to whisper in my ear. “I don’t know either.”
My mind tells me that, as he shifts back, there’s some movement behind those red domes he’s using to cover his eyes. Something in the way the light in the room filtered through the domes allowed me to catch a glimpse of the man beneath. I saw him blink.
“But it has to be somebody!” he says as he stands once again.
I’d join him in standing, but I have two toes that would rather I not move, much less try to stand up.
“No, it doesn’t,” I say. When that buzzing numbness starts creeping up my leg, I’m not surprised.
The room goes blue. It’s the purest of blues—like the hair on my head. Calamity Carl’s body armor glows like rivers of irradiated blood as he grabs me by the front of my shirt and lifts me vertical, off my feet, until I’m looking down the length of his arm, my feet dangling in the air. Can hear the seams in my shirt beginning to separate as it begins to lose the fight to support my weight. I grab for his wrists, and somehow I have enough control of my hands to hold on, though I’m unable to avoid encountering his blades and spikes. The one that I take special notice of is wedged between the pinky and ring finger on my right hand, slicing into both digits, warm blood running under my palm.
“You’re incomplete,” Calamity Carl says, and there’s a chilling resignation in his voice. “You’re not going to be able to do what you’re supposed to if that’s what you are—what you think you are, what you allow yourself to be. You cover your incompleteness with words—cruel, meaningless words, and I don’t like it. Not one little bit. I brought you here, not to confront you, but to allow you the chance to confront yourself. You’ve fought me every step of the way. If you’re not willing to be honest about yourself, then that’s it. The test is over. And here’s a big surprise. You failed!”
(he is going to kill)
(you)
“You fucker, did you really think I’d do any of that?” I ask, and it’s the sound a small animal makes just before some bigger animal rips a chunk out of its neck. “This isn’t a test. This is tort—”
bzzzzzZZZZt!!!!!
Static detonates so hard I’m seeing actual interference lines in my vision. Think the shock is back as well, since I’m quivering uncontrollably. Body bows backward, hands slipping from Calamity Carl’s wrists. Can’t control anything, arms and legs flopping around, fingers curled up tight, nails driving into my palms, toes constricting. I’m held aloft only by the sheer tenacity of the material my shirt is made of. The material is stretched to its maximum, digging into my armpits. I get brief glimpses of Calamity Carl holding me up, his form motionless in contrast to the paroxysms of mine. The left shoulder seam on my shirt gives way first, followed quickly by the right shoulder seam. I find my body turning to one side just as the rest of the garment decides that it’s had enough. I come down mostly on the back of my shoulder, which goes immediately numb. That prevents me from slamming my head against the floor, but the rest of me isn’t so lucky. My hip hits next, then the rest of my leg. My feet double-tap the floor, and it’s goodnight-lights-out (2)Syl.
…
…
…
I awaken screaming.
I don’t remember it, but I know he was shocking me while I was unconscious. Awake now, but staring into the backs of my eyelids, imaging an existence where Calamity Carl decides that he’s not tired of me. That he’s not going to let me go, and he’s not going to kill me. No, instead he’s going to keep me here, alive and suffering.
(he’s killing your baby it’s)
(dead inside you)
It hurts so much.
The pain.
The failure.
The loss contained in my next words to him:
“Mercy,” I say. “Please.”
“No. You don’t deserve it.”
“Please stop.”
“I already told you what I wanted. You did not cooperate. The test is over, but I changed my mind. I’m going to keep you here. It’s going to be painful! It’s going to last a long time!”
The thought of this continuing is unbearable.
“No. No more. I—I submit. I’ll do whatever you want. Tell me what you want me to do.”
He doesn’t respond, but I’m consumed with simply trying to breathe, so I’m unable to say anything else. I manage to open my eyes so I can look at him.
“You don’t know how disappointed I am to hear you say that,” he replies. “Because I have one more secret for today: Just a f
ew minutes ago, I lied. I told you that the test was over, but it wasn’t. Only, now it really is over, and this time you really did fail. This is life, Blue, and you just failed in the only way any of us can really fail in life: You gave up. A tiny bit of pain and suffering, and you offered yourself up to me. How could you do that? It makes me sad. I thought you’d come through this. You had so much potential. You proved that with the Dokks and the wirewitches. I thought you were willing to do what it takes to survive. I was wrong.”
“No.”
“The shock—that’s not going to go away again. You’re going to feel it until the end.”
The lights dim, a dark blue, the ocean at midnight.
Calamity Carl walks out of my vision. The static and the shock are an all-consuming assault that sap my control, but I sneak in just enough to rotate my torso and my head so I can watch him go. There’s a fresh new pain in my side. May have broken a rib or two when I landed. I watch the elevator doors open. He doesn’t turn around, so his back is to me when the doors close and he’s gone, his last two horrific words echoing in my ears.
“Goodbye, Syl.”
43/Survive
Unknown/Unknown
I thought you were willing to do what it takes to
(survive)
What it takes to
(die)
My body moves where the static and the shock take it. I’m just a powerless boat on an angry sea. The hurt drifts through my body, traveling through me like an explorer in a cave, searching out every untouched nerve ending. At other times, it assaults all of me at once. It’s the constant nature of the pain that chips away at my cognizance. Each second is as painful as the previous one, until my sense of time is lost in the throb and pulse that Calamity Carl is delivering by way of the shackle.
This time, it’s not going to stop until I’m dead.
The black shroud is back, slowly descending over me. How long do I have this time?
(survive or die angel make a choice)
It hurts too much.
Nothing’s responding.
I’ve lost control.
There’s nothing I can do.
(close your eyes then it’s)