A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0042

Chapter 42

The chicken was the cheapest thing that could still legally be called chicken, and Kimiko knew this before the first bite, because her tongue had become an instrument too honest for the meals they gave her. She tasted the freezer burn under the grease, the wilted oil that had fried a hundred other portions before this one, the thin chemical sweetness of a bird that had never stood on its own legs. None of it mattered. She ate anyway, tearing the last of the meat from the bone with her teeth, working it down to the cartilage, because her body was a furnace that never stopped asking, and any fuel was better than the hollow that lived beneath her ribs the rest of the day.

She set the bone on the greasy paper in front of her, laid it beside the others with a tidiness no one would ever see, and pushed the whole ruin of the meal away as far as the slack in her arms allowed. Which was not far. The chain conceded her about the length of a forearm before it drew taut, and the tray slid to that limit and stopped, and she left it there.

For a while she did nothing but breathe and let the food do its slow work inside her.

The cell was small enough that she had long ago stopped measuring it in meters and started measuring it in her own reach. Four short paces of wall if her legs had been free. They were not. Steel bracketed each ankle and each wrist, the cuffs lined with a strip of rubber that had worn through months ago, so that now the metal sat directly against skin she healed and healed and healed again beneath it. From each cuff ran a chain thick as her thumb, and each chain ended in a plate bolted flat to the concrete behind her, and the concrete itself was the real prison, poured a hand’s width thick around a room built for exactly this and nothing else.

She had learned the room by its failures of light. A single fixture in the ceiling, caged in wire, burning a dull orange that never fully died and never fully woke. High on the far wall, above the steel door, a slit no wider than two fingers where the outside pressed a bar of true daylight through the block, and that bar traveled the wall through the hours like the hand of a clock she could not stop watching. When the bar reached the third seam in the concrete, she knew the day outside was ending. When it vanished, the night belonged to the orange bulb, and the orange bulb belonged to no hour at all.

Her senses reached for the world and found the world walled off. This was the particular cruelty of it, the one they had probably not even intended. Whatever the blue had done to her, it had opened her hearing until she could count the men breathing in a corridor, opened her sense of smell until she could name what they had eaten, opened her sight until the dark held shapes for her the way water holds fish. And then they had buried all of it under thirty centimeters of poured stone, so that every gift arrived at that wall and broke against it. She heard the building the way a diver hears the surface, muffled, distant, distorted into meaninglessness. She smelled damp and rust and her own long confinement. Most of what her body had been remade to perceive, it perceived now as absence.

She flexed her hands. The knuckles cracked. Under the left cuff the skin had split again and already sealed, a thread of new pink where an old sore had been, and she watched it finish closing with the detached interest of someone observing a stranger’s wound. Her regeneration did not care that she was starving. That was the thing she had come to understand about it, the thing that frightened her more than the pain. It healed her whether or not there was anything left to heal her with, and when there was nothing, it took what it needed from the rest of her. On the worst nights she could feel it eating her from the inside to close a cut on the outside, feel the muscle thin along her arms while some deeper wound knit shut, and she would lie against the cold wall with her arms wrapped around a stomach that had begun to devour itself and understand, very clearly, that her own body would never be allowed to let her die.

That was why they kept her.

She had not understood it at first. In the beginning, in the long blur of the first weeks, she had waited for the thing every woman in the camp had learned to wait for, the thing she had run from across an ocean. She had braced for hands, for the smell of men deciding, for the old fight she knew how to lose slowly and survive. It had not come. They fed her, chained her, ignored her, and she had lain awake trying to solve the arithmetic of a captivity that made no sense, until the day the men in the plastic aprons came for the first time and she learned that she was not merchandise of the kind she had feared. She was a field. She was something you planted a knife in and came back to harvest, and the harvest grew back, and that was the whole of it, and it was worse than anything the camp had ever taught her to imagine.

She knew the sequence now the way a body knows a scar. The batons first, always the batons, because whatever the blue had made of her, it had not made her too strong for enough voltage. Then the needle, the milky sedative that dragged her under before her strength could matter. Then the dark, and the drift, and the surfacing hours later on the cold floor with a line of fresh closure somewhere on her, a seam that itched as it finished sealing, and the knowledge that some organ that had been hers that morning was on ice somewhere, moving toward a body richer than she would ever be. A kidney. Part of a liver, which she gathered grew back, because they returned for it. Marrow. Things she had no names for in any of her languages, taken with a routine that had stopped being personal a long time ago.

She had kept count for a while, in the beginning, scratching a tally into the grout with the edge of a cuff. She had stopped when the tally stopped meaning anything, when the number grew large enough that it described a person who should be dead many times over and instead sat here tasting freezer burn on cheap chicken. Somewhere out there a man was growing very rich on the fact that she could not stop living. She had seen him exactly once.

It had been early, before they understood how far her hearing reached, before the concrete. A door left open a crack down a corridor she could still perceive. She had watched through the gap, and she had seen him take two men by the throats, one in each hand, and lift them off the floor without effort or interest, the way another man lifts two bags from a car. She had seen him cross a room in the time it took her to blink, there and then simply elsewhere, the space between the two positions erased. He had said something in that language she could not place, low and bored, and the two men had gone very still in his grip in the way of men who have understood something final. Then the door had closed, and she had never seen him again. But she carried the image the way you carry a stone in a shoe. He was like her. He was more than like her. Whatever the blue was, he had drunk deeper of it, or drunk longer, and he had built all of this on the discovery that a creature that heals is a creature you never have to stop selling.

She did not know his name. She did not know the name of the city, the name of the country, the name of the ocean she had crossed to arrive at this exact room. She had crossed so many borders by then, been handed off through so many sets of hands, that geography had dissolved into a single continuous corridor of being moved, and America, when she finally reached it, had felt at first like the end of the corridor. She had let herself believe it. That was the part she could not forgive in herself, on the nights the hunger let her think clearly enough to hate anyone. She had let herself believe she had arrived somewhere.

She let the memory come because the memory was hers, one of the few things in the room that was. A field at the edge of a village, and her mother’s hands, and then the hands were gone and there were other hands, rougher, and a truck, and the camp. She had been small. The camp had made her less small very quickly. It had put a rifle in her arms before the rifle was lighter than she was, taught her the parts of it by feel in the dark, taught her which men to walk near and which to never be alone with, taught her to sleep with one hand closed around something sharp. It had trained her to hate a nation across a map, to be a weapon aimed at a country she would grow up to destroy, and she had learned the lessons because the alternative to learning them was a shallow grave at the tree line. She had escaped the men who wanted her body more than once, escaped by running and by biting and once by lying so still under a tarp that the man had given up and gone to find someone who moved. She had learned that surviving was a thing you did with your whole animal self and apologized for later, if there was a later.

And then, at the far end of all of it, when she had finally run far enough and fast enough to put the whole trained-to-kill life behind her, when she had crossed the last water and stepped onto the last shore telling herself the corridor was finally over, the corridor had simply turned a corner. New men. A different language. The same van, more or less, the same tarp, the same practiced indifference of people for whom she was a unit of weight. And at the end of that van, no buyer of the kind she had spent her whole life outrunning, but a small glass vial of something blue, and a needle, and the discovery that the worst thing that could happen to her was not to be used up but to be made unusable up.

She laughed, once, a short dry sound with no humor in it, at how completely her every survival had failed. She had survived the parents she lost and the camp that raised her and the men who hunted her and the ocean that should have drowned her, survived all of it with a competence that had once made her proud, only to be delivered whole and healthy to the one fate her competence had prepared her for least, the one where being unkillable was the trap and not the escape.

But under the laugh, low, where the hunger lived, there was still the other thing. She had not been able to name it in a long time and she did not try to name it now. It was not hope, exactly. Hope was a soft word for a soft feeling and there was nothing soft left in her. It was closer to a fact she had decided to keep, the way she had once kept sharp objects in her fist while she slept. The fact was this: they had made her a creature that did not stop. They had poured a wall around her and drained her by the ounce and calculated exactly how little food would keep the furnace lit without ever letting it roar. But they had built their whole enterprise on the one thing they could not take back, which was that the same power that let them harvest her forever was a power. It was strength they were starving down to a trickle. It was regeneration they were spending on their profit. And a trickle was not nothing, and a thing that could be spent could, some other day, be saved.

She turned toward the plate on the wall behind her, set the sole of one bare foot against the cold concrete for leverage, wrapped both hands around the chain at her left wrist, and pulled.

The chain came taut with a sound like a struck rail, and behind her the bolt plate groaned against its anchors, a deep grinding note that traveled through the concrete and into her spine. She held the pull, felt the metal transmit her force down its length and into the wall, felt the wall answer with the tiny, grudging shift of something that has been told for the first time in months that it is not eternal. Dust sifted from one of the bolt holes. A hairline of grit ran down the wall and pooled on the floor. She held until her arms shook and the split reopened under the cuff and closed again wet against the steel, and then she let the pull go, and the chain fell slack with a clatter that filled the whole small room and died against the walls.

Nothing had broken. She had not expected anything to break, not today, not fed the way they fed her. But the plate had moved. It had moved before and it would move again, and she was patient in the specific way that only the truly powerless learn to be, the patience of water against stone, which does not hurry and does not stop and does not care how long. Let them keep taking. Let them keep spending her by the ounce. She would be here when the arithmetic finally failed them, and it would fail them, because they had bet everything on a body that was designed, at its deepest level, never to lose.

She let her hands open. Her breathing slowed. Beyond the wall, muffled and far, something changed in the register of the building, a shift in the muffled hum that her hearing caught and her mind translated before she had consciously decided to listen. Footsteps in the corridor. More than one set. Coming this way, and not slowly.

She knew what more than one set meant at this hour, with the light-bar sitting where it was on the wall. Her body understood before her mind finished the thought. The furnace in her stomach clenched. Some old animal part of her, the part the camp had built and never let sleep, gathered itself uselessly against chains that would not care.

The lock in the steel door turned over with a heavy, deliberate clunk.

She turned her face away and closed her eyes a half second before the door swung inward, because she had learned that lesson too, and even so the daylight from the corridor came through her lids red and burning after the long orange dusk of the cell. When she risked opening them, squinting against the flood, three men stood in the doorway with the light behind them, black shapes edged in white, and in the hands of each was the familiar shaft that hummed and spat its little blue arc against the air, the sound of it filling the room before the pain did.

The one in front was smiling. She could not see his face against the light but she could hear it in the way he breathed, the small satisfied intake of a man who enjoyed this part. He raised the baton. The other two spread to either side of her with the boredom of men clocking in for a shift.

The first touch landed against her ribs and her whole body seized around it, the current tearing through muscle and locking it, and then the second baton found her shoulder and the third her thigh, and the three of them together were more than even she could hold. Her body arched off the wall against the chains, every tendon a drawn wire, and a sound came out of her that she did not choose and did not recognize. They kept at it, unhurried, methodical, until the current had wrung the fight out of her and her limbs went loose and heavy and she slid down the wall to lie against the cold floor with her cheek in the grit, twitching, unable to command a single muscle.

Through the ringing she felt them crouch around her. Felt a hand find the crook of her arm, felt the thin cold bite of the needle, and then the milky flood pushing up her arm and into her, warm where the electricity had been sharp, heavy where she had been taut. Her thoughts began to come apart at the edges, softening, drifting free of one another. The hunger let go of her for the first time in days, which was the sedative’s one mercy and its cruelest lie.

Somewhere above her a man said something in that language she would never learn, and another laughed, and she felt her wrists lifted, felt the cuffs worked loose from around them for the first time in longer than she could count, the small terrible freedom that only ever meant they needed her limp and portable now. Her arms fell away from the wall. Hands took her under the shoulders and began to raise her.

Her eyes rolled toward the far wall as the dark came up to take her, and found the slit above the door, and the last thing she saw before it closed over her was the thin clean bar of daylight lying across the concrete, patient, unhurried, moving toward the third seam in the wall the way it did every day, whether she was there to watch it or not.