Seanan McGuire - Midnight Blue-Light Special

“Why the hell would I start believing that now?” I demanded.

“Because I might be telling the truth, and wouldn’t it be wonderful if I were?”

I didn’t say anything. I just glared mutely, willing him to fall down dead. Maybe that would have worked, if I’d been Sarah and he hadn’t been wearing an anti-telepathy charm and oh, right. If we lived in a comic book universe where the rules said that the bad people would be punished, and the good people would always come out on top. Too bad we didn’t live in that kind of world. Too bad we never had.

And then the cuff around my arm began to expand, and the needles I hadn’t previously been able to feel began piercing my skin. After that, I forgot about everything but screaming for a little while.

“What’s your name, love?” asked Peter.

I screamed.

“Just tell us your name and this can all be over for now. What’s your name, love?”

I screamed. The more they inflated the cuff, the more the needles dug into my arm. The fact that it was designed to let air slowly out again meant that I never achieved equilibrium; the cuff would inflate, the needles would dig in, the cuff would deflate, the needles would shift positions, and then it would all start again. It was a new, exciting way of hurting someone, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

“What’s your name , love?” asked Peter.

I screamed, and kept screaming, until the sound ran out and I slumped, practically boneless, in the chair. Robert stopped inflating the cuff, letting it collapse with a soft hissing sound. Then he leaned in, wrapped his hand around the now-deflated cuff, and squeezed .

Somehow I found it in myself to scream one last time, wailing like someone’s family beán sidhe . Robert kept squeezing, grinding his hand against the cuff so that the needles danced inside my flesh. His expression was sad, almost disappointed, like he hadn’t wanted any of this to happen.

“What’s your name?” he asked, almost in a whisper.

“V-Verity,” I replied. “Verity Price.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Verity Price,” he said, and took his hand away. The needles were still there, but the sudden reduction in pressure was such a blessing that I started to sob. “Take it off. We have what we need for right now.”

“How is that what we need?” Margaret asked.

Robert smiled. “Verity’s seen the light. She’ll be willing to help us, now, won’t you?”

I couldn’t say anything. I could only sob, and keep sobbing as they gathered their things and left my tiny artificial prison. This time, they remembered to turn off the lights on their way out, and I was left alone again. Well, almost alone; the pain was still there, and was more than happy to be my companion in the dark.

Professional dancers learn to work through pain. It’s a part of the job. We dance on sprained ankles, we dance with broken ribs, we dance on blisters and bunions and broken toes. We are expected to be beautiful machines, capable of holding our form no matter what injuries we’re hiding. All my training told me that I should be able to compartmentalize the pain, and so as soon as I was alone—and as soon as I stopped crying—I began to do exactly that.

First up was an assessment of my injuries. The puncture marks in my right arm were probably the worst; they were still bleeding, and I couldn’t move my arm enough to tell whether there were tears in the muscle. For the moment, I had to assume that they were all superficial, and that I’d be able to climb if I needed to. Anything else was unthinkable.

My feet were in worse shape. I didn’t think any bones were broken, but both soles were badly swollen and probably just as badly bruised. I wasn’t going to be running anywhere any time soon. I’d just need to find another way.

Apart from that, all I had was a split lip, a bloody nose, some abrasions on my scalp where the hair pulling had gotten overly enthusiastic, and some extremely sore fingernails. They hadn’t pulled any of my nails off, which was a small mercy, given how enthusiastic they’d been about driving slivers of bamboo underneath them. My whole life, I’d been hearing about how torture doesn’t work; torture is never the answer. Well, apparently, our cousins at the Covenant never got that particular lesson. They thought torture worked just fine.

I took a breath, held it until my lungs ached, and breathed slowly out. I could function. I was hurt, but not too badly, and I could function. That was a good thing, because I needed to get away the second I had the opportunity to do so. These people were willing and eager to hurt me in the name of their cause, and when they started asking for information more sensitive than my name, they’d probably be more than happy to move on to more advanced methods of extracting answers. I liked my fingers, and my toes. I wanted them all to stay attached to my body.

And I could no longer be sure I wouldn’t give them what they asked for when the cutting started.

I don’t know how long I sat there in the dark, just breathing, waiting for the throbbing in my feet and arm to die down. When the door finally opened, I didn’t twitch, even though the light burned my eyes. I just stayed in the same position, chin down, slumped as far over as the chains allowed.

“Not so mouthy now, are you?” asked a voice. Peter Brandt.

I allowed myself a brief moment of satisfaction. Of the three, he was the one I’d been hoping would come to check on me. Margaret had a holy crusade. Robert had a job to do. And Peter? Peter had a grudge.

“Please,” I whispered.

“Please? Please what, love? Please mercy? You didn’t show much mercy when you thought you had me. Why should we show any mercy to you now?” Peter crossed the room to my chair. My leg twitched with the urge to be reintroduced to his balls, at speed. I forced myself to keep still. “There’s not any mercy here for the likes of you. We’re going to beat the devil right out of you.”

“Please,” I whispered again. “I need to use the bathroom. I don’t . . . I mean, I don’t want to . . .” I started crying again. It wasn’t hard. All I had to do was press my feet a little harder against the floor and the tears came practically on their own.

Claiming to need the bathroom was an old trick, which meant it had a pretty high chance of failure. But you never succeed if you don’t try, as my dad always says, and it became an old trick because it worked so often. Most people don’t want to deal with prisoners who come pre-soiled. Tears always helped with that sort of thing. Being tiny and blonde means that most people are looking for excuses to underestimate me, and Peter was from the Covenant. He had to consider me inferior, or he’d be admitting that the Covenant might not have the best training program out there.

“What’s to stop you pulling a fast one and trying to get away from me, hmm?”

He was smarter than I’d expected; damn. I sniffled, and said, “My feet hurt so bad I’m not even sure I can walk. How am I supposed to pull a fast one when I can’t even walk ?”

“What’s in it for me?”

I almost dropped my subservient posture in favor of taking another shot at his groin. I managed to suppress the rage—barely—and whispered, “Anything you want.” Hopefully, if I couldn’t escape, his “anything” wouldn’t be anything that forced me to kill him any more than I was already planning to.

Peter hesitated. Then, finally, he made up his mind. “Stay there,” he said, and laughed as he walked out of the room.

Oh, I was definitely going to kill that man when I got the opportunity, or at least hurt him a lot. I stayed in my half-hunched position, listening intently to the noises coming from outside my little room. First came the clinking of metal, and then the soft sound of a hasp being turned. He was undoing my chains. My wrists and ankle were still cuffed, but the chains themselves were no longer attached to whatever was outside the walls.