NewU Pt. 38

I knew that the time was approaching. Somehow, despite all of the hardships I was suffering, and without a single point of outside reference, I was still able to track the relentless passage of time. And every two hours, day or night, like clockwork, my cell door would be opened, a man in a hood would come in and sit down on a chair in the corner of the room - which I also could not reach - and ask me the same questions.

Over and over.

Countless times since I had been tossed in here.

The same. Fucking. Questions.

I was at breaking point, he knew I was at breaking point, and he knew it was only a matter of time before I gave him the answers he wanted.

With a groan that sounded like it could have come from the lips of an eighty-year-old postal worker, still struggling with his rounds, I hauled myself to a more upright position. Panting and wheezing, grunting through full-body muscle cramps, and stretching out the ache of limbs that hadn't moved in hours, I dragged myself off the floor and sat back against the wall.

There was a toilet in the room, probably the only mercy these Praetorians had shown me, but sitting on it for any longer than was necessary to relieve myself was one guaranteed way to get myself electrocuted. Still, there was a certain element of.... Shall we call it 'bodily releases' that came with that kind of muscle contractions, and the lower part of me was a disgusting mess of urine and the remnants of Uri's blood that had soaked through my pants. I could only look at my legs with thinly veiled contempt as the muscles contorted painfully beneath the skin, adding a strange shimmering effect to the dried fluids that now caked my extremities as the light from the only bulb in the room bounced off them.

I had done this enough times to know that I needed to wait for those muscles to stop having a tantrum before I would be able to attempt any more movement.

The small patch of blood on the ground, a little way to my right, was evidence of what would happen if I rushed it. I had made it to my feet the week before, determined to be on them when the interrogator arrived, needing to demonstrate my defiance. My legs had cramped, then buckled, and with my arms still secured behind my back, I had no way of preventing the floor from coming up to meet me as I face-planted into it. My nose had been spread across my face after that one, and stopping the bleeding and resetting my nose had taken up more of my power reserves than I had to spare.

I was fairly sure my collarbone was broken, too. Same reason: a sharp and violent impact with the floor, although that one had been at the behest of a sudden and unexpected dose of mains power to my body while I had been upright.

I had given up on trying to be on my feet for the arrival of the interrogator after that.

Every moment, every shudder of pain, every inhalation of my own stench, every shiver from the cold, every burst of agony from the electric shocks, and every growl of my hungry stomach was just counting down to the moment of my surrender.

And my time was just about up.

The large, heavy-sounding deadbolts on the door were pulled back with a loud, metallic clunk, and the solid steel door creaked outwards on strained-sounding hinges. A man in a hood, a significant white aura surrounding him, stepped into the room, regarded me with dispassionate eyes, and took his seat on the chair in the corner.

"How are you feeling today?" his voice asked calmly, the same first question as always.

"Peachy," I grumbled back at him. I still couldn't bring myself to answer him properly. No matter how close I was to that abyss, I wasn't in it yet, and I would be damned if I wasn't going to throw every shred of myself into fighting for as long as I could.

The man nodded and wrote something onto the clipboard he was holding.

"Are you ready to begin?" It had taken me a few goes around to realize that was question number two.

"Raring to go."

"What is your name?"

"Barbara," I had given him a different name in each of the interrogations. I was honestly starting to run out of new ones. But again, my defiance simply wouldn't let me answer him honestly. He scribbled my answer onto his paperwork.

"Where were you born?"

"In West Philidelphia, born and raised. On the playground was where I spent most of my days." I tried keeping that answer novel, too, as well as the ones for every other question. I had made it into something of a game.

"What is your father's name?"

"Chuck Norris."

"What is your mother's name?"

"Dolly Parton, but don't tell Chuck's wife."

"Where do you currently live?"

"Here, I'm guessing." I finished my answer with a long, haggard cough, which in turn caused a series of full-body cramps. The man waited for me to finish, looking at me with neither contempt nor compassion in his steel-grey eyes.

"Where did you go to school?"

"Sesame Street."

"Where did you go to college?"

"Also, Sesame Street."

This went on for a while. There were more than two dozen questions in total, each one as innocuous as the last and each one a question that I was certain they already knew the answer to. The goal was relatively simple: They were trying to break me. They would keep asking the same questions until I had been worn down enough to answer them truthfully. Once I had been broken, they could ask me the questions that they really wanted to know.

This time, like the hundreds of times before, I gave him nothing.

Without a sigh, without a growl, or without a single outward sign of any emotion one way or another, the man scribbled down the answer to his final question, stood and left the room.

I closed my eyes as the door slammed shut and started to count down.

5... 4... 3... 2... 1...

The pain smashed into me. It would seem that the powers in charge of this place were not impressed with the flippancy of my answers and, as had happened every time since the fourth or fifth interrogation, a huge amount of electrical current was forcefully crashed into my body.

Being electrocuted, for those of you fortunate enough to have never experienced it and sensible enough to have never licked a battery, is rather unpleasant. We have all experienced muscle cramps before - in bed or after exercise, and usually as a product of dehydration - all you really need to know is that it feels like that... just everywhere and at least a few hundred times worse. But whereas you can usually stretch out a leg cramp, the convulsions of the rapidly oscillating current from the power grind simply forbade any muscle in your body from functioning by cramping them, over and over again, a dozen or so times a second, for as long as you were subjected to the electricity.

Everything was pain. Pain consumed my entire existence for those few seconds. Acute, debilitating agony, the likes of which I had never imagined before. Then it stopped, and I found myself back in that twitching ball on the floor. The pulsing aftershocks, the body-wide cramps, the smell of burned hair as my heart pounded in my ears. Wretched and crumbling, broken and forsaken, I just lay there.

It appeared that my captors were either growing increasingly frustrated by my petulance, or they were able to see how close I was to breaking and decided I needed that extra push. Because whereas I had only ever been subjected to a single blast of electricity after each interrogation before, I was completely blindsided when, thirty seconds later, another one smashed into me.

And then another.

And then another.

Five seconds of torture, thirty seconds of respite, then another dose.

Twenty-one more times.

I passed out.

********

I blinked my eyes open, momentarily disoriented by a severe lack of knowledge about how long I had been out, and looked around the room.

It may have been only a few minutes, it could have been hours, it could have been longer.

But the door was open.

I frowned at it.

My eyes scanned to the right until they came to the shape of a man - quickly clearing through the flog of my bleary eyes - sitting on my bed, with a moderately powerful aura framing his silhouette.

I frowned at him, too.

"Why do you resist?" the distorted and echoey sound of his voice floated into my ringing ears.

I groaned and, fighting off the crippling pain in every part of my body - and spitting out a mouthful of blood as I did - rolled onto my back. "Because I can." I croaked at him. During my convulsions, I seemed to have bitten off the end of my tongue, but more of my powers, the very last of them, had been subconsciously expended in repairing the damage. I frowned at the taste of blood in my mouth and quickly banished the question as to where that chunk of flesh had gone while its replacement was being grown.

The man sighed and shook his head. "We are not your enemy."

I twitched my foot, making the manacle around my ankle rattle."Yeah, I can see that."

His eyes flicked down to the manacle with a frown. It wasn't so much that it looked like he hadn't noticed it before that moment; it was more like he had just realized that its function did sort of set something of a tone.

"Do you know why you are here?"

"To be tortured for information and then killed, right?"

The man shook his head. "No. You are being tested."

I arched an eyebrow at him.

"Ours is a venerable order," he said, holding my eyes. "We trace our lineage all the way back to the Praetorian Guard, who protected the Emperors of Ancient Rome. Of all the legionaries of the Roman armies, only the best of the best were selected to join its ranks, and even then, there were trials. That soldier had to prove their worth. You have already shown your abilities in combat; this was to show your ability to persevere against the very worst of conditions. It is a trial we all go through."

"Even you, huh?" I answered non-commitally. His inquisitor mind forbade the ability to read any of his thoughts, a common problem amongst my guards, but I somehow doubted that many people would commit to an order after being brutally tortured by them.

The man nodded, leaning down and rolling up the bottom of his pants on his right leg. The very clear scar of a burn mark, in the exact place my manacle was attached to mine, ringed around his ankle. "In the Conclave and the Sect, a person's position is dictated by their power, in the Inquisition, it is afforded by their lineage. None of them have to earn their positions; they are attained purely through the manner of your birth. Here, you have to prove your worth," he said, rolling his pants back down and sitting upright again. "Not just your abilities. I lasted thirteen days. You have just passed day one hundred."

I still said nothing.

"I know what you are thinking," he went on. "I was thinking the exact same thing when I was in the position you are in now. That I would never work with anyone who had put me through this, that this was the very definition of evil. That I was going to kill every fucking one of them the first chance I got."

I kept saying nothing.

"But when it was all explained to me, I saw it. I saw why this was important, I saw why it was necessary. And when I learned the order's objectives, their purpose, and the role I could play in that..." he left the rest of the sentence hanging in the air. "I am the man I am today; I am free precisely because I went through what you did. You have passed your test, you have been made to suffer, and you gave us nothing." The man stood. "You are to be commended on your strength."

Yeah, I couldn't tell if it was a trap, either.

"Your ankle restraint will be removed; there will be no more of... this," he went on, gesturing his hand at the chain connecting me to the wall. "You will be fed, and you will be allowed to sleep," he finished. As soon as he did, the roaring noise from the speakers that had been my constant companion for one hundred days shut off, and the cell descended into silence.

I looked around. The room somehow looked a little bigger without the oppressive, unending noise being blasted into it. "Then what?" I asked, eventually turning back to the man.

"Tomorrow, once you are rested and have eaten, you will have a meeting with some of the Prefects and Tribunes, our commanders. They will answer the questions that you have, and they will decide if you are offered a place in our order."

"And if they don't? Or if I refuse."

The man held my eye. He didn't answer verbally, but his look said it all.

"If you refuse, you will die."

I matched his gaze for a moment before slumping my shoulders. I was just too tired to fight it. I nodded softly.

"We will see you tomorrow, Pete." With that, the man reached down and unlocked the restraint around my ankle, leaving it and the chain it was attached to loosely on the ground, then removed the cuffs from my wrists before walking out of the room and closing the heavy steel door behind him. I reached my hand out lazily and stroked the tender skin around the other wrist as I rested the other on the chain

"Did you get all of that, Jerry?"

"Yup, I got it all."

********

I should probably rewind.

********

A very old Polish saying floated from Uri's memories to the surface of my mind as I watched Marco climb into the SUV outside the hotel in Horlivka.

"All mushrooms are edible; it's just that some of them are only edible once."

These men, these 'Praetorians,' weren't trying to capture me; that much was obvious from the moment Marco had started talking. They were trying to recruit me. They were trying to bring me into the fold. And if that was the case, I was going to make sure that I was as poisonous to their order as it was possible for me to be in the relatively limited time I would have to do damage. The longer I played along, the longer I would have to do that damage.

By the time the car doors on my own SUV had been closed, it became apparent that half of the four men in the car were human, and both of them had a fair idea of what was about to happen to me. I couldn't quite tell if I was unique in this regard, but I remembered watching that 'zoned-out,' vacant look on the faces of the other Evos at the party when they all entered the mindscape; it was what my guards were looking for. Yet I had perfected the ability to enter it while still looking like I was doing something else in the real world, mainly as a means to work on the computer program while Jimmy was around and harvest information from my lecturers during college classes without being noticed. It was that zoned-out look that my guards were watching for. Making that appearance less obvious seemed a fairly simple solution to me so it was more likely that other Evo's couldn't do this, rather than just had never thought of it. So, with the men on either side watching me for those telltale signs of my entrance into the mindscape, they thought they had that base covered. Instead, what they saw was me fidgeting uncomfortably, looking worriedly out of the windows at the passing scenery, and coughing the last of the floor dust out of my throat.

In reality, I was learning everything that it was possible to learn about what was about to happen to me and coming up with a plan with Jeeves on how to tackle it.

In a massive stroke of luck, it turned out that one of the men in my car had a rather significant crush, bordering on infatuation, with the doctor who would administer the injections when I first got there. He didn't know specifics, but he knew that one of the drugs I was going to be dosed with was a form of antibiotic that would combat infections in the wounds I would doubtlessly suffer during my "interrogation" and could, therefore, be considered reasonably harmless. Another was some sort of hypertension medication designed to lower my blood pressure. Lower blood pressure would leave me feeling tired, lethargic, less prone to bursts of anger or defiance, and generally feeling a bit shit. It was designed to medically reduce my ability to resist. That one could be filtered out of my bloodstream without having any effect at all.

The deafening sounds coming from the speakers were, honestly, a bit of a shit show, too. Marco had already told me that at least "hundreds" of Evo's had been recruited into the Praetorians, not to mention Marco himself, so the fact that none of them pointed out that I could simply tune that noise out while still being able to hear everything else was something of a mystery. My ability to control my conscious body whilst in the mindscape could, theoretically at least, be put down to me having much more power than other Evos. Maybe the ability to do both of those things at the same time was quite draining, and that power requirement was something I'd never had to think about, but without another friendly Evo to ask, nor any way to secretly get that information from anybody else, I had no real way of knowing. The thought of not being able to tune out the noise, however, just didn't make sense. One of the first things Marco had taught me to do was to tune out the background thoughts of other humans, so surely the leap to filtering out literal background noise was not a massive one and, as far as I could tell, took a truly tiny amount of power.

But then maybe that was the point. Every single drain on the well of a normal Evo - even in tiny doses - added up to a point where they would eventually become powerless. But Marco had seen my powerplants; was it feasible that he simply hadn't understood how much power they could produce and how instantly they could produce it? At least compared to the finite wells of all other Evos.

The same went for the lack of food and water and the perpetual cold. After a certain amount of time, my body would start to draw on my powers to sustain me. That power would drain from the reserves that these people still seemed to think I had and would, in theory, shorten the time I was able to resist.

Where they really went wrong, however, was with the electrocutions.

The concept was simple enough. The pain inflicted by increasingly violent bursts of current into my body would need to be blocked; the randomness of their timings would mean that I would need to keep that block on my pain almost permanently, and any physical damage to my body would need to be repaired. All of it added up to significantly increasing draws on my body until the damage couldn't be repaired and the pain couldn't be blocked anymore, after which point, the real torture would begin, albeit for a much shorter period of time.

The entire basis around which their methods revolved was the assumption that, like every other Evo, my powers were finite. That eventually, my reserves would be drained, and that I would break. That as long as they inflicted enough pain and discomfort, regularly enough, over a long enough period of time, I would inevitably crack, and their plans to recruit me would rock into action.

They were very, very wrong.

I mean, obviously.

But that wasn't their mistake.

Their mistake came in the manner they had chosen to administer those electric shocks. The room itself seemed to have that lattice of tin literally built into its walls and operated in the same way as an Inquisitor's skull or Olena's hat. I had been quite nervous when I had first been dumped into the cell at how completely it had blocked my mind's ability to reach the outside world; even though I knew it was coming from the information I had mined from my human captors, it was still very disconcerting. As a cell designed to contain Evos, it was perfect.

That is, apart from the hulking chunk of metal attached to my leg. The one that literally connected me, through the mind/machine interface, to the power grid, and therefore, every computer, router, lightbulb, TV, rechargeable dildo, and charging cell phone in the building, not to mention the outside world beyond it via the powerlines and the internet. It seemed that nobody had ever considered the possibility that I would be able to use that to maintain my connection to my powers when they built this cell, but that glaring oversight had essentially undone all of their hard work. I had reconnected to my computer within seconds of the manacle being attached to my ankle.