Shivering, wet and miserable, I stand there while the doctor takes notes.
While many of the doctors in the hospital I’d worked at during my internship used electronic records to track their findings, this one apparently still preferred the old-school approach of pen and paper.
My lips tighten into a thin line. Though the doctor has the trademark, illegible scrawl of a physician, I can still make out the words on the paper clearly.
Rape test: Conclusive
Vaginal tearing and bruising. Subjected to violent sexual assault.
If the doctor notices me looking, he doesn’t make any sign of it. Instead, he just takes the clipboard and leaves the room – leaving me, once again, naked and alone.
I sit down on the edge of the medical table, my head swimming.
They’re going to claim that the Aurelians raped me. They’re going to call them spies. They’re going to say that the attack on Barl was the Aurelian’s fault – and even if the Aurelians didn’t firebomb the city themselves, it was destroyed because the Capital would have been attacked next.
In a disgusting way, it all makes sense.
I sit in the medical office, wondering what I’m waiting for. It’s tempting to start looking around for anything that could be used as a weapon, or a means of escape, but that seems a little too easy. Even if there are video feeds transmitted from cameras in the medical room, there’s still a chance they didn’t catch my quick palming of the black vial of Mercy from my sock. If I tried snooping around now – to pocket a scalpel, for example – it would tip them off as to my true intentions.
I laughed humorlessly. I couldn’t even pocket a scalpel anymore. I was naked, and didn’t have pockets!
Instead, I think.
The question is Lord Aeron. The Viceroy makes him out to be a useful fool. I must play a part for him, to let his guard down.
The door eventually opens again, and this time a women my age comes through. She rushes over to me, and puts her hand on my shoulder, looking at me with concern.
“You poor, poor thing. What those Aurelians did to you… Oh, Gods, I can’t even imagine. Come with me.”
It’s not like I have any alternative, so I follow this stranger out of the room, and down the hallway outside.
I’m painfully aware of the fact that I’m still naked, and I wish that I still had my medical kit with me. Somehow, I miss that even more than I miss my clothes.
The only good thing is that I’ve confirmed I can talk clearly even with this small vial hidden beneath my tongue.
The woman opens another door at the end of the hallway, leading to a room filled with clothes and beauty supplies. She bids me to sit down in front of a tall mirror, and then fusses around as she beautifies me.
I’ve scrabbled for life in the hard streets of Barl for so long that the idea of being ‘beautified’ is completely alien to me. When the woman is finally finished, I look at myself in the mirror and barely recognize myself. This morning I was a scrappy mechanic, covered in oil and grit. Now, I am someone else. I look like a beautiful, noble lady from the Capital elite.
But now that I know how the Capital feels about people like us, I think I’d prefer to still look like the scrappy mechanic.
When my friends Jade and Anna would tell me about life in the Aurelian harem that they’d joined together, I often felt envy at the clothes and fabrics they told me they wore, and the perfumes that they dabbed against their skin. They’d boast of the softness of the material against their delicate skin.
Back in Barl, I had calluses on my hands from hours of labor, grease on my cheeks from the dirt of my vocation, and cuts on my body from struggling to use poor-quality tools and scrap metal.
Now, in contrast, I can have everything I once dreamed of – and yet I want to rip these ostentatious signs of wealth from my body.
Now that I know the true villainy incipit within the Capital, I have no further desire to be part of their ranks. All I want to do is help the sick and the wounded – and I’d happily trade all of these fine clothes just to have my med-kit back.
I don’t have that choice, though.
Instead, now that I’ve been dressed and adorned with makeup, I’m escorted up the stairs to the main chambers of the infamous, near-legendary Lord Aeron.
The looming doors to his luxurious chambers open and I suddenly realize that I’ve been led right into Lord Aeron’s huge bedroom.
I shudder, realizing that I’m alone in the bedroom of a man who is in a very high position of power. This never ends well for women like me.
I also suspect why I was just beautified. I wonder if I am being presented to Lord Aeron as though he’s my savior, and I’m to play the part of the grateful, vulnerable, shuddering woman. A victim that he rescued from the Aurelians – and who wishes to… repay him.
The expression on his face confirms my suspicion.
Lord Aeron enters the room from a doorway opposite, and I see that he stands taller than me – perhaps an inch under six-feet-tall with a fleshy face and enormous eyebrows that look as though they want to crawl away from the rest of his bloated visage.
He’s decked in absurdly ostentatious finery – fabric and adornments that make even the rich dress and necklace I’m now wearing seem like the rags of a peasant.
The enormous gold chain that marks his status as a High Lord of the Capital dangles from around his blubbery throat, and I wonder if it’s so heavy that it gives him neck pain to wear it all day.
“They say you are called Tammy,” Lord Aeron says, spreading his fleshly arms
