sense of onward movement. Or perhaps the reason was simpler, and she just needed to try and focus on something besides what those men had done to him. What they might be doing to him right now.
She hoped she hadn’t actually heard that scream.
The beatings had been awful.
He couldn’t take much more.
Alone, trapped, the cuffs digging into her wrists, she slumped against the walls of the cage. The air hissing in from the shaft was not exactly warm, but it had raised the temperature enough to keep her from freezing, keep her alive down here, keep both of them alive before they took him away.
She wished she knew where he was,
The beatings.
Her thoughts insisted on doubling back to the beatings.
Like those that came afterward, the first assault had been sudden and brutal. The men who’d burst into the cage wore hard-shell helmets with lamp assemblies, and she’d flinched from their piercing bright beams, blinded for several horrible seconds. But when her eyes recovered from their shock, the part of her that was trained at observation had amazingly kicked in. She’d noticed their coveralls, and their safety vests with luminous yellow stripes, and the card-shaped dosimeter badges on their chests, a type worn in laboratories where ionizing radiation hazards were present. Laboratories in which she herself had worked. She’d noticed that the lights rapidly intensified without manual adjustment, and that each was composed of multiple lenses, like the compound eyes of an insect… state-of-the-art, probably white LEDs controlled by a microcomputer. All six or seven of them were carrying firearms. Submachine guns, she believed, although such weapons were beyond her realm of experience. Or had been. Her training and background were in science, but recent events had dealt her a harshly different kind of education.
It had felt planned out to her, almost staged. The men went silently about their appalling work, a couple of them grabbing her arms, pushing her back against the wall, restraining her. Two others pointed their weapons at him, gestured him toward the middle of the cage. When he refused, scuffled with them, the rest of them closed in around him. They pounded him mercilessly. They used their fists, kicked him with steel-reinforced boots. They made no attempt at interrogation. They did not respond when she begged to know what they wanted. They just kept hitting him, the beams of their helmet lights jostling from the furious motion, leaping about the walls of the cage.
She screamed for them to stop, pleaded with them to stop, but they continued to ignore her. And during it all the man with the strange birthmark on his left cheek — it was melanocytic, a perfect crescent, like the shadow of a sliver moon — had watched from off to the side, looking frequently in her direction. If the whole torturous episode was indeed choreographed, she had no doubt in her head that he’d been the one to arrange its lockstep savagery.
The beating had seemed to go on endlessly before they were finished. And then he was writhing on the floor in agony, gasping for breath, his lips cut and swollen, his nose bleeding, his face a mass of bruises. The man who had been watching from the side turned toward her, strode to where the others held her pinned to the wall, and stood there regarding her with eyes that showed neither hostility nor conscience. They were like camera lenses in their level objectivity. In a way that was his most frightening aspect. He was as lacking in malice as pity. A man doing his job. His quiet dispassion had unbraced her.
She’d shuddered through her entire body as the others held her immobile against the wall.
He waited a moment, leaned close.
“Later,” he had said softly.
Nothing else.
And then he’d turned, and his men had released their grip on her, and followed him out the solid metal door of the cage, passing into the black.
That was the first visit.
They had come back often since. Sometimes it was to measure out more violence against him. Sometimes they left trays of bland, greasy stew and water. When they brought the food, it was always without the man she’d assumed to be their leader. He would just arrive for the beatings. None of them ever asked any questions. None of them spoke. It was always the same.
They ate their tasteless food in the blackness, ate to stay alive for however much longer they could. Two prisoners holed away without explanation, without knowing when their sentence would reach its end, or what would happen to them afterward. It was difficult for him to chew or swallow. She’d had to help him take down the unsavory mush, slip little clots of it past his swollen lips with her fingers. After the third round of severe punishment he’d vomited, been unable to hold the food in his stomach for quite a while. Talk of escape arose between them, but neither had any idea how it might be accomplished. They had wondered aloud why they were being held, could only guess that sooner or later their captors meant to question them about the base. There was no way to be sure what they expected to learn, what motives they might have, it was all so baffling. But he told her he’d promised himself not to give anything up to them. Not unless they began to direct their violence at her would he give anything up.
She wasn’t surprised. He was a brave man. She wished she felt that kind of courage on her own.
The beatings continued to alternate with the crude, bare-sustenance meals.
Time after time it was the same.
Until the last time.
That last time they returned, it was to take him away. By then he’d been in desperate shape and could barely stay up on his legs. She remembered panicking as they dragged him off the floor, into the blackness beyond the cage. She had verged on crying out that she’d tell them whatever they needed to know, anything, if they only let him be. But then she’d thought of his vow to defy interrogation, his resolute, unsubmitting
Another scream suddenly bayoneted her thoughts now, and she jerked bolt upright as if slapped, the chain of her handcuffs clinking coldly between her trapped, chafed wrists.
The screaming continued to slash the blackness; shrill, tormented. There was no wishing it away anymore. No telling herself it wasn’t real. That wouldn’t work, wouldn’t help, not now…
She heard footsteps outside the cage, several sets of them, approaching with that familiar martial cadence. Then the cage door opened, lights glaring inside, dazzling her. She cowered back, squinting, shielding her eyes with both hands as they adjusted to the brightness.
The marked man entered, the rest of her jailers hanging behind him, positioned to either side of the entrance with their weapons at their hips. He crossed the floor of the cage, stood very still before her, framed in that terrible blaze of light.
Shevaun Bradley waited.
Trembling, cringing against the cage’s metal wall, she waited.
At last the marked man bent low over her.
“Now,” he said, “we talk.”
And outside in the black, Scarborough’s screams strung on and on above the heavy clashing roar of great machines.
ELEVEN
Having worked out the solution to a seemingly insoluble problem, the mind longs for verification. It is not simply enough to know intuitively that something is correct; humans desire external confirmation. A math student wants the proof to be convincing and communicable. A police officer making an arrest wants the satisfaction of a conviction in a court of law.
Nessa wanted the Picasso, or more likely, the series of Picassos. She had consulted experts on her theory of a painting from the time of
