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By Root 527 0

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