Chapter Text
The intake room of the Sinyala facility is white.
No, not white. It’s that particular shade of off-white that government buildings and hospitals use when they want to trick your brain into thinking clean; even when it’s crusted with cigarette smoke and dried blood. Cream, maybe. Eggshell. I bet some paint company out there calls it Bureaucratic Beige.
I’m thinking about paint colors because it’s better than thinking about the drill.
It’s sitting on a metal tray to my left. I can see it in the edges of my peripheral because I’m strapped to this chair in a way that makes turning my head inadvisable. Not impossible, exactly. Just inadvisable. The restraints won’t leave marks if the prisoner cooperates, but will absolutely tear into them if they don’t.
I’ve seen restraints like this before. FBI training. Advanced Interrogation Resistance. Day sixty-three. Never thought I’d actually put it to use.
They told us the trick was to focus on something else. Pick a detail. Catalog it. Describe it to yourself in excruciating detail until the pain is just background noise to the disaster within your own reeling skull.
So: paint colors. Bureaucratic Beige. A real winner.
There are six other people in this room. Four of them, to the best of my knowledge, are alive. I say this because I hear at least four sets of panting and moaning that are not coming from my own body. One is surely dead, because the Bureaucratic Beige directly to my right is sprayed with fresh Foxy Rojo. That, and the figure in my peripheral hasn’t moved since the technician walked away from them. 40 minutes ago.
The technician – I’m calling him a technician because ‘butcher’ seems uncharitable and ‘surgeon’ seems overly generous – is humming something near one of the pant and moaners to my left. I think it’s Onward Christian Soldiers. I find that funny in a way that makes me want to laugh and vomit simultaneously.
I don’t do either. That would require moving my jaw and as established I’m trying very hard not to move any of my body parts at the moment.
I hear a sound akin to a dentist’s office prepping their equipment and I tell myself that’s what this is. He’s most certainly not prepping the drill. Yes, a dentist’s office. I can do that. The straps cutting into me are for safety. I bit the dentist a lot as a little girl.
This is fine.
This is—
“Miss Deveraux,” the technician says. His voice is pleasant. Midwestern accent. Like he’s about to offer me a glass of lemonade. “This is going to hurt quite a lot. Would you like something to bite down on?”
I want to tell him to go fuck himself, but my mouth is dry because I suppose that I too was panting and moaning.
“No,” I manage instead.
“Suit yourself.” He sounds genuinely unconcerned. I suppose he would be. This is his Tuesday.
A television is pulled directly in front of my face. Wow, this really is like a dentist’s office.
The hideous Murkoff Corp. logo flashes violently on the Foxy Rojo sprayed television screen before I am greeted by the silhouette of a man at a table. A talking head. Frustrating. No one wants to see a newscaster at the dentist…
“Don’t be afraid,” says the talking head. The technician pulls a large syringe from the metal tray. “I want you to know that you are safe.”
The technician brings the syringe to my face and does not, in fact, put it in my mouth like a dentist would. The needle jabs directly into my left orbital socket before I can comprehend this.
Pain shoots from the socket all the way back to the base of my spine. I feel an awful wet squelch behind my eye as whatever amber liquid was inside the needle gets injected into me.
I bite down any screams because they’re pointless. Most of the others around me are gagged, as well as bound. I was not about to squander whatever good behavior I had on intake that allowed me the freedom of my mouth. The needle retreats and just as quickly repeats its previous action into my right socket.
“My name is Dr. Hendrick Joliet Easterman, and I’m your friend.”
Easterman. I know that name. Project LATHE. The Mount Massive correspondence I found… this is the man who requested Her transfer.
Both of my eyes are weeping now. I’m unsure if the liquid is tears, blood, or whatever chemical cocktail they’ve just injected into my head. The television blurs. Easterman’s silhouette multiplies and swims in my vision.
“I’m going to help you. To guide you through… It’s going to be painful,” he continues. His voice is so calm, so reasonable. It reminds me of my father when he preaches. “But at the end of this journey, you will be reborn. A whole new you.”
The drill whines to life beside me.
I volunteered for this…
The thought surfaces through the chemical haze and the pain and the sound of the drill getting closer. I walked into that Outreach Center in May, desperately convinced I was doing something noble; something no one else would be able to do. Deep cover. Investigation from the inside. I filled out that form myself.
No one made me come here. God, what the hell have I done?
Another technician enters my murky field of view. Had she been here the whole time? Oh my God, was she one of the pant and moaners? That means it is wholly possible that there are only three others alive. That makes this process a fifty-fifty survival rate. Fantastic odds.
“Who’s this lab rat then?” she asks the Midwestern technician not-dentist-but-maybe-still-a-dentist. Her voice is nasally. Brooklyn, I’d guess. Or Jersey. Somewhere cold where the women sound perpetually miserable because they are.
“It’s all right here,” he says, wheeling up a metal cart stacked with file boxes. Through my haze, I could make out the words ‘PUBLIC’ and ‘PRIVATE’ stamped onto the respective boxes. “This is an interesting cat. Former FBI.”
“Former?” The woman laughs. It sounds like a dog’s bark. “Has someone been a naughty girl?”
Because this is surely the time to make jokes…
The Midwestern man flips open what I assume is my file. I can’t see it, but I can hear the paper rustling. “Fired for insubordination. December of ’59. Looks like she was investigating shit out of her paygrade… and her sex.”
“Ooh, a rebel.” The woman comes closer. I can see her clearer now through the chemical murk, but her face is mostly covered. “What were you investigating, sweetie? Communists? Homosexuals? Your own reflection?”
I don’t answer because my jaw has locked up from pain and also because fuck her.
“Says here she was poking around Murkoff.” The man’s voice is still pleasant. “CIA partnerships. Mount Massive Asylum. Real curious girl.”
“Well, curiosity killed the cat,” the woman says as she slaps something cold and metal over my face. My murky vision is then filled with a sea of sickening green. “But satisfaction brought it back. Isn’t that how it goes?”
“Something like that,” the man agrees.
“And here you are,” says the woman, all too cheerily for her awful demeanor. “Hold now. This part’s the worst.”
The man steps up to me. The drill touches my right temple, and I smell burning before I feel anything and that feels so, fundamentally wrong, that the order of sensation happens to be smell-then-pain rather than pain-then-smell.
Then the actual pain hits and I understand that the order doesn’t matter because it’s all-consuming anyway.
My skull is cracking. I can hear it, deep inside my ear canals where the noise comes from inward rather than outward. The vibration travels down through my jaw and into my teeth where I taste copper and realize I’ve bitten through my tongue.
“Steady,” says the man, and I realize that I’m trying to thrash against the restraints, bruises be damned. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
As though I’m not already being mutilated.
He pulls the blood-soaked drill back from my temple and moves to the left side.
“No,” I manage to say, or maybe I just think it. I’m not so sure anymore. “No, please—”
“Shh,” the woman says. “It’s almost over, Special Agent…”
I hear-smell-feel the drill burrow its way into my left temple now, and I hear the person to my left screaming. Or is that me? Or is it both? Probably both.
I think of how awful this root canal experience is as the blood and murk pools within my vision, and I collapse into darkness.