He wheeled the cart toward my chair.
This was the most light my eyes had seen in I didn’t know how long, and I drank in my first decent glimpse of the place—a warehouse of sorts, ten or fifteen thousand square feet, with a high ceiling.
Across the room, I noticed another chair like mine. A bulky coil of cables extended out from the underside of the wooden gurney, and then the package spliced—one group running into the control panel, another disappearing through the wall.
My chair, I realized, was identical.
Luther stood at the control panel, smiling down at me.
“You truly cannot imagine how fun this is. I told my IT guy I wanted a device that could establish immobilization and then deliver heat, cold, electricity, perforation, abrasion, blunt force trauma, pressure—all the elemental forces. Imagine if the Inquisition had had the benefit of electricity? So Andy...” He was turning a knob now, something beneath me beginning to hum, a subtle vibration in the chair. “What’s your pleasure?”
Violet
SHE realized that she was awake.
Still shivering.
Still lying on a hard floor in the pitch-black.
Her right ear throbbed, and when she touched it, her fingers grazed a swatch of dried blood and skin that had begun to scab over.
Her stomach ached.
“Max,” she whispered. “Oh, God.”
She fell apart and wept, realigned herself to the horror that had become her life, and then gathered herself together again.
She’d shifted in her sleep and it took five minutes of walking into walls before she finally stumbled out of the break room and back into the corridor.
She stood there for a moment, waiting to see if some image might emerge out of the dark, but nothing did. A disconcerting hum, like the sound of wind moving through a tunnel, broke the silence, though it seemed a great distance away—far above her.
She went on as before, the knife out front, one hand trailing along the wall, figuring she must have slept for hours, because her clothes were almost dry.
The corridor ended in another stairwell, and she climbed several flights until she reached the top and pulled open a door.
Light streamed in.
She stood at the entrance to a large room sectioned by cubicle space. The light was weak and gray and still it burned and she had to stand there for several minutes, letting her retinas grow accustomed to the onslaught of daylight.
Through the maze.
Depressing partitions of long-vacant workspace.
Cheap desks and chairs. Rogue paperclips. Stray power cords.
She stopped in one cubicle and stared at a calendar still pushpinned into the fabric wall—six years out of date.
Light slipped in through wide, narrow windows near the ceiling that gave no view but of the sky. The hum was loudest here and the sound was of wind blowing through those glassless windows, passing through the room like breath over an open bottle top.
Andy
IN the end, Luther still decided.
He shaved my leg with a straight razor below the knee and scrubbed the skin with warm, soapy water.
Dried it with a towel and put on a pair of plastic safety glasses, my stomach already in knots.
He unholstered a high-powered soldering gun and a roll of 21 gauge 60/40 solder from a rack that contained a variety of high-end tools—pliers, augurs, slate cutters, drills, shears, even a ball peen hammer.
The first sensation was the liquid-metal burn of the solder.
My skin blistered, and I didn’t scream at first, having endured real pain before, and knowing it ebbed and flowed.
But this just kept coming, and with it the rush of panic, of trying to handle something I couldn’t stand or stop, and after he’d laid three inches of melted alloy onto my leg, my throat finally gave voice to the scream it had been dying to unleash, and I raged against the restraints only to confirm my complete immobilization. Only my fingers and toes could move.
Luther didn’t even look up, just kept at his work as tiny coils of smoke lifted off the solder, and he didn’t stop until he’d reached the top of my foot.
Already the metal was cooling, bonding to my skin, and though the pain of the brilliant heat was fading, the nerves in the newly-traumatized flesh had just started to sing.
He made three lines down my right leg, each approximately sixteen inches, each a searing revelation of pain.
When he’d finished his work and I’d worn myself out screaming, I watched him reholster the soldering iron as sweat ran down into my eyes.
I couldn’t believe it, but I registered the briefest moment of relief. Of hope.
The pain, still mind-blowing, was abating, and I’d survived it.
Luther pushed the cart that held the control panel and the tools away from my gurney and started across the room.
“This,” he called out, “I have to keep far away from the electronics and other tools. You familiar with neodymium?”
Violet
SHE continued on, soon passing out of the room of cubicles and into a short hallway that accessed larger offices.
A noise stopped her.
She cocked her head to listen.
Nothing but the softer hum of the wind.
Two steps later, there it was again.
So faint, but was it...screaming?
Max.
She rushed toward the end of the hallway and a closed set of doors, and when she pulled them open, the day’s first hit of adrenaline entered her bloodstream.
That wasn’t a baby.
Those were the screams of an adult.
A man.
Andy.
Andy
HE was coming back now carrying a briefcase.
When he reached the gurney, he set it down on the floor and flipped the hasps.
“It’s a rare earth metal,” he said as I tried to crane my neck, though my head was strapped into place. I was desperate to see what he was prying out of the hard black foam. “Neodymium is used to make the strongest magnets on earth.” He ran a finger down the first line of solder he’d laid into my skin. “I think we’re good,” he said, holding up a small, U-shaped magnet—smooth, shiny, and silver. “Hardest part was finding the right solder. I needed an alloy that would bond to skin cells. My friend, Javier, taught me this method, showed me the right brand. Jav runs with the Alphas in the southwestern border towns. Very bad news, that one. I think you’d like him, Andy. Quiet guy. All business. Total psychopath.”
Luther quickly lowered the ends of the magnet toward my leg.
They locked down on the solder.
He was smiling now through those brown, disgusting teeth.
“So,” he said, “can you guess what’s going to happen next?”
Violet
SHE was standing just inside another factory, this one without the benefit of windows, though it didn’t need them. Globe lights shined down from high above, casting everything—the concrete floor, the strange and varied machinery as far as she could see—in a harsh glare.
She kicked the door-stops down with the toe of her tennis shoe and propped open the doors.
It felt like something physically held her back from proceeding, but Violet broke through and pushed on, tightening her grip on the knife.
There were more machines than she’d ever seen in one place, her hands grazing the cold metal and congealed grease.
It all looked ancient.
Derelict.
Giant drill bits.
The dulled blades of circular saws that hadn’t spun in years.
Massive planers and boring mills.
Machines that fixed machines.
The screams were getting louder, and they tore her guts out, so much agony behind them that she finally stopped and knelt down and plugged her ears and prayed.
It was a long time before she stood up again, and when she did, silence flooded in.