There were assorted knives, some of them serrated and some smooth, a package of steel skewers for barbecuing meat, a small handheld blowtorch. So this stage of her ordeal was going to be what she had expected-cutting and fire. There was a car battery, and a set of insulated wires with alligator clips. Just another kind of fire.
The tall man disconnected the IV needle from the back of her left hand and wrapped the tube around the steel stand. "Here. Roll her over on her stomach and use the restraints to secure her wrists to the bed."
The two men turned her over roughly, and tightened the Velcro restraints on the bed frame around her wrists. She heard a cigarette lighter, and then a hiss. She turned her head toward the sound and watched the tall man holding the lighted torch, adjusting the feed valve until the flame was a small blue point.
The tall man used the torch to heat up a set of four steel skewers while the driver held them with a pair of long-handled pliers. Jane pictured the warrior, tied to a stake by now, watching the embers being heated, the torturers' eyes glowing like cats' eyes in the reflected firelight. The proper response was complete indifference. The warrior would pretend to be unafraid, would show calm when the pain came, would pretend that he felt no despair.
Jane could see that the skewers were red and glowing. The driver pulled the oversize man's shirt she was wearing up to her shoulders, and the tall man simply laid the skewers, one by one, across her back. Her muscles tensed, and her vision narrowed, with a red halo at the edges. Her eyes were wet, the tears spontaneously running as the hot steel seared her back. She believed she smelled her own flesh cooking, but she pictured the warrior's eyes staring into hers, silently urging her to endure the pain and the horror, and remained still.
The tall man picked the skewers up with the pliers. "Hot enough, you think" She couldn't tell who he was talking to, and it no longer mattered. "You know, that was a shame. You really did have a beautiful back. I hated to ruin it with those burn lines. Well, guys What should we try next"
Another voice said, "We should have just killed her when we got her here."
"You shot her. You could have fired again or just aimed higher and said it was an accident." He was enjoying her ordeal, but it seemed to be making his friends uncomfortable. "She has a lot of determination, doesn't she"
The driver said, "Maybe she told us the truth. Maybe she doesn't know where he went."
"Then she's really stupid. You should always have -something-one precious thing-that you can use to keep this kind of shit from happening to you." He was heating the skewers again, and this time, he dropped all of them on her back at once. Jane's vision clouded red again, with only a small point of light in the center. The muscles in her arms and legs tightened in a spasm, but she held back the scream, kept the air moving in and out through her nostrils so it wouldn't pass her vocal cords and make a sound.
The burns on her back were now throbbing from the first attack, the air sweeping across them and making the pain flare again. She felt the bruises from the beating under her, and the burned flesh on her back, and together they seemed to overwhelm her nervous system until she was barely aware of the men and their movements.
"You know how to make this stop. All you have to do is give us back what's ours."
It was getting harder to keep silent. The bullet wound in her leg hurt again. Her body was a raw, throbbing, aching set of nerve endings, all sending hot, screaming alarms to her brain at once, and she couldn't soothe herself, couldn't turn away, couldn't even move. Inside her closed eyes she had a vision of her husband, Carey-not wishing he could save her, not wishing him into this horror at all, just feeling the loss of him.
What the tall man did next came with no warning, no sound that reached her ears, but brought an explosion of pain, and then the red cloud in front of her vision closed the point of light in the middle, and went black.
At first the darkness was like being in a pocket, but then she sensed that it was big, like a starless, infinite space. She wondered for a moment if she was dead. Moving was impossible, and she couldn't feel her body touching anything. And then, without warning, she felt all of it. The skin of her back was on fire. Her eyes opened like a camera shutter, and closed again at the glare of the lights.
She tried to look at the men again, and saw that they had gone. She couldn't see them or their shadows or hear their voices. She was cold, and she suddenly realized she was wet. She looked around at the table, and saw that someone had attached the two insulated wires to the car battery. That was it. They must have given her a shock, and she had passed out. She wondered how long she had been unconscious. She tried to run an inventory of pains, but she didn't detect any she hadn't felt before. They had let her alone after she passed out. They wanted her to feel every single sensation. There was no point in hurting a person who couldn't feel.
She had lost track of time. She had heard from people who had been broken in interrogations that losing track of time had weakened them. A person had to feel that there was a whole world outside his prison where time proceeded in an orderly, uniform way, where the sun rose and set as it always had. She realized that this was part of the distress she had felt when she had first been dragged in. The high windows that had been blacked out had scared her a little, and the single dim desk lamp had been worse. It was always gray twilight in the big room.
Jane took a deep breath, asked herself how long she could hold out against the pain, and realized that she was still willing to die. As long as she didn't reveal where Jim Shelby was, she could buy him time, and keep these men occupied with her instead of searching for him. Shelby and every one of her earlier runners would have another day of safety, another day for their identities to mature and be more solid, another day to make a friend who might help them. And another day would give Jane's captors a chance to get impatient and careless.
She thought about her runners. Over the years she had taken dozens and dozens of them away. Shelby was only the most recent. They had almost all come to her in the last days of wasted, ruined lives, sometimes just hours before their troubles would have changed from dangerous to fatal. She would obliterate the person's old identity and turn him into a runner, a fugitive she would guide to a place far away, where nobody knew him, and certainly nobody would ever think of killing him. She would give him a new identity and teach him how to be that new person for the rest of his life. By now there were people all over North America and Europe who bore names that she had made up.
She thought about her husband, Carey, the surgeon who spent every day of his life fixing and curing people. He had been her reward, the part of the world that she had taken for herself for no better reason than that she wanted him and he kept pestering her to take him. She loved him so much she could picture every centimeter of him with such clarity that she could feel him against her skin. She had lived a good life, but now she had to be ready to die to preserve the other people, the ones who had trusted her with their lives.
Jane let go of Carey's image and prepared herself for the next phase. The pain of torture was almost unbearable, but she had discovered it had other qualities, too. It set her apart from the rest of humanity. Each time the pain didn't destroy her was a failure for the enemy, a wall that had held against an attack. The cuts and burns were decorations of valor and at the same time proof of the torturers' unworthiness. The pain was the means of consecration, the welcome fire that proved the victim's nobility.