Page 10 of Slashed Bonds

The ice. The seasons. The plan.

I cough.

Blood comes out onto the carpet, dark and stringy.

More than a split lip accounts for.

Naomi makes a small sound of satisfaction.

“That’s the compound working,” she says. “It scars the bond site. Irreversible. She won’t be able to form another one.”

Wait. What? What you mean I can’t form another? I can’t bond again? What do you mean? Am I now defective? Why would they give me this? Why would they plague me with something…so cruel? Why is this happening? I did nothing to deserve this?!

Silas speaks for the first time. His voice is a rasp, unused.

“That’s all it does. Correct?”

Naomi rises and crosses to him and reaches up to pat his cheek like a favorite nephew’s.

“Does it bother you?”

Half a second.

“No,” Silas says.

“Good.”

She turns back to me.

Considers me on the floor with my arms leaking and my mouth full of blood.

Then she points past my shoulder, at the window.

“Take the trash out.”

The guards haul me up.

I don’t understand at first. I’m still trying to breathe past the wreckage where my bond used to be.

It’s the direction that tells me. The angle they turn my body. Then I see one of them working the latch, and cold air comes off the service lot two floors below.

Two floors.

Concrete. A loading bay. The steel bones of the ice plant.

“Wait.” My voice is destroyed and I use it anyway. “Wait. Wait, wait—we’re on the second floor. We’re on the second floor!“

I fight. Both feet, both shoulders, my head back into somebody’s chin, everything I’ve ever learned about getting out of a corner with a man’s weight on me.

It buys nothing.

And here’s what my mind does in the last seconds.

My legs.

Please not my legs. Break the arms. Break the ribs, the collarbone, take the teeth. If I keep the legs I can start over.

New city, new name, some women’s league in a town nobody’s heard of, beer-league ice at eleven at night.