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Folding my arms over my chest, I look at the floor. “Take me back.”
“Take you back where?”
“To my cell.”
“You can’t possibly want to go sit in a little concrete box when you could have all of this comfort. Look at the couch.”
I don’t know what the fuck a couch is, and I don’t care. I want to be alone, back in the little space where I am the feared one, the mistress of my domain. It’s easier to be a wild animal than it is to try and play at whatever this is.
The doctor doesn’t give me a choice. He takes me by the hand and leads me over to the big soft seat, which I guess must be a couch.
“I know this is strange,” he says in that devastatingly kind way he has of talking. “But it’s going to be okay.”
Tom
I didn’t understand how far gone this girl was. When she’s in battle mode, she seems no different from any other hard-bitten operative in this place, but put in this domestic setting, all the lack in her life suddenly becomes immediately, heartbreakingly obvious.
She sits there so tight and tense. I want to make it better for her, but I know only time and familiarity will do that. There’s nothing I can do to make this easier, or go quicker. This is a process she’s going to have to go through, and I know it won’t be easy on either of us.
There’s a television in the corner of the room. I grab the remote and turn it on. The sudden sound and color makes her twitch, but not quite jump.
“Turn that off!”
I turn it back off. There’s anguish in her voice, and her eyes are wide with sudden, obvious fear.
“Take that out of here,” she says, her voice rough.
“You don’t like television?”
“I don’t like the scream screen,” she says bitterly.
“Scream screen?”
“They used to show us pictures on them,” she explains. “Bad pictures.”
“What kind of bad pictures.”
“People dying. People hurting.”
I draw in a breath. She’s not just been physically tortured her entire life. She has also been mentally abused. It’s no surprise, but I am finding it difficult to contain my composure. It would be easy to give way to pity, but I’m sure that’s not what she wants – and it’s not what she needs.
“Do you like stories?”
“Stories?”
I pull out my phone and pick out a book on my e-reader app.
“Alice was starting to get tired of laying on the river side,” I begin reading the story of Alice in Wonderland, all the way through to the rabbit running past Alice and pulling out a pocket watch.
“Wait…”
“Hm?”
I glance over. Electra is looking at me with wide eyes. “What is that? What are you doing? Who is Alice?”
“It’s a story. It’s…” I realize it is actually very hard to define what a story is. “It’s a description of things that didn’t happen.”
“Why?”
“Well, for entertainment, and more. Reading helps me to relax. Listening to stories can be very calming.”
She nods slowly. “What happened to the rabbit? Why is he wearing a waistcoat? The rabbits I saw on missions didn’t have clothes.”
Just like that, she’s hooked.
I read the first chapter of Alice in Wonderland. She is utterly wrapped up in the story, and I’m happy to read it to her, at least until I hear her stomach start to growl.
“You’re hungry,” I say, closing the app. “How about we make some food?”
“We can make food?” She cocks her head at me. “What do you mean?”
“Yep, that’s what the kitchen is for. Taking ingredients, combining them together, making something worth eating.”
It’s almost like dealing with a little alien, I think to myself as I lead her to the fridge and together, we pick out foods she might want to eat. It’s difficult, because she’s never seen raw ingredients before. I reckon she’s looking for the brown gruel slop that prisoners tend to be fed. Instead, I decide to make her bacon and eggs.
Electra
The doctor starts pulling packages out of the fridge. They’re all marked with words like the ones he was reading off his phone, but the markings don’t mean anything to me.
“What’s that?”
“Bacon,” he says, glancing at me for a second. I can see him thinking. He’s smart. Too smart. He notices things more than anybody else I’ve ever met. The people I used to interact with were always pushing things on me. Making me act certain ways, do certain things. This doctor notices what I do before he tries to change it. “Electra, tell me something.”
“What?”
“Did they ever teach you to read?”
I feel an unwelcome flush of horrible heat over my skin. “No.”
“Okay,” he nods. “Well, that’s going to be one of the first things we do for sure.”
He acts like it isn’t a big deal, but I know it is. My handlers have mocked me before about not being able to read. Tyko thought it was hilarious. He used to write things down in front of me and tell me the were directions out of the facility. I don’t know if they were or not. My education was specialized, and reading wasn’t on the list. I think they left it out on purpose, just so I would be unable to get by in the outside world. I’m always going to need someone who knows what the signs mean.
