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7
Tarni
The interrogations go on for a long time. There is a good guy / bad guy dynamic being used on me as they attempt to get a more damning confession.
“It’s not your fault. You were left in a vulnerable position and you trauma-bonded with your captor.”
The sympathy I am being offered is not real. It’s another trap, a rope they mean for me to take and hang myself with — metaphorically, before they hang me for real. I know what happens to traitors. I know my life will end swinging on a rope.
“He wasn’t a captor. He was decent.”
“He is a murderer. He is responsible for the destruction of an entire colony.”
“In retaliation for our hostilities to his people.”
“What people?”
“Exactly. We wiped his entire tribe out.”
The officer’s face contorts in a rictus of villainous cruelty. “Not all of them. Not until he is executed. And he will be. Your betrayal will not stop us from recapturing him.”
I allow myself the first break in my otherwise stony expression, a small, sarcastic twist of my lips. “Good luck with that.”
He makes a dismissive gesture toward me, now speaking to my guards.
“Take her away. She’ll be hanged with the savage when we recapture him. Until then, she can think about what a traitorous bitch she is.”
* * *
Ispend a long time in my cell. I do not know how many days or nights because the light is kept low and is continuously on. It’s a method to induce a quiet kind of madness and make one feel as though the grave has already claimed them.
I am fed once a day, or maybe twice. Again, it is hard to tell. I spend my days lying on my plastic bed with my eyes closed even when I am not asleep, playing my adventures with Kail out from the beginning. I try to remember every bit of them, every expression on his face. Every look. Every gesture. Every word. Every smell. I sink so deep into imagination that sometimes I am able to entirely forget that I am imprisoned and awaiting execution.
These daydreams allow me to investigate our relationship more closely, and marvel at the kindness he showed me when he did not need to. Even if he was conducting me to Colony Alpha to kill me there, he tried his best to make me comfortable along the way. He crafted me clothing.
I now wear a plain white jumpsuit with a barcode along the back and arms. I remember when I was a much younger woman, teenagers wore things like this in an attempt to be edgy. Now that it is my regular attire, it does not feel cool. It feels like the mark of a human organization that feeds on hope, joy, and freedom. The colony programs have their own momentum that has nothing to do with any of the individual people involved. If all the officers and soldiers and guards and settlers were to disappear today, they would inevitably be replaced because this is what our species does. We spread. We take. We consume. We are locusts upon this universe, and we will not stop until we have devoured every last part of it.
There’s no point in feeling guilty about that. It is simply in our nature. For every one of us who comes to some enlightened revelation about living in balance with nature, a dozen more see nature as something to be claimed, harvested, and profited from.
I wonder what will happen a thousand, ten thousand, ten million years in the future. I wonder if we will succeed in the goal evolution gave us when it molded us from amino acids and set us on this path. Is this what the universe wants? Is this destiny? And if so, am I and everyone else like me wrong in attempting to stop progress?
There is plenty of time for deep thoughts like these in my captivity, but there are no answers. They will only come from the unfolding of the process, which I will never live to see if I lived a hundred lifetimes.
* * *
At some point, and there is no way of telling when, I hear a commotion outside. My cell has been very quiet for a long time. Nobody talks to me or talks outside it. The entire block is on a kind of lockdown to encourage the worst effects of sensory deprivation.
But I hear voices now.
More than voices. I hearscreams.
Doors are thrown open. More screams. Are they executing the prisoners? I know I am not the only one here. There are others who similarly tried to stand against the colony’s goals. I hear the banging and the shrieks and more banging and more shrieks and finally there are no doors left but mine.
I sit up in time to see my door thrown open, bright light streaming in behind a powerful figure.
It is Kail.
He is covered in blood, and most of it is not his own.
