Page 116 of The Song Rising

I had said nothing, betrayed nothing. But he would be back tomorrow, and the next day. And the next. I had expected torture, and I had expected to be able to withstand it, but I hadn’t expected to be so weak that I couldn’t use my gift at all, not even to give myself a moment of relief from the pain in my body. The coma must have corroded it—it had certainly left my dreamscape paper-thin.

Sleep called to me. I kept my eyes open, telling myself to focus, to concentrate. I couldn’t have much time before they executed me. A few days, at most.

Step one: survive the torture.

Suhail soon came back with his questions. Even after the first time, I wasn’t prepared for the ice-cold liquid to flood my mouth and knife its way into my stomach. For the fear that made me fight my chains until my wrists were raw. For the gargling screams I couldn’t control, even when Suhail told me I was a yellow-jacket, even when I knew that screaming would crack open the sluice-gates in my throat. For my body to retort with bouts of vomit. I had drowned on dry land over and over, a dying fish flopping on a slab.

Suhail became nothing but the hand that poured. He told me to forget my name. I was not Paige here. I was 40. Why had I not learned the first time? Sometimes he would touch my forehead with a sublimed baton, which had the same effect on my spirit as a cattle prod. As I cried out, the deluge came again. He whispered to me that this interrogation would do no harm, that there would be no physical destruction to my body, but I didn’t believe it. All my ribs felt splintered; my stomach was bloated with water; my throat seared from the acid in it. Whenever he left, I fought to keep my eyes open.

Staying alive was physically strenuous. Breathing was no longer a reflex, but an effort.

But I had to live. If I didn’t live for just a little longer, everything I had done to get here—all of it would be for nothing.

Day and night were now water and silence. There was no food. Just water. When my bladder was full, I had no choice but to let the warmth seep out of me. I was a vessel of water, nothing more. When he returned, Suhail reminded me of what a sordid animal I was.

I hoped, every minute, that the others wouldn’t try to save me. Nick might be foolish enough. They had faced odds almost as daunting when they had got me out of the colony, but there was no way they could infiltrate a maximum-security fortress like the Archon. Whenever Suhail tired of tormenting me, I visualized how they might attempt a rescue. The scenarios I envisioned always ended in a spray of blood. I pictured Nick dead on the marble floor, a bullet through his temple, never smiling again. Warden chained and brutalized in a room like this one, held in a permanent state of torture, denied even the mercy of death to escape it. Eliza on the Lychgate, like my father.

The next night, or day, Suhail fed on my aura as he worked. A Rephaite hadn’t fed on me in a long time. Blind panic made me haul against my fetters until the muscles of my neck and shoulders burst into flame. The double blow to my system left me so weak that once it was over, I could hardly cough out what had worked its way into my lungs. When Suhail took the cloth off my face, his eyes were the red of a moribund fire.

“Do you truly have nothing to say, 40?” he said. “You were rather more vocal in the penal colony.”

I used the last of the water in my mouth to spit at him. His hand strapped my cheek. Pain staggered up my face, and my head seemed to vibrate with the force of the impact.

“What a great pity,” he said, “that the blood-sovereign wants you unspoiled.”

A second blow knocked me out.

When I woke, I was face down in a cell. Concrete floor, blank walls, and no light.

Suhail had really done a number on me this time. I could feel that I was badly bruised around my left eye, and my cheek was hot and swollen.

A cup of water sat beside the cot. It took me a long time to drag myself across the concrete and pick it up, and longer still to lift it to my lips. The first sip made me gag. I tried again. And again. Dipping my upper lip into the glass, I let the water soften the broken skin. Then more. Just the tip of my tongue. I retched into my arm. My throat closed in anticipation of the flood.

No. The water could be spiked. I crawled away from it and lay on my back, holding my aching stomach. They would not turn me into a mindless automaton.

When I didn’t drink, they sent in a Vigile with a needle. Something that gave me temporary amnesia; I suspected, in lucid moments, that it was a potent mix of white aster and a tranquilizer.

Step two: resist the drugs.

After that needle punched into my muscle, I couldn’t remember how to dreamwalk; couldn’t even remember that I was able to do it. As if the drug had washed my knowledge of my gift away. When it was in my blood, all sense of identity and purpose collapsed, leaving my mind void. When the dose wore off, another Vigile arrived to top it up.

And so a pattern began—a cycle of sedation.

A near-constant thirst vied with my new fear of water. I would be taunted by thoughts of plunging, ice-cold pools, of crystal depths, of that stream I had glimpsed in Warden’s memory. I wasn’t sure if it was the drugs, or if I was hallucinating out of dehydration.

The next day, they took me into another room and allowed a squadron of Vigiles to beat me in lieu of the waterboard. With each blow, they asked, “Where are your allies?” “Who’s been helping you?” “Who the fuck do you think you are, unnatural?” If I didn’t answer, another kick came, along with a mouthful of spit and foul words. They wrenched my hair and broke my lip. One of them tried to make me lick his boots; I fought back viciously, and in the fray, another of them grabbed my weak wrist too hard. From the way the commandant hauled me away at once, the sprain hadn’t been intentional.

No one used my name. I was only 40.

After the beating, I lay for hours in my stupor, cradling my wrist. When I finally surfaced, a narrow face was hovering above me. I shrunk away from the flashlight and sheltered my eyes.

“You’ve been asleep for a while, 40.”

That voice, slightly nasal, with a note of self-satisfaction.

“Carl,” I rasped.

“Not Carl. 1.” Footsteps. “Do you know where you are, 40?” Without waiting for my reply, the person I’d known as Carl Dempsey-Brown faced me boldly. “They keep political traitors in this room before they go to the Lychgate. The last person in it was your father.”

---