Page 45 of Devoured
“I can’t do this anymore,”he whispered, voice quivering. “I can’t keep pretending this is normal. That what happened to you both is just... treatment. That this is medicine.”
Marion turned her head toward him with effort, wincing at the movement. “Isaac—”
“No. Listen to me.”He looked up, eyes red-rimmed and hollow with exhaustion—and something darker. Something like self-hatred. “I’ve been here two years. Two fucking years. Told myself I was helping people. That the screams were just... part of recovery. That sometimes healing has to hurt.”
He stood up and paced to the window, then back again, like the energy inside him wouldn’t let him stay still. “But seeing you both like this, seeing what he did... This isn’t a hospital. It’s a slaughterhouse. And I’ve been helping them sharpen the knives.”
“You didn’t know,”I said, but the words felt hollow even as they left my mouth.
“I did know.”His voice was flat, brutal with honesty. “I just didn’t want to see it. Didn’t want to admit that I was part of something evil. That every day I came to work, I was complicit in torture.”
Isaac sat again, leaning forward like the realization was too heavy to carry upright. “But I’m seeing it now. All of it. And I’m getting you out of here.”
Marion’s eyes snapped into focus. She was suddenly alert despite the medication. “Out?”
“Tonight. Both of you. I don’t care what it takes.”
“We can barely walk,”I pointed out, though some part of me was already reaching toward the possibility of escape like a drowning person reaching for air. Everything below my waist felt like hamburger meat—torn and ruined in ways that made every movement agony.
“You’ll have to try.”Isaac said firmly, almost desperately. “Because if you stay here much longer—if you give him time to plan whatever comes next...”He swallowed hard. I saw his throat working around words too terrible to speak aloud. “I think Varnar’s planning something worse. The way he looked at you both when they brought you back. Like he was just getting started.”
A chill lodged deep in my bones. What we’d endured had already been horrific. But the idea that it was just the opening act in a longer nightmare was almost too much to process.
The door opened, and we all tensed—but it was just Sela doing rounds. She stepped inside and closed the door behind her, pausing to take in the scene. Her eyes missed nothing—our red faces, Isaac’s agitation, the way we were all leaning together like conspirators planning revolution.
“Problem here?”she asked, though her tone suggested she already knew the answer.
Isaac straightened, trying to look professional. “No, just checking their—”
“Cut the shit.”Sela stepped closer, clipboard tucked under her arm like a weapon. “You three are planning something stupid, aren’t you?”
We said nothing, but silence was its own answer.
Sela sighed like she’d been expecting this moment for years. Then she pulled up a chair and sat beside Marion’s bed.
“Twelve years I’ve been here,”she said. “Twelve years of patching up girls just so they can be broken again. Of pretending the screams are from nightmares, not torture chambers. Of mopping up blood and asking no questions about where it came from.”
She looked older suddenly—worn down by a thousand compromises.
“You think I haven’t noticed the patterns? Girls who ask too many questions disappearing into isolation wards that don’t appear on any official hospital map. Patients who fight back getting ’special treatment’ until they stop fighting altogether.”
“Then why stay?”Marion asked, voice rough with accusation.
“Because someone has to keep the ones still breathing alive long enough to maybe escape.”Sela’s smile was bitter with guilt. After a long pause, she added, “But I’m done now. I’m done being complicit. I’m tired of going home every night and washing other people’s blood off my hands.”
Isaac leaned forward. “You’d help us?”
“I’d help me sleep at night for once.”Sela pulled a small notebook from her pocket and flipped to a page filled with precise handwriting and what looked like architectural diagrams. “But if we’re doing this, we do it right.”
She unfolded a hand-drawn map of the hospital. Every corridor. Every hidden passage. Every secret artery beneath the floors.
“Shift change is at 2 a.m. For about fifteen minutes, the skeleton crew is doing rounds and paperwork. Security’s focused on the main floors and patient wards. That’s our window.”
Her finger traced a path through narrow hallways and unlabeled shafts. “Service tunnel system. Runs under the whole building. Connects to the loading dock where they bring in supplies. The tunnels are old, from when this place was built—but they’re still functional.”
“What about alarms?”Isaac asked.
“The loading dock has an exit that leads directly to the parking lot. No alarms on that door—it’s considered internal infrastructure.”Sela looked at Marion and me, assessing our condition with cold precision. “Question is, can you two move? Really move—not just pretend?”
