It was the longest night Ray could ever remember having experienced. Her exhaustion forced her to doze against her will but her racing thoughts, preparations, and plans, kept her from surrendering to it completely.
Whenever she even suspected Karfa may be looking in at her, she immediately filled her mind with the worst memories she could recall, focusing on their misery and fine detail until she sobbed, until her spirit felt torn apart from it.
He had broken her doors, but she had seen his arrogance, his smug superiority. As she had told him, she didn't need to see into his mind to do it. Much of it was the same as she had felt from the other Kilrathi- he was as convinced as they were, that human beings were inferior. They were so soaked in their culture of honor and strength that they could not help but seek out weakness, and they found it everywhere.
This cultural arrogance was merely how they evolved. How they perceived evil was not how the humans did. Both perceptions were rooted in tribalism, both being socially evolved creatures, but their approaches were different. To a human, the act of making someone miserable enough to kill themselves was evil; to a Kilrathi, someone killing themselves no matter how miserable was the evil act.
To a human, the commission of treason itself was the evil. To a Kilrathi, the dishonor such a commission brought upon their family was the evil. Subtle distinctions, perhaps, but wars had been fought in the infinite space between subtle distinctions.
Karfa's arrogance was more than just the Kilrathi pride borne of culture, however. He saw himself above humans because he was Kilrathi, but he also saw him above other Kilrathi because he could do things they couldn't. He was strong, and he was trained, and compared to the others of his kind he had encountered, he was good at what he did. He'd propped himself up on his pillar so high the possibility that an untrained shaved Ape such as herself might outwit him never occurred to him. That pillar was so high that it had become quite shaky, just waiting for the right nudge to come along and tip it over.
The trouble wasn't his shaky pillar, the trouble was he was stronger than she was, he was trained, and Ray had only found out the truth about herself a few weeks before. She was unsure of what she was even capable of.
That soldier that was throttling Rafe, he knocked him back, she thought, still tense as she monitored her mind for Karfa's stink. Somehow, he physically moved that man hard enough to break his grip on Rafe without even looking his way, without being near him.
Could she do something like that? She thought maybe she could, but she really had very little time in which to practice. She could not risk trying to look into Karfa's mind to see how he'd done it; he'd know the instant she started to even try.
Retov, however, was a different matter. She suspected Retov was not like she and Karfa were, and when he'd left her alone in the cell but taken a tiny piece of her with him, she'd become certain of it.
Only an hour after she was certain Retov was asleep, she had most of the information that she needed. The plan mumbling about in the background of her mind, hidden behind the screen of her most terrible memories, began to grow.
Her plan might prove to be futile, but it was her only hope. Either way, she would need every micron of determination she could manage before she even tried to put it into effect. With the IV fluids she'd gotten she was feeling much better, but she couldn't count on that being enough, and with only a few more hours left until dawn, she finally allowed herself to fall to sleep.
Retov woke her from a dream in which she was lost in a gray mist, surrounded by nameless, faceless, and shapeless people who wanted something from her she couldn't understand. The mist broke apart as she was lifted into Retov's arms, and her first feeling upon waking was not fear or confusion but rather annoyance. Understanding was so near- if she'd only had a few more moments!
Then he was settling her in a chair in another unfamiliar room. As he strapped her wrists down, memory returned, and the fear with it.
He brought over another IV, the needle sliding into the crook of her arm. He said nothing to her, nor did she to him, and after he got the IV set he left her there alone. She tried to put the fear back into its place but looking around the room did little to comfort her.
It was a medical suite, and a dozen steps away behind a transparent half-partition lay a metal table fitted with yet more straps. Shelving covered with various bottles of medications, cans of swabs, and antiseptics flanked the table, and overhead hung a camera and voice recorder. Large, deep sinks stood at the ready, several scales of varying sizes resting here and there.
She'd seen such rooms in passing before. It was an autopsy room. The only difference between those and this was that the autopsy performed here soon would be upon a living and keenly aware subject.
Would it be today? She didn't think so. It was doubtful they'd give her another IV if they just meant to slap her on the table and cut her apart, and she'd seen the image of the paralytic that Karfa had mentioned in Retov's mind; it was not delivered through IV.
No, this was supposed to be psychological. Karfa wanted her to be in view of the place where they would cut her to pieces. He wanted that terror.
When she was certain that Retov had gone and Karfa was not paying her any mind she fixed her eyes not on the autopsy table itself, but the shelving. Taking a chance, she both focused and fell away, stepping back from her eyes.
One of the cans of swabs was right in her line of sight, and it was there that she concentrated her efforts. Try as she might, the can remained as unmoving as would be expected.
Karfa hit that guard, I'm sure of it. How did he do that?
She thought back to when he'd broken her doors the day before. She had jolted back so hard she'd tipped the chair and spilled to the ground. She focused on that event, playing it over and over again. Had it been her jolt that had knocked the chair, or had he hit more than her mind? Had it been his strike that had thrown her back?
How did he do that? How, if not with his…
…his mind. She internally groaned with a realization. She was being a fool. As much as she'd scoffed at Dr. Versi's theatrical revelations about psychic gifts, she'd been thinking about this thing all wrong- she'd been thinking about it in the same terms that Dr. Versi had.
What she and Karfa and others of 'their kind' did was not mystical or supernatural. Whatever this was, it was necessarily rooted in the world of science and physics as much as anything else was.
The times that she had talked to Parry, when she'd held her hand and was sure Parry had felt it, she wasn't just lurking behind her eyes and focusing some imagined telekinetic power. She'd gone to her. Some part of her that was anchored to her body and yet separate from it had gone to her.
She remembered standing outside of her downed fighter, watching as Parry rushed to her aid. She'd seen her own body laying there, seen the meat. She'd returned to it during those periods where she'd nearly woken up, and left it again.
Karfa hadn't reached out with his mind to knock back that soldier. He'd just reached out.
She didn't step back any further from her eyes, she just reached, as she would reach for any object. She felt her hand lift, and then a sweep of surreality. In the corner of her vision, her hand was still motionless, pinned beneath both strap and IV. At the same time, she could see it lift in front of her face. She tried wiggling her fingers, and the fingers of her lifted hand wiggled, while the fingers of her strapped hand remained motionless.
For the first time she became concerned about other cameras in the room, ones that might be focused on her, instead of just the autopsy table. She dismissed that concern almost as fast as it came. Parry had been able to see her at the end of her ordeal but Ray suspected that had Parry not been in her own desperate state, strained to the end of her endurance, she would not have. She herself had seen nothing like this of Karfa when he'd hit the soldier.
Dismissing thoughts of both Parry and Karfa from her mind, she held out her arm, stretching her fingers. It extended to the limit of her normal arm, then stopped. Grinding her teeth, she willed it to stretch further.
Slowly, the arm began to elongate, the fingers pulling further and further, stretching like taffy. It was disturbing to watch such a distortion, and for a moment she faltered. The hand and arm started to pull back, to revert to normal.
No. I've got to reach it. Focus.
Once again she stretched. The shelving with its can of swabs was at least twenty or thirty feet away and before her reach had gotten to five, she was starting to sweat. Every inch further she pushed them seemed to take as much effort as the inches before combined had. She pulled more and more of herself out from behind her eyes, and the arm reached a few inches further. She was only vaguely aware of her painfully gritting teeth, of her ragged breathing. She was not even halfway to her destination yet and her entire being felt as tenuous as a spider's thread, and the effort was as if she were trying to move a space station with her pinky finger.
Then with a sudden rush she was standing halfway across the room, at the furthest place her hand had managed to reach. Her arm and fingers were back to their normal length. Turning, she saw a woman strapped to a chair, an IV taped to the crook of one arm. The form was emaciated, her short hair dry and unkempt. Dark circles were under her eyes, her cheeks and lips colorless. She sagged forward against the bounds, clearly unconscious. Only the faint shifts as she breathed gave away that she was anything more than a corpse.
But of course the woman was her; her meat.
She turned back toward the cannister, walking toward it as normally as she had ever walked toward anything, then paused again.
Walking.
She looked down, and saw she was dressed in her Confed uniform. Both legs, both feet, were present and accounted for.
Reaching the cannister, she reached out to touch it. She felt its smooth surface just a moment before she snapped her hand back.
Karfa and Retov were nearly at the door.
In a rush of sound and color she found herself suddenly back in the chair, strapped down tightly. Thin sheens of sweat coated her skin, tears damping her eyelashes. The IVs had done their job in rehydrating her at least enough for that.
She felt dizzy, wrung out, and realized she was shaking. Her heart thundered, ramming painfully in her chest. She barely had time to pull a miserable memory around her mind as a blanket before Karfa was stepping in front of her. He seemed pleased as he crouched.
"Good!" he said, and she flinched back as she felt the rough pad of one of his fingers on her cheek. He grinned, then looked at Retov. "You can take out the IV."
As the needle slid out of her skin Ray felt Karfa once more probe almost casually at her mind. She quickly turned up the volume of her memory to ten, trying to drown out everything else in her mind. This one was of Karen and her squad-mates in training calling her names, but the memory itself was not entirely accurate. Parry, Rafe, and her friends from Rho wing had joined them in their taunting. They had never done so but she had long grown used to Karen's mockery and it did not bring up nearly enough emotion any more to sufficiently hide behind. Rho Wing mocking her, however; the idea of that was keenly painful, and what she'd feared when she'd first opened up to Parry on who her father was.
Her adding to the memory like that was not at first intentional. She'd drawn up the first negative memory that came to her mind when they'd walked in before realizing it would not be enough.
Karfa, however, did not seem to realize that what he saw was only part memory, and part imaginative fear. He seemed pleased, pulling back before investigating any further, and she filed that away in the part of her mind that was continuously working behind her defenses.
As long as the emotion is strong, he can't tell the difference between what is imagination and what is truth.
That may come in very useful.
He began to taunt her again, describing in minute detail all that he had in store for her, how every instrument he was going to use on her would feel, what it was for. She barely heard him; his voice reduced to a type of white noise. As she had put all her energy into stretching across the room, she now put all her energy into conjuring up the most vivid and realistic 'memories' as she could. She was still shaking, a few thin tears damping her face along with the sweat. His assumption was that she was in mortal terror of what he was explaining, not realizing her reactions were simply those of the effort it took to forge a false wall in place of the doors she'd had no time to repair.
As she grew weaker, she forced herself to imagine worse things than just Rho mocking her. Her ego was not so fragile that even her best friends calling her names constituted the worst possible fear to her. Instead, she took the image of Parry once again, and made herself picture her death. No context, no cause, as Karfa believed Parry and the others had perished in an explosion on the ship transporting them to the Palace, but just images of Parry laying on the ground, covered in blood from some unseen wound. Her eyes were fixed, unfocused, empty. A drying smear of blood was on her face, a crimson pool that had formed beneath her no longer glossy but slowly drying to a rough and tacky maroon.
She was beyond any hope or thought of help. There was nothing Ray could do. She was cold, and gone, and dead.
Karfa had stopped speaking. Vaguely she felt his rough pads again, this time under her chin as he lifted her head. Caught up in forming and holding this torturous image her eyes must have seemed glazed and unfocused, and he had realized she was not listening to him.
She felt him again as he looked inside. Sharp and greasy panic shot up from her stomach and into her already painfully thundering chest. She was at the edge of her limits, if he pressed at all she would not be able to stop him. He would see everything, know everything. He would know that Parry and the others had escaped. He would know it was the Kilrathi resistance that had helped them. He'd know Zuhn had helped them, that Elie Kaan was still alive. He'd see that half flooded underground tunnel. Ray didn't know where it was but he would know, or know enough to be able to find it quickly. If he told Surc, the emperor might even torture the information out of Zuhn.
If Karfa pressed now, he'd know, and then they'd die. They'd die for real. The image she had of Parry, bloody and beyond help, would become, and just like in her forged vision, there would be nothing Ray could do.
Nothing.
Karfa began to press, and in a sheer spasm of panic, Ray leapt at him.
Her body twitched forward weakly in the chair, but that fundamental part of herself that only a short time before had stood on its own two legs across the room, surged forward and struck Karfa with a force that surprised even her.
The moment between her strike and Karfa hitting the floor, stunned, contained a suspended infinity. When she hit him, she'd felt his own mental doors not only break but fly inward and vanish. Behind them was a rush of static noise, so many thoughts, memories, judgements, sentiments, philosophies that it seemed she was tangled in a raging tornado of him. She recoiled from it so instantly that her retreat was almost simultaneous with her attack.
As she pulled back, he as well was reeling backward from the force of her strike, and the moment of time caught and hung there, and she saw…
Then she was back strapped in the chair, and Karfa was striking the ground with a sudden bark as the air escaped his lungs. Claws pricked her skin as Retov wrenched her head back, and on the floor Karfa managed a weak gasp, and began to stir.
Ray began to scream, a thin and hot sound that itself had claws, wounding her chest and her throat as it raced outward. Her hands curled and beat at the arms of the chair, the straps digging painfully into her wrists. The heel of her foot smacked down into the floor.
Ignoring her but making no move to release her, Retov 's eyes were on the other Kilrathi.
"Karfa! Are you…?"
But Karfa was waving a weak hand, grimacing as he slowly pushed himself up. His hand travelled to the back of his head and he winced, and then laughed. Ray's screams had reduced to whooping gasps, and her eyes fluttered as her thrashing stopped.
"Karfa?"
"I'm fine," he said, and waved away Retov's hand from Ray's throat. As he released her, Ray's head fell forward and her body slumped to join it, saved from spilling onto the floorby the straps holding her in place. Her gasps were ragged, broken by weak sounds that nonetheless made her shoulders shake.
"What happened?"
"Nothing but the last desperate act of a trapped animal," Karfa said with a pitying tsk to his voice. "She lashed out with the last effort she had. It was weak, but I will grudgingly admit she took me by surprise. It was just enough to throw me off balance and I hit my head on the ground."
The hard heel of his hand pressed against her forehead and he lifted her head. Those weak sounds grew a little louder and her whole body shook with the force of them. Karfa's voice sounded as if it came from another room.
"Damn," Karfa sighed. "She's gone."
"Gone?"
"The last hints of whatever sanity this Ape had left have gone. My fault, I was too eager. I should have given her a few more days of time to recover. Ehn."
He released her and she let her head flop forward again. She had no real strength or will to stop it. Her shoulders shook again, her voice rasping and burning.
"Should I put her on the table?" Retov asked.
"Not just now. Take her back to her room. I hit my head rather hard; I think I'll have Kerona make sure I don't have a concussion, take some pain medication. I want to be clear minded and able to focus before we carve into her. In her current state, I don't think she's going to even be half aware of what's happening to her, more's the pity. It's what I get for my impatience."
"Tomorrow then?"
"No, tonight should suffice. I should be ready by then." He rubbed the knot on the back of his head again and grimaced. "I think she may have knocked me out for a moment."
"Are you sure- "
"Yes, yes. Get her out of here. I'll see you back promptly at first watch." Karfa waved impatiently. Retov unstrapped Ray, then lifted her out of the chair.
As he began to carry her back to her cell Ray's mind dwelled on what Karfa had just said.
I knocked him out, she thought, shaking again as the sob once more began to rack her shoulders and burn her throat.
No. Not sobs.
Laughter.
I knocked him out.
I knocked him…OUT.
