Chapter 12
The initial assault on her brain had been difficult for Emma to drive back. She was weak with hunger and the smell of food in the air struggled for her concentration. Psionics probed her brain at all levels seeking information. Emma had to be in a dozen places at once, balancing her defenses, hiding information by writing fake pathways in her memory to confuse her attackers. Her subdermal governor prevented her from launching any offensive action against the Links who were crawling through her skull, but she did have ways of getting at them.
A telepath reached for Emma's surface thoughts. He tried to manipulate her by asking questions into her mind about the information being sought.
Where is your Mutant X Sanctuary?
Instead of Stormking Mountain, Emma thought, What is Marlowe's hidden agenda?
Who has access to the New Mutant database? He asked her.
Is it right to torture your own kind at the behest of megalomaniac who Gabriel Ashlocke never named as successor?
Every thought Emma had was meant to question and instill doubt in her attacker. She never let the real answers to his inquiries rise to the surface.
A female telempath sought images tied to feelings of safety and family, hoping these would lead to images of Sanctuary and what Emma would see when she returned to this place. Emma, however, steered her in a different direction. She thought of horrible things. She remembered waking up Christmas morning to the death of her first cat. She thought about her parents who were no parents to her at all and the empty hole that left in her heart. Emma remembered every disappointment and humiliation as well as all the terrible things she had seen since joining Mutant X. She knew as a telempath what such images could do to the Link who was reading her.
Charles Marlowe walked into the room, smiling. He seemed to thrive on Emma's suffering, which disgusted one of the Links who was in the room. She fired a psionic blast and knocked Marlowe out and then came up to Emma and pulled her from her chair.
"I can't take this anymore," she said. "I want to take you from this place."
Emma shook her head. She was still sitting in her chair. Marlowe had not been in the room and none of her attackers had turned on their leader. It was merely an illusion. For hours she was subjected to seeing her friends tortured, her eyes gouged out and guns put to her head. There was no way to get back at this kind of psionic power, but Emma knew they would likely hold her until she broke. They wouldn't kill her. Anything beyond what she knew to be in this room must be an illusion. Even if they were to torture the real Shalimar in front of her, there would be no way to distinguish it from the illusion, while she was wearing a subdermal governor, making such a tactic ineffective. She could not and would not trust anything outside of her own brain.
The attacks largely targeted Emma's frontal lobes and cerebral cortex, trying to get her to think about the information they desired. With unlimited time the Strand mutants were also able to probe parts of her brain not easily accessible even to Emma herself. She felt a prod into her cerebellum. Emma had flown into Sanctuary so many times, that she did it without thought, which meant this area might hold its location. Manipulating this part of the hindbrain was difficult, but she was able to locate the information and obfuscate the instructions. She would have to learn to fly home by the coordinates again, but it was a small price to pay for security.
Even the parietal and occipital lobes were targets. Since these were the parts of her brain that integrated sight, sound, taste, and touch with memory, it might be possible to piece together enough information to zero in on a location based on her impressions of it. Emma tried to stay a few steps ahead of these psionics, creating confusing associations. Unless she restored the pathways later, Sanctuary would always conjure up images of hiking in Finland, the sounds of a traffic jam, the feel of ice and the taste of chocolate brownies. Let them try to do something with that, she thought to herself.
From deep inside of her, Emma felt an anger welling up. The fury peaked and turned into incredible sadness. Tears rushed from her eyes. They were attacking her hypothalamus, sending her on an emotional roller coaster to distract and weaken her, though it clearly had an effect on the telempath as well. She withdrew, unable to deal with Emma's emotions. Her attackers were expending more energy than she was protecting herself, which gave her faith she could hold out mentally as long as she held out physically.
In defending her mind, Emma's major trenches were set up around her hippocampus. If they accessed this part of her brain, they would be given a roadmap to every memory she had and so, at any approach, she reached out, projecting her power and triggering the subdermal governor. The shock it sent through her body and mind kicked out all of her invaders. Unfortunately, it had an extremely debilitating effect on Emma as well and she only used the tactic when she had no other option to protect herself. Afterward, they would come at her again, but she had time to arrange her defenses anew.
A full day went by and then another. Emma was only allowed a sparse amount of water and was not allowed to sleep. It was only a matter of time before she started making mistakes: the image of the flight controls heading into Sanctuary one day; Adam talking about his childhood and how it inspired him in choosing a location for his base of operations; simple things like looking out the window of the Helix and seeing landmarks such as buildings and lakes; walking out of their hideout for some fresh air and natural sunlight. All of these snippets of information were recorded.
After an interminable time, Charles Marlowe entered the interrogation room and walked around to one side of the center table. Suddenly all of the noise in Emma's mind stopped and she was alone in her skull. "I understand you have something for me, Michael," he said to one of the Psionics in the room. Apparently he was the leader of the probing, but all of the faces of the Links who had been attacking her blended together and Emma could not differentiate between them anymore.
"We have a location, Mr. Marlowe," he said.
"She doesn't look broken." Marlowe was skeptical. "She's staring right at me." Emma would have killed him that instant if she were free and if he could be killed.
"We haven't yet broken her. Her defenses are still up, but they've weakened. We've acquired some information and by cross checking the pieces against one another, we have zeroed in on a specific location. It appears that their Sanctuary is dug into solid rock." He handed Marlowe the satellite photographs they had obtained of the location.
"Does this look familiar to you," Marlowe said, throwing down the photographs on the table in front of Emma. Her shoulders noticeably slumped and he thought he saw some of the fire go out of her blue eyes. He considered a moment and then said, "Take her to the infirmary. If it's the wrong location, we can always start this up again."
Adam was shocked when he saw Emma escorted into the infirmary. He had received advance word in the lab that she would be coming down there. Although her appearance filled him with guilt that this was his fault, she did not appear to be permanently harmed in any obvious way. He rushed to her side, though quick movement still made his bandaged head ache. "Emma."
"I'm sorry, Adam," was the first thing she said. "They know where Sanctuary is." She was nearly in tears. Adam helped her up onto a hospital bed and immediately started an intravenous feeding tube.
"No one else could have held out this long," he said to comfort her. Adam ran a scan of her blood and found that she was on the brink of ketoacidosis.
"A lot of good it did," she said, her voice very weak. "I should have just told them everything the first day."
"Maybe, but you didn't know that then. The rest of us failed to come to your rescue." Adam wasn't sure if Emma had heard his answer, as she was fast asleep.
