The next three years were the most beautiful goddamned torture anyone could go through.
I loved Amata—loved her in every way I could, every chance I could get. But I never told her, especially not when she'd start with those damn whistling sighs, talking about how it's just practice, right? I could never be to her what she was to me, and it turned my gut into acid every time she asked that fucking question.
It didn't stop me, though. Nothing could drive me from her, not even when she started to get funny on me, laying beside me on the mattress in our cramped little world that reeked of sex and booze and freedom, dragging the baggage from the vault into our sanctuary in the form of her father's hang ups.
"Maybe we should stop practicing," she suggested, all sweetness and light beside me as she sliced my heart out with a scalpel. "I don't really want to, but the guys aren't doing this...maybe, if we stop, then we'll like it better with them when we finally do it for real?"
She worried about it, and the more I tried to soothe her the more she pulled away. What other choice did I have? If she was scared this was turning into something more, something real, I had to prove to her it wasn't.
So I started screwing one of the security guards.
Officer Gomez. His first name was Herman, but I never called him that. Husband to Pepper, father to Freddie, he was the best choice available in the small pool of the vault. He knew the ins and outs of the cameras, knew where and when we could do it without being caught, and had a family to think about. There'd be no bragging, no rumours, no love notes or strings, and there sure as hell'd be no discussion of marriage and babies. Just furtive hidden moments in dark corners.
He barely put up a fight. He'd always looked a little longer, smiled a little brighter, stood a little closer. I managed to seduce him with the all the grace and charm of a mole rat, batting my eyes and shaking my pitiful tits at him until he finally took me on the armoury floor. It wasn't very comfortable, metal grating leaving hash marks all over my ass, and it didn't last very long before he finished, guilt and pleasure making his hands shake as he did up his uniform, but I didn't really mind.
I'd do anything for Amata.
The gamble worked. She looked at me like I was the boldest, bravest person in the world when I told her. I loved it when she did that—it made me feel important, necessary, wanted. In her eyes I mattered, and it sufficed for both of us.
She was the only thing in the vault that mattered to me. My life, as the Overseer willed it, would be following in my father's footsteps as the vault's doctor. I hated the idea, hated the studies, hated every moment I wasted on medicine. I didn't care and I didn't want to—my test results were pathetic, my attitude worse, and only the very real fear of being reassigned to shit shovelling duty kept me from completely failing.
Every morning I woke up sick to my stomach, so full of bile I'd cough up acid if I tried to drink anything. I'd spend the day staring at the green text of the console, trying to study something I loathed, barely able to concentrate and so goddamned angry at being forced to do this I wanted to scream. Then it would be supper alone, my father working late in the lab. If I was lucky, Officer Gomez would offer to take me for target practice. A stray shot broke the camera in the shooting range years ago, and he carried the only set of keys. Occasionally I'd even get a chance to squeeze off a few rounds between him squeezing off his own.
If I was really lucky Amata would come by, able to break free from her studies—being trained to work beside her father, surprise fucking surprise. We'd escape to our own little world where the Overseer couldn't touch us, where I could know what it was to be happy. It was never enough to make it all better, and each return to the vault ground my heart down one turn of the wheel more.
Sleep became a distant stranger, the nights passed in staring at the ceiling, wondering who was watching me on the cameras. Paranoia sprang up like a fungus planted in the fetid, dark shit of my life. So many secrets to juggle—Amata, Officer Gomez, my cozy cavern—they stacked on top of each other until my mind started to crack. I saw shadows in the corner of my eyes, felt the lenses of the cameras on me, like grubby hands tickling my neck, and barely ate enough to keep a child alive.
On the nights when nobody came by, I'd sneak out of my quarters and move through the vault like a shadow, watching the watchers. Conspiracies were everywhere, and I would root them out. I'd hide in lockers and watch the maintenance men put the passwords into the terminals, then log in when they left and read all the files. I'd spend hours kneeling beside a closet door, trying to pick the lock open, convinced I'd find a team assigned to track my every move rather than a broken vacuum and dust covered shelves.
I hacked everything with a screen, opened everything with a lock. Near the end I started working on devices to help me catch them. I could hear them whispering to each other as I lay in bed, tiny voices in the corners of my room, but never loud enough to make out their dark plots. I hid recorders in the furniture, then woke up the next morning to find nothing—which only proved to me they'd come when I finally fell asleep and replaced the evidence with blank tapes.
So I tried not to sleep, and I made my own recorders, complete with traps if anyone tried to tamper with them.
My behaviour didn't go unnoticed, but in the spectrum of insanity that was daily life in the vault I barely registered. Sure, I looked like a cadaver, eyes perpetually black with exhaustion, bones poking through everywhere, skin ghostly pale from shunning the sun lamps in favour of vitamin supplements—I was convinced the lights were programmed with coded messages, able to infiltrate your mind if you looked at them.
But I still danced like a good little puppet to the Overseer's tune, so why fix what isn't broken?
Snapping became my way of life. My mind snapped when I tried to think, my joints snapped when I walked, I snapped at everyone who had the misfortune of talking to me. I even snapped at Amata, driving her from our cavern one bleak evening with my crazy suspicions. I spent the rest of the night curled in a ball on our mattress, formulating a way to end it all with my BB gun.
Of all the problems I had, both real and imagined, it was the one I worried least about that blew up in my face. Officer Gomez, showing a depth of feeling I hadn't considered, wound up drunk, morose, and in a confessing sort of mood. Just my luck—my father happened to take that night off to join him as his drinking buddy.
He found me in my room, soldering one of my half-functioning recorders completely shut. "Seleste," he announced as he strode in, "I think it's finally time we had a talk."
"Susie Mack started it. She stole my bear." In my mind this made perfect sense—the first memory I had of my father was him telling me we'd discuss the incident of my hitting Susie later. I was only four at the time, but I'd been waiting for that discussion ever since.
"What? No. Sweetie, come here." He sat on my bed, patting the mattress for me to join him. I did as he asked, but I hated it—we sat with our backs to the window, and though I'd covered it in a jigsaw of scrap metal, camouflaged with cloth salvaged from old jumpsuits to throw them off the scent, it made my neck prickle to know they could be behind me right now, somehow watching us both through layers of hammered steel and worn denim.
He spoke, saying a lot without really saying anything at all. His words deflected off my brittle cocoon of madness, bouncing into the dark corners where they liked to whisper. I spent the whole time wondering what they'd do with them, what odd weapons they'd build out of my father's sentences, and how they'd then twist them against me.
I don't recall much of what he said. Mostly the general platitudes he always threw at me, the lines that kept my bothersome troubles and worries at bay, leaving him free to think about more interesting things. My mother loved me very much, I was a good person inside, how proud he was of me—proud for screwing one of his best friends? No, proud of my studies, the ones I couldn't bear to think about without feeling my stomach clench in a spasm of acid-laced pain.
What could he do to help me? I wanted his fucking attention for a change. I wanted him to feel something for me, even if it was anger or disgust. Anything other than these absent pats on the head and empty praise. I'd take yelling, screaming, cursing—hell, I'd be happy if he hit me, because it'd mean he cared enough to belt me one for being so stupid.
He asked, and I answered.
The rubber bands holding me together finally snapped one time too many. I jumped off the bed, pressed my back against the wall, and started screaming. Spittle flew from my mouth as I railed against the Overseer, my studies, the confines of the vault, before my mind completely jumped track and I started shouting about them.
My father tried to get me to calm down, to sit on the bed and be quiet, but I slapped his hands away in a frenzy. I shook, vibrating like a machine with a broken cog, screaming nonsense at him until a pinprick in my arm stole my legs from under me.
A small shot of med-x, just enough to tranquilize me. In a cotton soft haze he maneuvered me onto the bed. I heard my father promising me he'd talk to the Overseer and see what he could do about my work assignment. Then I caught the faint click of the intercom, his assistant Jonas calling for him, exclaiming something about signs of success in the latest batch.
Before I dipped completely under, my father left me with one final promise. "We'll talk more about this later..."
When I woke up the next morning, nothing had really changed. My father wasn't home, already at work in his lab. The console with its green textual torture awaited my attention. Only Officer Gomez acted different—he'd leave a room as soon as I entered.
One other thing had changed, a very tiny little thing, but one that made a giant impact on my life. I learned through my father's action there was something I could do to make the pain go away, if only for a little while.
Drugs.