Reaping What Grows

Vivi's head spins and she closes her eyes. When she opens them again, she's looking at the doctor.

"Your medicine sucks," she says.

 

“Your opinion will be noted,” Katters says, tone flat.

The guard escorts the girl out of the cell by her arm, Katters trailing behind them. They turn opposite the direction Katters usually goes, and pass by a dozen or more identical cells. Some of them are empty — many of them are occupied.

There’s a door, and a second guard, at the end of the hall. He checks everyone’s credentials before letting them through.

 

Vivi tries to take in everything and memorize it all, turning her head to try to catch glimpses of the other prisoners, to try and see the other end of the hall. Then the door shuts behind her and she looks forward again.

 

There’s another hall on the other side of the door. This one isn’t lined with glass cells, but with rooms hidden behind drab, grey doors, each with a number and a letter stencilled on them at eye height.

The guard drags the girl to door 1-E and waits for Katters to unlock it with her ID. Inside is a white room lined with cool grey cabinets and counters. There’s a chair in the middle of everything, high backed, with levers and straps and a lamp jutting out of it at all angles.

 

Vivi's eyes go wide and she starts trying to pull away from the guard. "No! No!"

The guard pushes her onto the chair and starts strapping her in. Vivi manages to kick her in the stomach and she doubles over, but Vivi's arms are already restrained and she can't get them free. The guard quickly recovers and finishes the job.

Panic fills Vivi's head and she shouts. "Help! Please! Help!"

She knows that no one will come. She knows she's alone.

 

The guard parks herself by the door, arms crossed, while Katters busies herself with prep. They both ignore the girl.

“You know,” the guard says, “I used to watch over hard drives.”

Katters washes her hands.

“Important stuff on ‘em,” the guard continues. “Lots of people trying to steal ‘em, all the time. It was a real pain in the ass.”

Katters dries her hands, looking over an assortment of tools laid out on the counter.

“Still less of a pain than this shit — the hard drives never fuckin’ fought back.”

“I really don’t care,” Katters says.

“Well, screw me for talking, I guess.”

Katters looks up. “Listen,” she says, “I don’t suppose I could persuade you to go take your smoke break, or something? Thirty-Fifty-Nine’s all strapped in, it can’t do anything.”

“You sure can, though,” the guard says.

Katters scowls, glaring daggers at the guard before turning the look on the girl. “You know, I don’t think you actually need a tongue, and I’m damn sure you can survive without it.”

 

Vivi is still shouting for help, but her voice is growing hoarse already and she forces her mouth shut. Of course the doctor wants revenge for the nose, and the spitting. Vivi feels a new gratefulness for the guard's presence. But the doctor could do a lot of damage before the guard could stop her.

"Please," she whispers without meaning to. "You'd be scared too."

 

“Might have the presence of mind to avoid pissing off my captors.” Katters sneers.

She checks the straps around the girl’s arm — the one that got the “medicine” — making sure it’s immobile. She swabs it, giving it the same attention she gave the girl’s back an eternity ago.

 

"Trapped. Hurt. Alone. Scared." Tears are welling up in her eyes. "You people are never going to let me go, are you? You'll never let me see the sun again. I wasn't hurting anyone. I didn't do anything wrong."

She looks at the doctor again. "It could have been you, and you'd have done the same."

 

“Maybe if you cooperated you wouldn’t be hurt,” Katters says. “Maybe if you cooperated, you wouldn’t be alone. Maybe if you cooperated, you wouldn’t be scared.”

Half-truths. Designed to hurt, rather than help — words barbed with ‘it’s your fault, too’.

But she can’t bring herself to promise they’ll let the girl go, nor to hint that it’s a possibility.

She stocks a rolling table with her tools and wheels both it and a second chair over to the girl. She sits, adjusts her chair’s height so she’s almost face to face with the girl’s tricep.

It could have been you.
You’d have done the same.

“Probably,” Katters admits. “But it wasn’t, and I didn’t.”

 

"Cooperate with the people keeping me prisoner and sticking needles in me." Vivi tries to stay calm, but her breathing is speeding up. "The people who kidnapped me. I didn't hurt anyone. I was stolen, and I got away, and they stole me again. I just wanted to be free. I was just a kid, I had a family, and then all of it was gone -" The tears are streaming down her face now, and she's struggling against the straps. "It didn't have to be me, it could have been anyone passing that way, and I fought like hell for years and years to get out, and be a person again, not what I was made into, but you assholes stole me again because of it, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you -"

 

Christ. “Okay, seriously,” Katters says, “I can and will take your tongue if you don’t knock it off.”

She doesn’t really expect that to work — but she does know of a way to switch the girl from this whining she’s doing to something a little less grating.

Scalpel in hand, she cuts into the girl’s arm, incision long and deep.

 

Vivi's face twists and she cries out. "Fuck you! Fuck you!"

 

That’s. Well, it is better. Barely. Maybe we can lose a little more coherency if we—

The scalpel cuts down to the bone, into the bone, etching a line into the girl’s humerus.

When Katters puts the scalpel down, she’s made a cut about five inches long, almost the entire length of the girl’s upper arm. Blood pours out of the wound, pooling in the straps and dripping onto the chair’s arm, onto the seat, onto the floor.

 

Vivi screams as the doctor cuts deeper. The straps cut into her skin as she strains against them.

When the doctor stops cutting, she goes limp. Her cheeks are soaked with tears and her lip shakes as she tries to steady her breathing.

 

Katters spreads the girl’s arm open, holding the cut wide between thumb and forefinger until she can insert a retractor. The slim piece of metal snaps open, hooking into the flesh at the widest point of the wound, anchoring itself into place.

She clamps the largest of the blood vessels. The bleeding does not stop, but there is considerably less of it.

“Incision at,” she says, pitching her voice across the room, “7:58 AM. Into the brachium.”

 

Vivi screams again, and again. There's so much blood, and oh god that's bone, and now there's metal stuck in her arm, and

She can't stop trying to get free, no matter how much it hurts. She has to keep trying. She has to fight. She has to get away.

 

The chair holds the girl still, straps wrapped around her like vines, rooting her in place. This is what the chair was made for, and it is well made.

“Opening thirteen centimetres by eight centimetres,” Katters continues, raising her voice, not so much above the girl’s screaming as around it, looking away from her and toward the far end of the room. “Humerus visible.”

The wound is a blossom of deep, dark carmine and vibrant streaks of scarlet. Even the bone at the centre is stained red.

“Subject is dehydrated,” Katters says. “Note to self: Put in request to increase water allowance.”

The exposed muscles twitch with the girl’s struggles. Blood tries to fill the wound, but trickles out, following the same path the rest of it has taken.

 

Vivi's screams are interspersed with quick, panicked breaths. Her fingers twitch and reach for something to grab onto, but there's nothing.

 

Katters takes a metal probe and pokes at the girl’s muscles, hooking it under veins and pulling them up for a closer look, pressing the narrower ends of the injury wider, pushing the meat away from the bone.

“Everything looks,” she says, and sighs. “Normal.”

She puts the probe down and removes the retractor.