Chapter One

It was hot, the air was dry. Ayaan could hear a constant thrumming, a rumbling, bass sound that tickled the bare soles of her feet. Her feet... her feet hurt. She could feel pain in her ankles, her legs, her toes. When she looked down at them they seemed too big, they seemed to swim up at her, swollen and very dark and bruised. Blisters surrounded her toenails, blisters that popped and wept a clear fluid.

Her arms... her armpits were numb, she couldn’t feel them at all. Her arms were replaced with twin bars of searing light. It was the only way to describe it. There were no arms there, just pain, and only an abstract kind of pain at that.

In the unmoving air of the engine compartment they kept her metabolism ticking over slowly, so very slowly. When a doctor came and asked her to lift her head, it took all the energy she possessed. She wanted very much to sit down.

“Come now, come, that’s better. Open this mouth.”

She let her jaw go slack. There were needles in her, needles she felt sliding through her flesh, impaling her. Hands touched her in places she could barely identify. Her body had become a vast country with a poor communications infrastructure. Information from her extremities took most of the day to reach her brain.

“Blood oxygen levels good, yes.”

The green phantom kept her alive, but just barely, while men came and went from the room, their hands on her, their eyes everywhere. They attached wires to her, they scraped samples of the scum between her teeth.

“Basal body temperature is being normal.”

Sometimes she could see them moving around her, their faces flat, their hands cold. Sometimes they were only blurs or the flickering of a moth’s wings against her skin.

“You be interested to seeing this,” someone said, their hand on her lower belly, a latex glove in her pubic hair. She felt half a dozen people all around her look up, she could feel them paying attention. She could see Cicatrix across the room, the living woman in soft focus as her nostrils flared, her eyes fixed on Ayaan’s midriff. Her bald head flushed with shame. Something metal and cold touched her, spread her skin open.

“She’s still virgin,” the doctor said.

Ayaan kicked against her bonds but it was useless, her body barely rippled. It must have looked like a muscle spasm. Then time went blue...

...she wasn’t sure, wasn’t sure what that meant, but she knew it was right, blue...

...and needles, there were needles on her skin. Pricking her. She felt a single drop of blood roll down her collarbone, smash apart against the papery collar of her paper gown. She looked down and watched the blood wick through the blue fabric, a spiky blossom as capillary action drew it away from her skin.

“You need to lift head,” someone told her. She listened—it felt like she could only use one sense at a time. Something buzzing, an insect, a horrible nasty wasp right next to her ear, climbing on her throat, dragging its sting through her flesh.

“I can’t... I can’t do this, not with head like this,” the voice said. She couldn’t see who it belonged to.

In front of her the Tsarevich faded into existence. Like a cloud passing in front of the sun. His very pale eyes looked up into hers. His voice... she’d never heard it before... it fit him perfectly. High, clear, a boy’s voice. The voice of a soloist in a boy’s choir. “Is called strappado, some time ago. Now, we call it stress positions. KGB make it perfect. Is very effective.”

“Hand me silver again,” the other voice said. Right behind her head. The wasp stuck its tail into the back of her neck.

“We tie hands, then tie to ceiling. You cannot sit down without tearing arms from sockets. Body won’t let you do that, even when unconscious. You have not sit down three days. Your arms are dying, no blood. All blood goes to feet, which swell, then crack. Used at Guantanamo Bay, and at Kabul. In Belfast and Mosul and Jerusalem. Roman Catholic church invent it for Inquisition, because no blood shed. But KGB make it perfect.”

Ayaan tried to lick her lips but her mouth stuck together as if it were full of glue. Concentrating, squinting her eyes she managed to get a drop of spit onto her soft palate. Our kicks are never so simple, Cicatrix had told her. “Torture,” she creaked. “Do you,” she said, and waited until she had more saliva to loosen her tongue, “come when you see me like this? Does it make you come?”

The Tsarevich smiled at her. The kind of smile a grandmother would keep on living for. “Is not for me, is for you. Such talent you have. Such talent I never waste. I have use for you, even now. Is sad, must hurt so much, is very sad, but also, is necessary. Must break down ignorance and fear. You see?”

You mean, she thought, lacking the energy to keep talking, you mean you have to wear down my psychological barriers. Ayaan knew exactly what they were doing to her. Even in her reduced state she could still think, if slowly. They were torturing her in preparation for brainwashing. No matter how much resistance she put up, they would just push her farther. No matter how long it took, they could wait for her to come around.

“Fuck, get mop! She wets self,” the rough voice said.

The Tsarevich frowned. “Kidneys shut down after three days. Is permanent, if you don’t sit down.” He took a handkerchief out of the sleeve of his armor and mopped at the front of her pants.

“What,” Ayaan stammered, “what do you really look like?”

His eyes sparkled. “You find out, and soon,” he told her. “Very soon now. You come stand at my side.” He put a hand over his mouth, catching himself in a faux pas. “I mean to say, sit, at my side, yes?”

The smile lit up his face and the cloud moved away from the sun.

Stay alive, she thought. Stay alive for Sarah. She needs you.

“You will to be mine,” he told her, patting her feet.

She knew better than to antagonize him. It would only get her another day on the strap. Still. She was still Ayaan, at least for the time being. “That’s what the Least said,” she told the Tsarevich. “And look at him now.”