I was distracted with my thoughts for a moment or two after leaving the office, but was brought back to what was going on around me when I noticed I was being taken away from the dormitory doors and up the corridor to the branching. When I’d first been led in it had been up the left-hand fork, but now I was taken past the guard post and to the right. Passing the curve brought to sight three unmarked doors, one to the left, two to the right, and it was into the first of the right-hand doors that I was taken. The room was small and pale yellow, with nothing in it but a padded table and a narrow cabinet against one wall, not enough to be called ominous or to cause unease. The woman in yellow closed the door behind the Sees and me, and the smile she wore finally forced me to consider the question of what they were going to do to me.
“Put her on the table,” the woman in yellow said as she walked to the cabinet, the anticipation in her voice so laced with a sense of justice, you might say, that I began to be aware of a flutter inside me. I hadn’t spent much time thinking about what they would do to me for refusing to cooperate, the refusal itself had seemed much too natural to generate thoughts like that. They were wrong and I was right, and what else was there to consider? I had thought it possible they might kill me, but now I could see they weren’t going to kill me.
The first thing the Secs did was take away my smock, and then I was forced face down onto the padded table. The material of the table was warm and comfortable rather than cold and hard, and my wrists and ankles were closed into soft, gentle bindings rather than unyielding metal. For some reason my heart was beating rather hard by that time, just as though I were being threatened with some barbaric torture, but that was ridiculous. Misguided or not, those were still people of a civilized culture, as far from naked, screaming savages as—
“Hold her thigh,” the woman in yellow directed, and as soon as two strong hands had complied I felt the stinging stab of a needle. Something was injected into me and then the woman went back to the cabinet, returning to the table a moment later with a bottle of clear liquid in one hand and a wad of cotton in the other. The smile she looked down at me with was just short of gleeful, and I discovered I was trying to pull my wrists free from where they were bound below the edges of the table.
“So you have the unmitigated gall to think you were right in what you did,” she said, a definite edge of fanaticism to her voice as she continued to smile that same smile. “You offended a man so far above you that you should have fainted in delight at his even noticing you, and you aren’t even sorry you did it. I think, dear, we now have to search for that sorrow, and when we find it you’re to tell me at once. If it’s deep enough and sincere enough it might get you something of a reprieve, but don’t expect the reprieve to come too quickly. Living with sorrow for a time brings a bad girl regret for having been bad, and you were a very bad girl indeed. You’ll tell me that, too, that you were a bad girl, and then you’ll tell me how sorry you are. Are you ready?”
I had the impression that her question was for me, but one of the Secs took it as a cue. She gathered my hair together and pulled it away from my back, and then the woman in yellow came too close to the table for me to see her where she stood. I heard the sound of a bottle being uncapped and then the slosh of liquid, and a moment later a wet line was being drawn across my back. The line went from left to right before it ended, I heard the slosh of liquid again, and then another wet line was being drawn. My heart had really begun hammering when the first of the liquid had touched me, but the second line was completed and a third started, and I still felt nothing but wet. No pain, nothing but the mildest of discomfort—I didn’t understand what they were doing.
I didn’t understand, that is, until I was completely covered with lines, and then those lines began to dry.
4
I was able to keep from screaming for a while, but the more the liquid dried, the more the pain intensified. It began by stinging just a little, like a faint and not very serious rope burn, but then the sting changed to a sharpened throb, and then to a flaming that felt as though it were eating into my flesh, and finally it began searing so deep that I thought I would be burned to nothing by it. When the pain first started I tried to free my hands to rub at it, to try to brush or rub the liquid off before it dried any more, but I couldn’t free myself no matter what I did. The bindings on my wrists kept me pressed flat against the table, my breasts crushed under me, my head able to raise up no more than a matter of inches. My ankles, too, were held gently but inflexibly, allowing my toes no latitude for digging in, no purchase of any sort. I wanted to get off that table and claw at myself, but it just. wouldn’t let me go!
“Am I mistaken, or did I just hear a whimper?” the woman in yellow asked in a faintly interested voice, moving a bit to her left so that I might see her. I had my right cheek pressed hard into the padding of the table as my mind fought to deny what was happening, and she looked down at me and smiled.
“You might be interested to know that no real damage is being done to you,” she said, her easy, conversational tone making me shiver. “Your nerve endings may not believe that, but it’s entirely true. You may feel as though the skin is being whipped off you in strips, but it isn’t really happening. Doesn’t that put your mind at ease’?”
Just then my mind was too busy clanging with shock, as more and more of the lines dried in turn. I couldn’t believe how high the pain was growing, how the entire back of me felt as though it were being set on fire. I tried to pull at the bindings again, then couldn’t keep from crying out, my own movement having made it all flame even higher. After that I fought to lie still, to breathe as shallowly as possible, to do nothing that would add to the rising agony, but then an unexpected cross-line flared and my body twitched and then I screamed and the scream made it worse and I wanted to convulse but the bindings wouldn’t let me and I screamed again and again and again and
After an endless time surrounded by burning red I must have fainted, but I think I was screaming again even before I completely woke up. It went on and on like that, agonizing consciousness occasionally slipping into black times of no real relief, determination forgotten, noble intentions forgotten, only a very small me left right in the center of it all. Finally, after ages of knowing nothing but intense agony, I awoke to find that the level of pain had fallen just a little, enough so that my raw throat could settle for mewling instead of screams. I think I was terrified, but there wasn’t enough sense of judgment left in me to be sure.
“You poor dear, you look exhausted,” a female voice said from somewhere to my left, and a hand touched my sweatsoaked hair. “I tried to give you enough time to search for that sorrow we were talking about, and you’ve apparently used every bit of it. Were you successful, or do you need just a little longer?”
“No, please, no,” I whispered, unable to open my eyes, helpless to stop trembling, the small bit of me left inside shuddering in terror. “I’m sorry I did that, please, I’m so sorry, I swear I’ll never do it again, I swear! Don’t bring the rest of the pain back, please don’t . . . ”