The Torturer's Daughter

by Zoe Cannon

  Even now that she was here, now that it had really happened, it didn’t feel possible. She kept waiting to wake up, to come back to reality.

  She didn’t wake up.

  And still nobody came.

  She paced back and forth and heard the camera hum as it swiveled to follow her; she sat on the bed and watched the stain on the floor grow. She slept a little, and drifted in and out of nightmares indistinguishable from her reality. When she woke up, it took her a moment to realize this wasn’t just another dream.

  Her stomach was growling. She felt weak with thirst. She waited for food and water—they had to give her something eventually, they couldn’t just let her die in here—but it didn’t come.

  Nobody came.

  She had run out of tears. Her eyes felt like they had been rubbed with sandpaper. Her throat burned with thirst; her tongue kept sticking to the roof of her mouth. Every part of her body ached—whether from sleeping on the hard mattress or from the constant trembling, she didn’t know.

  She lay down again. Maybe this time, if she managed to fall asleep, she wouldn’t dream. Maybe for a while she could turn her mind off and forget where she was.

  * * *

  Becca drifted from one half-dream to another. The lights blazed through her eyelids into her brain. She got up, paced the room, lay down again, sat and stared at nothing, until she wasn’t sure whether she was awake or asleep.

  Her mother came. She called Becca a dissident, and Becca couldn’t speak. She took a gun from her belt and aimed it at Becca, and Becca couldn’t move. Her eyes were cold as she pulled the trigger. Becca woke wiping away tears that weren’t there. She had no water left for tears.

  Her stomach was twisted in on itself, trying to devour itself. She felt shriveled. Empty. Her tongue was swollen in her parched mouth.

  The door opened.

  Becca jerked up from the bed as a man ducked through the doorway. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. He hadn’t disappeared. And he seemed brighter than the vision of her mom. More solid.

  She recognized him. He was the one she and her mom had talked to the other day.

  The one who had killed Anna.

  She fought back her initial fear and revulsion. She had seen the way he had looked at her mom, how eager he had been to help her. If her mom couldn’t come herself, maybe she had sent him to get her out.

  She got to her feet, then steadied herself against the wall as her legs threatened to give out under her. “Did my mom send you?” The words scratched against her throat like tiny nails.

  A flicker of emotion crossed his face, too fast for her to read. “I need you to come with me.”

  Her mom had to have sent him. He just couldn’t say it here, because… because of the camera. Or because her mom wanted to keep her scared for a little while longer, to teach her a lesson.

  His face was expressionless.

  His height no longer made him look awkward; he loomed over her as he took a step closer. He held out a pair of handcuffs. “You’ll have to be secured.”

  Maybe her mom had arranged this whole thing. Maybe she thought watching Anna die wasn’t enough to keep Becca from turning into a dissident. Her screams as the Enforcers had led Becca out the door… all part of the act.

  Wordlessly, Eli pulled Becca’s arms behind her back and fastened the handcuffs around her wrists. She let him. It would only be for a few minutes, only until he brought her to her mom.

  He took hold of her arm the way the Enforcers had.

  “I’m sorry it has to happen this way,” he said softly as he led her out the door.

  * * *

  Becca expected another room like her cell, like the room where Eli had shot Anna. Or maybe something bigger, with a single chair in the center and torture implements laid out in neat rows along a metal table.

  She didn’t expect anything like what she saw when he opened the door and motioned her inside.

  Unlike everything else she had seen on the underground levels, this room didn’t have even a hint of gray. The walls, though still noticeably rough concrete, had been painted a warm tan. The carpet was the soothing blue of the ocean, the color of Becca’s bedroom walls at home. A wooden desk, big enough that Becca wasn’t sure how it could have made it through the door, took up most of the space in the small room, and a chair made from the same dark wood sat to either side.

  A camera, identical to the one in her cell, watched her from the corner.

  Becca stepped into the room. Eli unlocked the handcuffs and gestured to the chair nearest her. “Sit down.”

  She almost fell crossing the short distance to the chair. Eli made his way around the desk and folded himself into the chair opposite her.

  There was a glass of water on the desk, next to a small stack of papers. Once Becca spotted it, she couldn’t see anything else. She imagined reaching across the desk and grabbing it, feeling the cold on her tongue as she poured the liquid down her throat. Her hand twitched.

  Eli pushed the glass across the desk. “Have as much as you want.”

  Her hand felt weak and trembly as she closed her fingers around the glass. She gingerly brought it to her lips, afraid she would drop it. She took a small sip first, then gulped faster until the glass was empty. The coolness of the water spread from her stomach out through the rest of her body. Not enough. But she felt a little better.

  She glanced at the closed door. Any minute now, and her mom would walk in, ready to take her home. Any minute now…

  The door stayed closed.

  Her mom wasn’t coming.

  Why had she even bothered trying to fool herself? If her mom had been able to save her, she would have stopped Enforcement from taking her in the first place. If anyone cared whose daughter she was, they would have released her by now.

  Her breaths grew ragged as the truth closed in on her. There would be no rescue. They would get whatever confession they needed from her, and then they would kill her just like Anna.

  “You have to let me go,” she told Eli anyway. She tried to sound unafraid, but her voice, weak and rough from crying, broke on the first word. “Before my mom finds out I’m here.” Her words echoed with the hollowness of her threat. Her mom already knew she was here.

  “I wish you didn’t have to be here.” His regret sounded genuine. Not that that meant anything. “Raleigh Dalcourt is my role model. I respect her more than anyone else I’ve ever met.” He paused for a moment, straightening the papers on the desk. “But as much as she matters to me, our purpose here matters more. Nothing can get in the way of that purpose. She taught me that.”

  “I haven’t done anything.” Why had she bothered to say it? She knew it didn’t matter what she had or hadn’t done.

  “I want this to be over just as much as you do. I want to get you back home with your mother where you belong.” Eli rested his arms on the desk and leaned toward her. “We can do that. Nothing you’ve done is that serious. It’s obvious you’re not a threat to society.”

  Becca tensed, wanting so badly to believe him, waiting for the catch.

  “All you have to do,” he said, “is tell us where to find your friend Jake.”

  Jake. Of course. That was why they had brought her here. Somehow they had found out about her warning.

  Jake, hiding with his dad in the playhouse. Had he started wondering yet why she hadn’t come to bring him more food?

  What would happen to him if she never got out of here?

  Eli had said she could go home.

  All she had to do was give him Jake. Trade Jake’s life, and his dad’s, for hers.

  Maybe he was lying. She knew all about Internal’s lies. She wanted to believe he was lying; that was easier than wondering whose life was worth more.

  Eli flipped through the papers on his desk until he found what he was looking for. “We know you’ve been helping him hide from Enforcement. We heard your phone call warning him.”

  She should have expected it. Should have known better than to
think she could do something like this—helping a dissident evade Internal, dissident activity by any definition—without ending up right where she was now.

  Becca didn’t say anything. Was there any point in trying to pretend she hadn’t helped Jake? And yet she couldn’t bring herself to say she had done it, couldn’t admit to dissident activity in this of all places.

  “Did Jake approach you first,” Eli asked, “or was it one of the teachers?”

  Becca blinked. “What?”

  “Who was it that recruited you? Was it Jake, or the teacher who told you to warn him and find him a place to hide?”

  The teacher thing, Internal’s invented conspiracy. He wanted to weave her into it. Make her useful. Just like her mom had said.

  “There isn’t—” She almost told him there had never been any conspiracy, almost admitted she knew what Internal had been doing. She stopped herself just in time. If they knew her mom had betrayed Internal’s secrets by telling her…

  So what if they knew? Her mom hadn’t gotten her out of here. Why should Becca protect her?

  But she didn’t finish her sentence.

  She started over. “He didn’t recruit me into anything. Nobody did.”

  “Please, Becca. I just want to get you out of this place. You know what will happen to you if you stay here.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You don’t have to worry about how it will reflect on you. With a mother like yours, I know you would never have ended up in a position like this if there weren’t some very persuasive people behind it. I understand. Just tell me what Jake and the others have been telling you, and who told you to protect him.”

  “You said all I had to do was tell you where Jake was.” Not that it mattered; she wouldn’t have told him anyway. She wouldn’t have traded Jake’s life and his dad’s for hers. Right?

  Right?

  “That would be a good start,” he said. “But finding one dissident isn’t going to help us very much, especially since he’s probably an innocent victim like you. We need to find the people responsible for dragging kids like you into this. Maybe it wasn’t even anybody at your school. Maybe this has reached further than we suspected.”

  He wouldn’t let her go. No matter what she told him, no matter who she accused. He would add it to their collection of false confessions and use it to condemn more innocent people. Public Relations would take advantage of the fact that she was Raleigh Dalcourt’s daughter to prove that the dissidents could corrupt anyone. And she would die in the room where Anna had died, or on TV for everyone in the country to watch.

  He wouldn’t let her go. It was a lie.

  Wasn’t it?

  Eli sighed. “This is silly, Becca. Why are you protecting these people, after what they’ve gotten you into? Why are you protecting Jake, when he’s the reason you’re here in the first place?”

  How did she know it was a lie? Her mom had even told her Internal let people go sometimes if they weren’t a threat to society. Eli had said she wasn’t a threat. Maybe she didn’t have to end up like Anna. Maybe she could walk out of this place and forget any of this had ever happened.

  She could say Jake’s dad had gotten her involved in whatever this was supposed to be. Eli had said it didn’t have to be a teacher, after all. That way she wouldn’t have to condemn anybody else—Jake’s dad would end up here anyway if she told Eli where Jake was.

  No. What was she thinking? How could she even consider killing them for the sake of her own possible freedom? The cost was too high.

  Anna wouldn’t have been here, wouldn’t have died here, if not for Becca’s lie. Nobody else would die because of her.

  “All I did was call him,” she answered. “I don’t know where he went. And nobody recruited me into anything.”

  So easy, too easy, to say the words that determined the way her life would end.

  She couldn’t tell whether the sadness in his eyes was real or as much of a lie as everything he had said about the conspiracy. “In that case, I guess I don’t have a choice.”

  She had thought she would start crying again. She didn’t. She sat perfectly still, trying not to imagine what was coming.

  Eli walked over to her. “Give me your hands.”

  She held her arms out to him; he refastened the handcuffs. He guided her out of the chair and toward the door, one slow step at a time.

  As he reached for the door, it flew open.

  Becca’s mom stood in the doorway.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Becca’s mom blocked the door, wild-eyed, hair spilling out of her untidy braid. “I’m here to take my daughter home.”

  Becca pulled away from Eli and rushed into her mom’s arms. It didn’t matter what her mom had done, or how she had lied. All that mattered was that she was here, and she was going to get Becca out of this place. She was going to save Becca’s life.

  Her mom wrapped her arms around her, a noise like a sob escaping her throat. Becca would have clutched her mom just as hard if not for the handcuffs. Tears of relief prickled at the corners of her eyes.

  Her mom smelled like day-old sweat. Becca didn’t care.

  “I can’t let her go,” said Eli from behind her. “I’m sorry, Raleigh.”

  “I talked to the directors.” Becca felt the heat of her mom’s breath against her hair as she spoke. “It took me two days, but I got them to agree. She’s free to go.” She let go of Becca with one arm to pull something out of her bag. “The forms are right here.”

  Two days? Had Becca really been here that long? How long had she waited in that cell?

  “You need to think about this, Raleigh. What will happen to you if you let a dissident go free? It could mean the end of your career, or worse. You’d probably be investigated.”

  Her mom’s voice turned glacial; even though it wasn’t directed at her, Becca shivered. “What are you accusing me of?”

  “I know you’re not a dissident,” he said hastily. “I understand. You just want to keep your daughter safe. But you have to think about how it will look.”

  Her mom’s voice didn’t warm up. “My daughter is not a dissident.”

  “There’s evidence against her,” Eli persisted.

  Her mom’s arms tightened around her. “I’ve seen your evidence. I think it’s ridiculous, and the directors agree.”

  Eli made a disapproving noise. “If you’re sure you want to do this, and you’ve convinced the directors to go along with it, there’s nothing I can do to stop you. But you still have a chance to change your mind. If you think it through—”

  Her mom cut him off. “I’m not leaving this room without her.” Her tone made the way Jake had threatened Laine sound like the mewling of a kitten by comparison.

  Eli sighed. “Like I said, I can’t stop you.”

  Her mom released her slowly, like she had to pry her own arms away. Eli fiddled with Becca’s handcuffs until they slid off her wrists. She rubbed her wrists and swayed on her feet. The world wobbled around her.

  Her mom put an arm around her shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”

  * * *

  Leaving 117 felt like being reborn.

  As her mom guided her out the door and across the parking lot, the sun shone down on her as brightly as it had yesterday—no, two days ago—when the Enforcers had brought her here. She could almost believe that no time had gone by at all, that her time on the underground levels had been nothing more than a bad dream.

  The world jolted; Becca stumbled over nothing. The rows of cars in front of her blurred.

  Her mom dug through her bag and pulled out a water bottle. She handed it to Becca. “Drink this.”

  Becca unscrewed the cap on her second try. She greedily gulped down half the bottle, then choked as the liquid turned out to be thick and syrupy-sweet. Her stomach growled, caught between nausea and renewed hunger. Hunger won; she drained the bottle as she climbed into the car.

  It took her mom two tries to turn the key in the ignition w
ith her shaking fingers. “Tell me they were wrong about you,” she said in a voice on the edge of tears, a voice Becca had never heard from her before. “Tell me you didn’t help that dissident hide.”

  Becca stared out the window at Processing 117 as the car began to move. It looked the same as it always had. Everything looked the same.

  I almost died in there.

  She couldn’t stop shivering. She wrapped her arms around herself, even though she wasn’t cold. Why couldn’t she stop shivering? She was safe now.

  “Please.” Her mom weaved out of the parking lot, and jerked the steering wheel to the left seconds before she would have slammed into a parked car. “Tell me you didn’t do it.”

  Out of the parking lot. Away from 117. Becca rested her head against the car window and closed her eyes, overcome by a wave of dizziness. She stammered out a denial through her chattering teeth. “I… I d-didn’t do anything. I didn’t even know Internal was… was after him.” Her mom would see through her; her mom always saw through her. Would she turn around and give Becca back to Eli when she realized Becca was guilty after all?

  “You called him the morning Enforcement came for him. When they got to his house, he was gone.”

  Becca opened her eyes, then quickly closed them again. The world was going by too fast. “I c-called him to hang out. That’s… that’s all.” It didn’t matter what she said. Her mom would figure out the truth, and then she would bring Becca back to that cell…

  “So you don’t know where he is.” The car swerved sharply to the side. Becca opened her eyes in time to see them swing back into the right lane, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision.

  “N-no.” Jake had been waiting for two days. Did he suspect what had happened to her?

  “I knew you couldn’t do something like that.” Her mom tightened her fingers around the steering wheel like she was trying to choke the life out of it. “You’ve said some misguided things lately, but that doesn’t mean you would help a dissident hide from Internal. Even if he is a friend of yours.” She paused. “You’re certain you don’t know where he is?”

  “I d-didn’t even know… know he was a dissident. I thought you w-were wrong about him.” She waited for her mom to confront her, to expose her lie.