Without warning

Caitlin closed her eyes and smiled. A small victory. Not so long ago, Reynard would simply have absorbed the abuse and bored in on her, attempting to undermine her defences, all the time reminding her of how utterly alone she was in the world. Enraging him was a small victory. Possibly pyrrhic, but a victory nonetheless. She breathed in slowly. The air was stale and dank. She remembered her last stay in the cells beneath Noisy-le-Sec as being uncomfortable because of the cold. Her interrogators had maintained the temperature just above freezing, but on this occasion there had been no attempts to manipulate her environment. She put that down to power shortages. The lights flickered off and on irregularly, often going out for minutes at a time. The fort would have had its own generator but even so, the directorate would need to ration supply if the wider grid had gone offline.

Really though, she had no idea. She had been held incommunicado for three weeks now, and her captors told her nothing of the outside world save for those details that suited their ends, and of course, she could not necessarily believe them anyway. She could only trust what few miniscule scraps of reality came filtering through their control.

Time. They had tried to disconnect her from the flow of time. To impress upon her that she was adrift on the seas of eternity, and completely within their control. They were good, too. She had been trained to listen for any clues in their conversation, to try to catch a glimpse of any timepieces or watches that might stray into her field of view. But Reynard and his men were good. On their wrists she found only a tan line, and for a long time, lost in the haze of beatings and interrogation, she did lose track of the days and weeks. But of course there was one thing they could not take or hide from her: she was a woman and two weeks into her capture, her period arrived, weak but unmistakable.

It had since passed, marking three weeks since Monique had been killed and she had collapsed in the hallway of the apartment block back on the Route d’Asnieres, betrayed by her own failing body. She kept the small morsel of knowledge, that she knew how long she’d been held, to herself. It was a small prize to covet in her ongoing battle with Reynard. And not the only one either. She knew things about him that he would not want her to know.

The Frenchman, for instance, was losing weight. She had taken note of where he notched his belt the first time he had interrogated her. It was two notches in from there now. At first, too, he had always been clean shaven, and his suits freshly dry-cleaned and pressed. Recently, however, he had once or twice sported a five o’clock shadow and she noted that his collars and cuffs were growing dark with grime. He, like her, was suffering. Dark bags had appeared under his eyes and he had chewed the skin around his left thumbnail quite ragged.

She could not know what was happening in the city outside the fortress walls, she didn’t even know what was happening in the cells near her own, but Caitlin was willing to bet on a systemic collapse. And so she taunted him along those lines, finally eliciting the angered reaction of a few moments past. She would wait now for her punishment. She composed herself, a task made somewhat easier because today she was able to lie flat on the cold slab that served as her bed. She was naked, but she had long since grown used to that. Most importantly, they did not have her trussed into a stress position, sitting cross-legged, with her knees pulled right up and bound, and her hands cuffed behind her back. It had been excruciating after a while, and they’d forced her to maintain the posture by having two men stand over her with lengths of heavy rubber tubing, to hand out a beating whenever she attempted to alter position.

After a few days, however, pressure sores covered her buttocks and had become infected. That bought her respite for a day or two while a medic treated her. They then relented, in a fashion – resorting to a mix of stress positioning, water-boarding and sensory bombardment, rotated in such a way as to maintain her torment without the inconvenience of needing to halt for medical treatment. The combination had almost broken her, but they had stopped it after she sank her teeth into the wrist of a man who’d been attempting to place a hood over her head in preparation for another water-boarding session. Caitlin had bitten down as hard as she could, feeling the skin break and hot, salty blood start to flow, a split second before feeling the satisfying crack of a shattered bone. The asshole had screamed a lot louder than she ever did – something she’d been quick to point out to Reynard. Following that incident, they reverted to beatings for a couple of days.