He barely stirs. I slide the cord from the back of the TV free, loop it once, twice, smooth as braiding hair. It fits nicely around his throat, the plastic warm from the wall. His eyes shoot open when I tighten it, hands clawing at the air a beat too slow. His chair skids; his heels drum against the linoleum. His face blooms from pink to a spoiled plum, veins rising under the skin like a map of all the places he wishes he’d paid attention. His nails scrape my wrists. I hold, gentle as a hug, until the last twitch drains out of him and his bowels loose in a wet, ugly apology.
“One,” I say softly, unhooking the cord and letting his head sag forward onto his arms as if he’s only napping harder. “Noise corrected. I told you. Twenty-two minutes. Enough time for a girl to get creative.”
The two competent guards are exactly where they should be, their competence softened into docility. One is slumped in his chair in the monitoring room, head tipped back, mouth open. The other has made it as far as propping his forehead on his fist, eyes rolling under half-closed lids as he loses his fight with gravity. The screens flicker, showing the same corridor three times in a loop.
I open the drawer where they keep the emergency supplies. Not the flashy things – batons and tasers, the obvious toys. The quieter tools. A roll of gaffer tape. A pair of trauma shears. The heavy steel torch with the loose bulb. The box-cutter.
The first guard never wakes properly. I tape his wrists to the arms of the chair, ankles to the base, mouth shut around the soft grunts that are all he has time for.
“Hey,” I murmur, leaning in, letting him smell the hospital on my skin. “You know they were going to cut it out of me, right? The thing you’ve been guarding. Scheduled intervention. For its safety.” His eyes flare, bloodshot. A sound tries to claw past the tape. “Funny, isn’t it? Who gets to decide what happens inside my body.”
The box-cutter opens with a satisfying little click. Just a blade, really. It doesn’t take much. The first slice goes along his forearm, elbow to wrist, shallow enough to sting, deep enough to open a clean red grin. Blood wells up and spills over, runs along his knuckles, drops to the floor with soft, wet ticks. The second cut crosses it, a careful X. He thrashes; the tape groans.
I work methodically. Measured lines. No hacking, no frenzy. I have the time and I want to have fun. I deserve this. I’ve been so patient, planned so well.
Peeling back skin in neat strips, I show him the pale tissue underneath, the gleam of tendon. His eyes roll, but I keep bringing him back with small touches – a thumb pressing into a wound, a light slap to the cheek, the dig of a fingernail under an eyelid.
“Stay with me,” I chide. “We’re doing accuracy today.”
By the time I finish, his hands look like someone has been practising filleting on him. The floor under his chair is a spreading lake. His breathing is a wet rattle. I step behind him, hook my fingers into his hair, and snap his head to one side. The vertebrae pop like knuckles. The silence afterwards is clean.
Two.
The jumpy one who loves his zip ties is in the side corridor, slumped against the wall, his extra restraints spilled in his lap like a bouquet. I pick one up, balance it across my palm. Ratcheting plastic. So many small imprisonments in one simple design.
He stirs when I nudge his boot with mine. His eyes roll open, unfocused. “What?—”
I crouch in front of him, press the tie to his lips like a shushing finger. “You like these, don’t you? Always ready to bind someone. Make them small. Make them quiet.”
His pupils widen as he realises I’m not a dream. He tries to push himself upright. The sedative drags him sideways into the wall.
“It’s important to understand what you’re doing with your tools,” I say. “Where they go. Where they dig. How to make them hurt.”
I take his wrist, loop the tie around, pull until it bites. Then the other wrist. Then ankles, drawn in tight. He breathes fast, shallow, like a preyed-on animal. I flip him onto his front with a shove of my boot and sit on his back, feeling the shallow hitch of his ribs under my weight.
“People like you,” I murmur, leaning down so my mouth is near his ear, “always think you’re the one holding the leash.”
I slide another tie around his throat and pull. Slow. Deliberate. Not enough to cut off all his air. Just enough to make every breath a fight. His feet drum the floor. He starts to cry, confusing himself with the sounds he’s heard other people make when he’s tightened restraints a little too far.
When his struggling begins to weaken, I move the tie higher, digging it under the jawline, feeling cartilage give little complaints. His tongue bulges between his teeth. There’s a pop, and a gush of warm wet down into the collar of his uniform as a tiny vessel gives way in his eye.
“Three,” I say when he stops. “Nearly done.”
I touch the world with quiet hands and it yields. There is very little screaming. The syrup sees to that. I move between rooms the way a moon moves across a lake. The camera pauses its loop whenever I ask it to; it looks away with good manners. I am not greedy. I don’t need to linger over every cut, every choke, every bone pushed past where it was meant to go.
Some men go quickly – a knife in the kidney in a dim corridor, a pen between the ribs and into the heart, a pillow pressed over a mouth already slack with sleep until there’snothing else. Others earn a little more attention: fingers broken one by one –count with me– a kneecap split with the heavy torch so the patella floats in meat, a scalpel tracing the line of a smile up past the cheekbone so they can feel what it’s like to wear the expression they’ve mocked on other faces.
In the break room, I flip the gas to off and then on again and then off and smile because I do not actually want to burn this place; I want them to see exactly what was done to them, every step counted, every breath accounted for. Pyromania is messy and men like to mistake it for genius. I prefer knives you never see.
I like to send a message.
By the time I return to the office, the building is breathing through new lungs. It inhales and it is clean air and it exhales, and somewhere a phone rings on a desk no one will answer. I find the medical kit under the sink and lay instruments on a towel like a picnic. Doctor Callaway is where I left her, sprawled in the chair, fighting the good fight, swimming upward through the muck of the sedative. Her eyelids flutter. She makes a small sound, halfway between a groan and my name.
“Kayla,” she says, and her voice begs my name for mercy like it’s ever done her any good. “We can make a different choice.” You can always count on a person who believes language fixes things to tie their own knots. Bless her.
“I am,” I say. “You’re going to help me.”
I don’t strap her down. It isn’t necessary and she would only call it theatrical. I put her hands on the armrests and her feet flat on the floor, and I talk. The words are the straps. Her muscles are syrupy, slow to respond.
