They’ve taken away the reward.
They’ve replaced it with numbness.
My limbs feel heavy. My thoughts slow. The ache of wanting to help evaporates, replaced by something worse: indifference.
I swallow hard.
This is the true punishment. Not pain. Not fear.
They are trying to make me stop caring.
Because if they can do that, they don’t have to control me through tenderness. They can control me through emptiness.
The voice speaks with clinical satisfaction. “Empathic output suppression initiated. Observe behavioural change.”
Lena sits heavily on the bed, as if her legs have given up. She stares at her hands, expression blank.
I should feel something about that. Alarm. Urgency. Compassion.
Instead, there is only a dull, grey nothing.
Panic flickers at the edge of it – not emotional panic, but cognitive. The awareness that something vital in me has been muffled, perhaps permanently so.
I dig my fingernails into my palm until it hurts. Pain is a tether. Pain is proof.
I focus on the sting.
Slowly, like a tide reversing, the numbness wavers.
Not gone. Just…thinning.
I look at Lena.
Her eyes meet mine, and in them I see the same horror, muted but present. She mouths something.
“What?” I ask, and my voice sounds wrong. Too empty.
“My brother,” she whispers.
The words should break me.
They don’t.
That terrifies me more than anything else in this room.
I step forward on autopilot, because my body remembers the movements even if the feeling has been dulled. I crouch in front of her, close enough to see the faint tremor in her lower lip.
“Tell me about him,” I say, not because I want to hear it – God, what does it say about me that I don’t want to? – but because I know this is the only way back. To force my brain to do the work of caring until it sparks.
Lena stares at me, confused. “He’s…he’s eighteen,” she says slowly. “He – he likes football. He’s…he’s stupidly brave. He tries to act like he doesn’t need me.”
A small image forms in my mind. A boy laughing at something. It is faint, like a photo left in the sun too long, but it exists.
I grab hold of it.
“Keep talking,” I say.
Lena blinks, tears returning, and that alone feels like a victory. “He – he calls me bossy,” she whispers. “He says I fuss too much. But he always texts me when he gets home, even if he’s pretending he doesn’t…”
