"You know," Webb continues, circling the table slowly, "I've been reviewing your file. I am impressed you can still shit with how much the Senator abused your asshole.” He stops at my head, looks down at me with something that might be curiosity. "And yet here you are. Still breathing. Still hoping."
"What do you want?"
"I want to understand." He pulls up a chair, sits beside me like we're having a casual conversation. "What is it about you that made Jace Harrison malfunction? You're not attractive, not in any conventional sense. You're not intelligent, not particularly. You have no skills, no value, no purpose beyond what others assign to you."
Each word cuts. I feel myself shrinking, collapsing inward, becoming the small, worthless thing he's describing.
"And yet." Webb leans forward, elbows on knees. "And yet a weapon I spent fifteen years perfecting looked at you and decided you were worth destroying his entire existence for. Why?"
"I don't know," I whisper.
"Neither do I." Webb stands, brushes off his coat. "But I intend to find out."
He walks toward the door. Pauses with his hand on the frame.
"I told Jace I wouldn't hurt you," he says. "And I won't. Not physically. But there are other kinds of pain, Elliot Rowe. Kinds that don't leave marks. Kinds that the body can't protect itself from."
The door closes behind him.
I stare at the ceiling and try to remember what it felt like to be safe.
The first session begins an hour later.
Webb returns with two guards and a rolling cart covered in equipment I don't recognize. Monitors. Sensors. A headset with wires trailing from it like tentacles.
"Do you know what this is?" Webb asks, holding up the headset.
Ishake my head.
"Neural feedback interface. It reads your brain activity and translates it into data I can analyze. Completely non-invasive. Completely painless." He smiles. "Physically, anyway."
The guards hold my head still while Webb fits the device over my skull. The sensors press cold against my temples, my forehead, the base of my neck.
"The interesting thing about trauma," Webb says, adjusting the fit, "is that the brain stores it differently than regular memories. It's not filed away in neat categories. It's fragmented, scattered, embedded in the nervous system like shrapnel. The body remembers what the mind tries to forget."
He steps back, checks a monitor on the cart.
"What I'm going to do is access those fragments. Bring them to the surface. Make you experience them again, as vividly as the first time." He turns to face me. "Not to hurt you. To understand. To see what's in there that made you worth saving."
"Please." The word comes out before I can stop it. "Please don't."
"I'm not giving you a choice." He picks up a tablet, swipes through screens. "Let's start with something simple. Your earliest memory of pain. The first time someone hurt you and you understood that no one was coming to help."
The headset hums. Something shifts in my skull, a pressure that isn't quite pain but isn't comfortable either.
And then I'm not in the room anymore.
I'm seven years old.
The foster home smells like cigarette smoke and mold and cat piss. I'm curled in the corner of a room I share with three other boys, knees to chest, trying to be invisible.
It doesn't work.
The oldest boy, John, stands over me with a belt in his hand. The buckle end. He's twelve, big for his age, with eyes that don't have anything behind them.
"You ate my food," he says.
I didn't. I haven't eaten anything all day. But it doesn't matter. Nothing I say matters.
