Every hour I sit inside it, the Seal pulls a little more, drains a little deeper, quiets the cold fire in my veins by another degree.
He's waiting for the fire to go out completely.
Then he'll begin in earnest.
While I drift in and out, Red Hands comes and goes. Sometimes I hear him before I see him, footsteps echoing across the vast concrete floor of the hangar from some direction I can't quite pinpoint. Sometimes he simply materializes at the edge of the Seal's boundary, already seated, already watching, as if he teleported in from whatever unremarkable life he lives between sessions.
He's been here four times since I first woke up. Or five. I've lost count.
The scalpels and other tools sit there outside the Seal and remind me of what he's capable of, what he's planning, what comes next when he decides my reserves are sufficiently depleted.
And the laptop continues to play.
Every time Red Hands comes in, he restarts the video. James's screams fill the hangar. The tinny speakers flatten the sound into something almost abstract, and it barely sounds human anymore.
James survived this. He had to have survived it. I will not accept any other version of events.
He's alive. He's alive. He's alive.
I press the words into my bones, let them become structural.
Sometime later, Red Hands sits in his folding metal chair just outside the boundary with his legs crossed and his hands folded and his unremarkable face arranged in that expression of mild, scholarly attention. When he’s here, I make myself watch every second of every loop on the laptop because the alternative is looking away, and I refuse to give Red Hands the satisfaction of watching me flinch from the truth of what he did.
He's cataloging my reactions, measuring my resistance.
"The skin is the first lie," he says.
His voice is conversational. The tone you'd use to discuss the weather, to comment on a movie you'd seen recently, to make small talk at a party you didn't particularly want to attend.
"Skin contains us, defines our edges. Makes us believe we're separate from the world, separate from each other. We spend our entire lives convinced we're discrete, bound, individual." He shakes his head. "But underneath, we're all the same. Meat and nerve and bone. The same structures, the same chemistry, the same terrified animal screaming into the same void."
I don't respond. I've been conserving words the way I'm conserving energy, spending them only when the expenditure might yield something useful.
"You're doing that thing again," he observes pleasantly. "The strategic silence. Denying me data." He doesn't sound offended, just interested. "Most of them talk compulsively by now. The isolation, hunger, and fear make them need connection. Evenwith me. Especially with me, because I'm the only human presence available."
He tilts his head. "You're different, though. You seem genuinely comfortable with silence."
"I live with a demon," I rasp, my voice like gravel. "He's not big on conversation."
He actually smiles at that. A real one, small and genuine, the first authentic expression I've seen on that forgettable face. It's somehow worse than his empty detachment.
"Yes. That's honest. That's the first genuinely unguarded thing you've said."
Something catches my eye in his hands. Nail polish. Eddie called the color Crimson Kiss. It’s Red Hands’s signature, one of them anyway. The mark he puts on all his victims’ fingernails.
The fear is sharp and immediate and real. I won't pretend otherwise, not even to myself. I've trained myself not to show it, not to let it read on my face, but inside my chest, it burns like acid. The nail polish is a specific, concrete terror in a way the scalpels aren't. The scalpels are tools. The nail polish is a statement.
And that statement reverberates between my skull.
You are finished. You are complete. You are mine.
Vincent was worse, I tell myself.
I tell myself that because it's still true. Vincent was worse because it came without warning, without philosophy, without any framework at all. Just the sudden, nauseating destruction of every belief I held about the world and my safety in it.
Red Hands is just a man with too much time and a bad philosophy and an inflated sense of his own spiritual significance.
Just a man.
