The lower level is quiet the way it always is, that particular underground quiet that has nothing to do with peace.
I stop outside the cell, hand on the door, and for one second I stand there and breathe and try to locate the version of myself that can walk in and do what needs to be done with something like detachment.
I open the door.
She’s in the chair.
She’s always in the chair because there is nowhere else to be and she’s been there long enough now that the defiance she was wearing when I left has gone somewhere.
Not broken, not collapsed, just absent the way a fire goes absent when it runs out of fuel.
She looks up when the door opens and I watch her face do the thing it does when she sees me, the tightening, the jaw setting, but underneath it something I haven’t seen from her before.
She looks defeated.
She looked better with the fight in her.The thought arrives before I can stop it and I push it sideways and walk into the cell.
“The code,” I say.
She looks at me and says nothing.
“The drive is encrypted. You know the password. You’re going to tell me what it is or today is going to be significantly worse than the last two days.” I watch her face. “Do you understand what I’m telling you, Lena?”
Her name in my mouth does something to her expression, a small flinch she covers quickly.
“I don’t know the code,” she says.
“Don’t fucking lie to me.”
“I’ve been trying to get into that drive since Moscow.” Her voice is flat and exhausted. “I don’t know the password. My father didn’t tell me. He just put it in my hand and told me to run and then he—” She stops. Swallows. “I don’t know what’s on it and I don’t know how to open it.”
“That’s a very convenient story.”
“Fuck you. It’s the truth.”
I look at her for a long moment, then I step forward and my hand closes around her throat and I squeeze.
I cut her air off completely and her hands fly up and claw at mine with everything she has, nails dragging across my knuckles hard enough to draw blood, and her face changes the way faces change when the body understands it is running out of time.
Her eyes go wide and wet at the corners and her mouth opens and works and I lean down to her level and hold on and speak very quietly into the space between us.
“Tell me the truth,” I say. “Or I will take my time with you until there is nothing left behind your eyes. Do you believe me?”
She can’t answer.
She can’t do anything except shake her head, tears breaking loose and running down her face while her hands keep working at mine, desperate and losing, and I watch her face for the thing that breaks, the specific thing that breaks when someone stops performing and starts surviving.
It doesn’t come.
What comes instead is more tears, real ones, uncontrolled and entirely without strategy, and I release her and jerk my hand back like her skin has burned me.
She gasps.
Drags in air in huge ragged pulls, shoulders heaving, and I stand over her and watch and something is happening in my chest that I do not have vocabulary for and do not want.
“If you don’t want to be hurt,” I say, and my voice has roughened somewhere I don’t intend, “then stop making me hurt you. Tell me the code. That’s all. One piece of information and this stops.”
“Go to hell.” She’s still coughing, still catching her breath, and I can tell she’s furious at herself for the tears and furious at me and her voice still has teeth in it even now, even like this, wet-faced and half-broken in a chair. “I don’t know the code. I don’t know what’s on the drive. You can do whatever you want to me and that won’t change because I cannot tell you something Idon’t know.” She drags the back of her wrist across her face hard, like she’s angry at the tears personally. “Murderer. You killed him and now you’re here choking me and you still won’t have your answer because there is no answer I can give you.”
