Author: Mina

It’s the lack of sleep that’s the worst. I can live with the brutal beatings, the agony of untreated broken bones, the drugs that fuck with your head, the insidious cold, the gnawing hunger, the burning thirst and the routine rape, but I would literally kill to sleep. We’ve all been trained in withstanding torture and interrogation techniques, but nothing really prepares you for not being allowed to sleep for six days straight.

And I hate feeling dirty. I know that’s the least of my worries, but it’s a symbol of everything I have been stripped of. Not just my freedom but also the smallest of dignities.

Only one of the five interrogators is into rape and I’m hoping he’ll be rotated in soon. My notion of time is rather sketchy, but they seem to do six-hour shifts. I’ve been able to read from him that rape is discouraged by his superiors, which is why he switches the monitors off when he wants to scratch that itch. I’ve been biding my time until I was able to sift the security access codes from the minds of our captors. I have them all now. I’m not normally this slow, but pain has a habit of getting in the way of your focus. And I’m very weak now. It needs to be soon or I won’t be able to see it through.

Yes! He’s been rotated in. We go through an hour of him slapping me around. I make sure to show the pain, as I know he gets off on it. I’m hoping he’ll soon be turned on enough to switch off his brain.

Ok. We’re there. He’s switching off the monitors and removing my restraints so that he has full access to my body. As he shoves me face first into the wall, I grasp the hand pulling my head back by my hair and rip into his mind.

His scream is most satisfying. I hold nothing back and within minutes he’s a jabbering wreck on the floor. He’ll be lucky if he ever remembers his own name.

For a moment, there are black spots in front of my eyes and I sway. No! I can’t pass out now. I punch the wall and the fresh pain cuts through the fog.

I reach out to the guard I sense on the other side of the wall and fry his circuits too. It takes me a bit longer this time.

God, my kingdom for a bed.

Stumbling to the door, I key in the code that slides it open. I take the guard’s weapon and do a shuffling run. I’ll be on their monitors now and even destroying them as I pass them (I got the schematics from the mind of one of the guards), I have to move as fast as I can.

I’ve used the last six days to also locate the minds of the three other survivors from our raiding party. Luckily, one is our pilot. I kill the guards and interrogators the old-fashioned way, with their own weapons.

Apart from the lead interrogator. I allow myself to enjoy his death too. I sweep through his mind like a wrecking ball in slow motion, letting him feel the collapse of his higher motor functions before I erase the rest of him.

His last coherent thought is “no, you can’t exist, you’re just a myth!”