Virta sat up in the small, cold cell. She let her eyes adjust to the dim light and exhaled a hopeless sigh. She was still not in her soft bed in her small apartment. Nothing had changed since the last time she looked around. It was all exactly, TERRIBLY, the same.
She was on a cot. Nearby, a chair was bolted to the floor. Her eyes raised to the video camera mounted high on the ceiling; it was spying down on her with its mechanical eye. A large TV screen hung just under the camera. There was no light unless someone turned it on from outside her room.
The last thing her eyes went to were the shackles attached to the wall: Manacles that were used to lock her into place, flush against the cold, rough concrete.
She had no idea how long she'd been trapped in there. The only way she marked the passage of time was when They came for her: her torturers.
One of them was a tall, thin angel in horn-rimmed glasses. He had greasy, dark hair and soulless eyes. Virta couldn't help but think how much he looked like the skinny, quiet guy who'd sat in the back of her very first orientation. That boy had a habit of frequently pushing his glasses up his nose. She also remembered that he hadn't been much of a talker with the other students.
This agent of her suffering didn't speak a lot either. He did smile frequently, to her chagrin. When he smiled, it was just the thin line of his lips pulled up at the corners. There was a deranged glint in his eye. It was a perverse smile that told her he got off on her suffering.
He carried a briefcase with syringes, vials, and implements of torture. For some reason, she thought of him as the 'Medic', even though he never did anything to help her feel better. No, he hurt her with the things in his briefcase; he hurt her a lot.
There was another angel who came in to help torture her. He was not the same guy she remembered from her first encounter with Medic. This one was a uniformed security guard. He was big, about as tall as Athan, and muscular. He didn't have a lot of hair on the top of his head, but he was hairy everywhere else that she could see.
His job seemed to be to physically manipulate her and keep her in obedience to the Medic. He didn't have a name badge, and she didn't particularly want to know his name. She took to calling him 'Brawny' in her mind.
They never answered any of her questions. In fact, when she tried to ask anything, her only answer was more punishing pain. She quickly learned to keep her mouth shut.
They seemed to visit her often, just when she was managing to fall into an exhausted sleep.
She still bore the scars of their first visits:
The door to her cell slid open. She raised her head in panic, whimpered, and uselessly pressed herself into the wall by the cot. A flashlight shined into her eyes. Someone flipped her room light on, blinding her even more.
Brawny grabbed her and dragged her kicking and screaming over to the shackles on the wall. She was helplessly locked there by her wrists and ankles.
Medic prepared his instruments while Brawny pulled off the rough Government-issue gown she wore. She was forced to stand naked against the wall, shivering in front of the two men.
Then, Medic went to work on her.
At first, he'd seemed obsessed with the tattoos on her chest. He was dead set on removing them. He burned; he cut. Through her tears and delirium, she watched him at his work. She saw the joy lighting up his angelic face as he carved her up. She smelled her own skin burning.
The next time she looked down, her cats were gone. There was just smoking, mutilated flesh in their place.
She didn't stop screaming.
She actually could not stop the screams until Brawny cuffed her on the side of the head. Then she sobbed as quietly as she could manage. Her felines were gone; Medic's first mission was accomplished.
The next time her visitors came, Medic told her he wanted to remove her other tattoo as well. She'd seen herself looking back, terrified, in the reflection of his glasses.
Brawny held her pinned to the floor for the crude operation. He pressed all of his weight down on her body, then held her legs apart while Medic burned and cut the dog right out of her calf.
No anesthesia was used. They did, however, offer her a stick to bite down on, shoving it between her teeth before the physical torment began.
Clutching her body in anguish after the sessions, she saw and felt the evidence of Medic's handiwork on her once-perfect skin.
Her visitors didn't just work on her body. They seemed to want her mind even more.
After the first two sessions that removed her tats, Medic's torture of her began to follow a pattern:
He opened his briefcase and set it down on the cot. It was clearly visible from where she stood. Virta kept her eyes off of it since the second session. It seemed to make it all the harder on her - waiting while he picked up a tool and examined it thoughtfully, before putting it away and choosing another.
Medic called them his "motivational tools," and with them, he claimed he was going to cleanse her of her rebellion.
She knew all too well now what his motivational tools were: Pliers, scalpels, a small handsaw, tweezers, an awl, a small torch and clamps, for starters. But she knew that he preferred his special tool to all others. It was one that he'd designed himself.
He picked up an implement and turned to her, sporting that villainous smile. He said, "Athan is one demon in a legion, aligned against Heaven and Earth. Athan is your enemy."
Then, with seemingly great relish, he tortured her body.
When he needed a break, Medic took off his glasses and casually cleaned spatters of her blood from the lenses. He put the glasses back on and gave them a push up his nose. Then, he looked her in the face again.
"Virta, you are a bad angel," he said. "You deserve to be banished from Heaven. You should go into the pit of Hell. You are guilty of sin."
The first couple times he'd said that to her, she had talked back.
"So you're Mr. Innocent?" she spat at him. "What about this -- this torture? You know, what you're doing to me right now, you son of a devil!"
As if on cue, Brawny stepped up and hit her in the mouth.
Her head wrenched back with the force of the blow, and then hung limply at her chest. She tasted her own blood and tried to spit it out. Her lips were torn open. Her teeth felt loose.
Medic gave his little smile and said calmly, "I'm just following orders." He pulled out a vial and began to fill a syringe as he continued talking.
"I do what I'm told, Virta." His voice had the same tone one would use with a disobedient child. "Following orders isn't sin. It's obedience. Something you still need to learn."
He jabbed the syringe into her neck, and she cried out as the liquid burned like wildfire through her veins.
No, she had learned not to say anything back to the Medic.
"Sin... rebellion," Medic repeated each time he tortured her. "You're such a naughty little angel. So much sin. I can SMELL it inside you, Virta. Did you know that? You stink. Oh yes, Virta, you smell foul indeed." That evil, demented smile again. "There's just so much sin to purge..."
Virta trembled as she watched him reach into his case and pull out his favorite tool. He always saved the best for last. It gleamed in the overhead light, matching the perverse gleam in his ice blue eyes.
Virta's head rolled back and she began to cry and plead. She knew what was coming next.
Her mind began to wander on its own, back to when she'd opened her eyes in this cell for the very first time. Then, at least, someone had done something nice for her. Someone had tried to take away her pain, not add to it:
The eyes were cat-like, and amber. Virta knew she'd never seen eyes quite like those before. Besides her unusual eyes, the angel leaning over her had hair the color of cinnamon, and a spattering of freckles across her nose and well-defined arms.
"My name's Geneva," the angel said in a firm but gentle voice. "I'm in Housekeeping. Normally, I just clean this place after the day shift goes home. But, they asked me to come in here tonight and clean you up instead." She smiled.
Geneva dabbed at Virta's brow with a warm, wet cloth.
