The Secret

Six

I’m still in the room twenty minutes later when I hear the door slowly creak open. “Did you agree to it?” A familiar voice says.

I open my mouth to speak but my tongue is mangled and heavy. “I agreed to do it,” I reply, struggling to keep my voice on a sturdy wavelength.

Sven sees the look on my face as he enters and sits on the table. A sigh lolls off his tongue lazily as a relaxed haze passes over his face. His beard is starting to become in need of a shave, but for some reason I have a strange urge to reach out and stroke it. “Thank God. The Doctor would have been spewing with fury if you’d refused. It’s a big responsibility, you know.”

“No, I don’t want to know,” I murmur. “I never want to know. I don’t even know why I’m here in the first place.”

“The waterfall you drank from is a trap,” Sven admits. “We catch the occasional thirsty hiker or tourist with that.”

“Why does the corporation do it like that?”

“So the outside world doesn’t know we exist – if we’d gone around asking for recruits and got rejected, they’d go around telling people about how some crazy guys came to offer them a position as a spy,” he says matter-of-factly. “It’s clever, isn’t it?”

“Not for the recruits,” I shoot back. “What if some people hate it?”

He laughs. “Oh Nadia, you’ll love it. Now let’s go eat dinner.”

We walk out of the room and into a glass elevator. My mind is spinning as I watch the dining level rise to my feet.

A while later, I shovel my spoon into the small mountain of beef stroganoff on my plate, the creamy concoction sitting proudly on a bed of steaming white rice. As I down yet another huge mouthful, I spot Sven staring at me from across the table.

“What?” I ask through my food. A grain of rice crawls onto my lips as I speak.

“Nothing,” he goes back to his stew. “Keep eating.”

I put my spoon down and place my hands firmly on the table. If there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s not knowing what’s going on around me. “Tell me,” I command. “Why were you looking at me like that?”

He stops eating, looks at the table and swallows slowly. “Nadia,” his blue eyes meet mine. “If there’s one thing I’ve been curious about...It’s the barcode tattoo on your arm, the numbers? What are they…?”

Instinct guides my body to continue its regular motion of eating, but on the inside I feel the polar opposite. The tattoo is a barcode they use to register the prisoners when they move throughout the different sectors of the complex. I recall when I was first captured: they tied me back, onto a table, and used their signature electric handcuffs to keep me in the uncomfortable position sufficient for the doctors to tattoo my upper arm. The sharp, stinging pain felt like a razor going into my skin. Afterwards they’d plunged my head into a bucket of freezing water and shaved all my hair off. My long, silky, dark hair. I’m lucky Sven hasn’t asked me why I’ve got no hair as well.

“Oh, that,” I laugh nervously. “The tattoo was just a stupid prank by some mates during a drunken night out.”

Sven looks right through me, sensing the lie. It is evidently bullshit. Regardless, he goes back to eating, clearly dissatisfied with the reason why I have a bizarre barcode on my arm. If he knew, if he knew, surely, he would tell Dr. Parker, and then where would I be? A goner, a loser, a criminal, once again.

Well, I still am a criminal anyway, so what difference would it make?

Maybe I’d be a dead one.

“Right…” he says slowly. “Never mind then. Just curious. Actually, I think I recall some jail who kept their criminals printed with some sort of code on their arms…”

I laugh, but it sounds as plastic as a processed sausage. “Me? Criminal? No way!”

“I wouldn’t think so,” Sven says as he chews his food.

The grain of rice that had migrated south down my chin through the course of the conversation now drops onto the table.

I think my fate will be like that, too.