Ultimum Carceron

Ultimum Carceron 19

The surgery worked. Seven days and five surgeries by the foreign surgeons, and Rebecca could walk again, provided she use a crutch. Every day, she was given a reasonable meal, about the same everyone in the sewers was said to receive. Most meals tasted like watered down oatmeal, and was less disgusting than it was unnatural with texture. With each passing day, she required less help to raise spoonfuls of food to her mouth. On the morning that she left, she fed herself and clothed herself, and walked on a crutch without human assistance.

On the last day, after being given her daily meal, she was told she was well enough to walk back. There still had been surprisingly no conditions; no money, protection, or guarantees had been extorted out of her in exchange for Illopé's mercy. When she left, she had only her guesses and assumptions about her captor/savior's motives.

A step forward and she would strain to balance with her crutch, another step and she'd still have trouble. When she hoped she would recover from her paralysis, she naively thought she'd be walking normally and not wobbling, shaking, and walking at a fifth of her normal pace. With that in mind, and knowing the correct direction to the elevators up, the trip was hours long.

She avoided all sewers and unnecessary detours, and finally arrived at one of dozens of elevators reserved for guards. She forced herself through the pain and sweating when she slid her personal card in the slot, and the doors parted open. It was only on her way up that she felt anxious, knowing if Smythe told everyone the truth, she would be coming back to her cell. Yet she pressed on, for she felt if there was no other option, she would just bludgeon Smythe to death with the crutch. She was hoping, however, that Smythe told Song-Xu nothing. Still, even if Smythe was completely honest, this meant she was supposed to be dead, and nobody would look for her.

Illopé was right about some things. She did love violence, and she didn't hold back even slightly if there was a good reason for it. Her gut sank every time she considered what happened to Theo, but that was an accident, not the result of something innately awful about her. That was her view, and not Illopé's; he seemed to believe that her hobby for murdering evil people was just the most defensible way of satiating a need for violence. That was why Illopé felt holding her responsible for Theo's death was justified; she had felt satisfied about it afterwards, hadn't she, even when she didn't know who it was?

She couldn't argue against the shrewd inference that she enjoyed violence, but did she have to? It didn't matter that she felt these impulses naturally from someone like Smythe or Illopé. Looking at this quantitatively helped, and she had done this before: on a sheet of paper, she wrote 1:66. That was a ratio of Theo's death to the deaths of inmates she murdered during the manhunt. By that standard, she should feel comfortable, having recompensed sixty-six times over.

Relieved when the elevator doors opened, she went out through the bridge and back into the security tower at last. Every step drew more attention, but even as she worried someone was about to shoot her, she still walked to Smythe's bedroom door and knocked on it with her crutch. Though she considered he would be out somewhere trying to capture prisoners, the door opened and Smythe was there. Satisfied to see that he immensely shocked, she slung a crutch into his face, causing him to fall backwards inside his bedroom. As gasps emitted from the employees on the floor, she poked her crutch to the door to close it as she entered.

"We don't have to fight if you take my deal," Rebecca snarled confidently.

"Deal?" Smythe asked. His face wasn't gashed as she thought it would be, but both his cheeks were bruised. He picked up a pistol off his bed. "I don't need your deal. I have the upper hand, here. You just assaulted me in public after coming back from the dead."