She Will Persist

2

Director Flagg twisted the screen around and shoved it in my direction. I glanced down to watch a black and white security video of three sides of an empty room play on the tablet. Today's date was in the bottom right hand corner, and the time was an hour ago. The girl, the pessimistic one with the crazy eyes and the bizarre scars that was locked in our basement prison was huddled in the corner of the cell this time, still unmoving and with her head down. Three of our uniform-clad agents came in next.

In the black and white footage I saw her lift her head up. Her stringy hair was clogged in the open wounds on her face, crusting to her forehead as the blood slowly dried, but she made no attempt to swipe away the strands.

In the video the agents approached her, sliding combat batons out from the straps at their thighs.

She went for their legs first, dodging their rapid swipes while throwing blows of her own to their stomachs and heads with her hands, lashing out almost like a cat, recoiling her fists after each hit. She used her heels, her elbows, her nails, her knees, even her head. She managed to muscle a baton away and use the end of it to knock all three boys out cold with bashes to the head. It was maybe a minute and a half before she had them all on the ground.

Well shit.

Flagg shut the video off. He slid the tablet back towards himself over his wooden desk. "What did you pick up on from watching that?" He asked, like I was a boy again.

Other than the fact that she's a mysterious badass, why did she wait so long for them to come near her? Why were the agents even there in the first place? What the hell did you tell them to do? And also, that incredibly annoying habit you have of restricting these kinds of things for no reason other than to reveal them at whatever time suits your dramatic personality is such bullshit I'm having trouble not scrunching up my nose at the smell of it.

"Not a lot," I summarized.

My Director leaned back in his chair with his arms crossed.

I bit my tongue to try and curb my spew of questions. "Can I ask why, sir?" My hands were clasped obediently behind my back as I stood, but I kept running my fingers over my knuckles. I was 20 years old and yet Director Flagg's long sullen silences and hard black eyes still made calluses appear over the joints in my hands.

"Why do you think she fought back this time and not when we captured her after she destroyed that apartment complex?" He asked.

I swallowed tenderly. "She told me that she deserved to be imprisoned because of what she did," I started to say. But of course he already knew this, and he was just trying to make me feel like a kid and explain it to him again. I had been an agent for eight years now, and I was definitely not a little boy anymore, so right now he was just seriously pissing me off. "I think," I shrugged my shoulders up to my ears, "maybe she blew up the building on purpose. To get attention, therefore get captured, so she'd be away from other people and no longer a threat."

Nothing changed on his face. He didn't believe me. As usual. He didn't understand why anyone would do something like that. Unfortunately, that ignorance for empathy was what made him such a successful Director of a secret government intelligence agency.

For the past few days I'd been reviewing the girl's words in my head. If I was in the same position as her, I might feel the same way. When I was in her prison cell she seemed afraid. I thought it might be of me, but considering she could have killed me if she wanted to, as clearly displayed in the camera footage, maybe she was scared of herself. For some twisted reason.

I tried not to look down at my feet as I contemplated this, instead continuing to run my fingers over all the ruts in my hands behind my back. The Director didn't have any empathy. Technically, as spies, all the agents here weren't supposed to have much either, but here I am, trying to relate to a terrified, depressed teenage girl who hated herself.