The Great Below

The Scope Training - Part 1

She was a bit of a mirage. Alex crossed the cafeteria, itching for the day's first cup of coffee, when he spotted Octavia camped out alone at one of the tables. Her hair had been washed and it hung, loose and wet, around her shoulders. She wore the clothes she'd been kidnapped in; a staunch assumption that her time there wouldn't be long. He had bought her plenty of things to wear. She poked at a dish of hash browns with her fork, and all around her in a semicircle were empty paper coffee cups.

Alex went to the counter, where Raul had taken a shift serving up food from the long, steel trays – scrambled eggs, sausage links and potatoes. Great clouds of steam rose from the pans, and Raul wiped at his face with his soiled apron. He smiled.

"Alex," Raul said. "I want to talk with you." Despite the handicap of his thick accent, Raul's confidence was improving. He understood maybe fifty to a hundred words; all taught to him by the various men he'd worked beside. There was often a pause between ideas, or an aggressive head shake, but more and more he got his point across. Nick had taken it upon himself to teach Raul all the obscenities he might need; he grinned like a proud father the first time Raul had told him to go fuck himself.

"What is it?"

"The woman, the new...empleada. She take coffee today and ask for something more fuerte." Raul mimed swinging a bottle to his lips.

"Strong," Alex corrected him.

"I tell her, is desayuno."

Alex frowned, filling his own paper cup with coffee and cream. "Breakfast, Raul. It's breakfast." But unlike most of the other men, Raul didn't seem to have a vice, and perhaps that was why he looked so concerned. "I'll take care of it," he said, "but your job is to tell her no." Alex looked back at Octavia, where her hash brown interrogation had gone into full-swing. She picked with the edge of her fork, stabbing and rolling the potatoes across her plastic plate, and Alex thought that sometimes his desayuno needed a little alcohol, too.

"It must be morning," she said, when Alex sat down at her table.

"Yeah?"

"Nick let me out of my room, and then Raul offered me eggs and hash browns."

"Pretty good indicators," Alex replied.

"But then – and I know this sounds crazy – I thought it was just a trick. That it isn't morning at all." Octavia tilted each paper cup in turn, only to find they were all empty. Her gaze paused on Alex's fresh cup, then she straightened, stacking her empties into a pile.

"That's not crazy," he said. "You're in a strange place with all new people. There's no clock in your room, no windows. The whole thing is designed so that you let go of your daily routine and focus on the job. You're supposed to be distraction-free." The skin under her eyes was stained with exhaustion. "Did you sleep okay?"

Octavia took great interest in rubbing at one of her fingernails.

"Did you sleep at all?" He picked up his coffee and set it in front of her before starting on his food.

She pulled it over. "Not really."

His mouth nearly formed the words what's wrong, but he thought better of it. It was one thing to be culpable for her current set of circumstances, another to be insensitive to it.

"I dreamed that Victor was alive," she said.

There wasn't going to be a better time to offer up the truth. It was difficult enough keeping them from running into one another. Even yesterday, the incident where she tried to run – he'd had to peel out on his own training session with Victor to stop her. He was about as difficult to train as he'd been to pick up in the first place, and at several intervals during the session, Victor had put a wary eye on Alex as if to ask his fiance's whereabouts.