My Mother Divinity [Unedited]

Chapter Fourteen

Amon and Brodie are brought into the barn the next morning, Amon with his mouth stuffed shut with a rag and forced onto his knees on the ground. I can't see what state he's in physically but I can hear him breathing heavily, and Brodie is silent. I crane my neck as the same candle from yesterday is lit.

The woman has Amon in a headlock. Brodie doesn't even need to be restrained - he's a child, harmless and helpless, but there's a lanky man, a boy, crouched down beside him. He's wearing a bandana around his neck and he pulls it up to cover his mouth.

"I knew you wouldn't tell me anything until I showed you I wasn't bluffing." A knife glitters. The spaces in the roof are like stripes on the woman's face, cutting across her cheekbones. "Tell me your full name."

"I don't know it," I rasp. Even if I did, what difference would it make? It's not like she can look me up on Facebook. But it doesn't matter because she doesn't believe that I could have lost my memories, and like any sane person in her position would do, she puts the knife over Amon's jugular.

"I don't want to torture the kid," she tells me and beside her, the boy moves to rest a hand on Brodie's shoulder, a soft warning. I feel like the knife may as well be pointed at him too because it makes the blood in my veins freeze. "I really don't, not unless I have to. But as for him..." She presses the knife further into the curve of Amon's neck and a bead of blood seeps out of a puncture. I get the picture.

"I was told it was Jane," I insist, "I don't—"

"No matter." She waves it off, literally, so that the knife relaxes from its position and I can blink again without worrying I'll miss his throat being slit. "I don't really give two shits. I thought we should start with something easy and, Gods forbid, you would cooperate but I see you don't like to beat around the bush. Well, I suppose we'll just get on with it, then." She motions to the boy to bark an order at him: "Flip her over."

The boy comes over to me and I can see the beginnings of stubble on his jaw - he can't be older than a teenager. His eyes are sad, I notice, and then he's turning me over so I'm lying on my stomach and knocking my teeth against metal.

"Take off her shirt," she commands.

He does as he's told and uses a knife to cut open my clothing. My back is exposed to the cold air and I feel goosebumps rise over the little patches of skin that aren't littered with scars. The woman must have swapped places with the teenager because suddenly I feel hands much too soft and small across the expanse of my skin to be that of a male's. I twitch restlessly as she looks me over.

"Interesting," she mutters, "so precise. It's like a piece of art."

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of this whole ordeal is how I'm now only seen as an object, something to experiment on and takes notes from, a means to a potentially brutal end. This is my worst nightmare. If I could trade my heightened emotions for a spark of physical sensation right now, I would.

"They seem to create these overlapping patterns." At this point, she must be speaking to herself. I wouldn't be surprised if I started hearing pencil scribbling across paper as if she were taking medical notes from a cadaver, but all I sense is the flickering of the flame. "You would have to be so careful to construct such a thing. But whipping marks, too? They can't have been much use. Maybe just to keep you in line."

I imagine they were just slashing into me without much thought, simply hoping for the best. I keep my mouth shut and my nose pressed against the table. I didn't know I had been whipped - it wasn't something I picked up on before.

"She hasn't even seen it," snaps Amon, "her back. Not properly, at least. You wouldn't believe how difficult it is to get your hands on a decent mirror these days."