Chapter Twelve Elliot
The first video call comes six hours after Jace leaves.
Webb holds the tablet in front of my face, angling it so the camera captures everything: the restraints, the collar, the dried tear tracks on my cheeks. I can see myself in the small preview window, a pale ghost strapped to a metal table, and I barely recognize the person staring back.
"Say hello to your Reaper," Webb instructs.
Jace's face fills the screen. His expression is blank, controlled, but I can see the tension in his jaw, the way his eyes catalog every detail of my condition. He’s on a plane.
"Elliot." My name in his voice. Steady. Certain.
"I'm okay," I say. The words come out cracked, unconvincing.
"Six hours. Just to show you a sign of good faith," Webb says, pulling the tablet away. "Proof of life delivered. Next is in twelve hours, assuming you're making progress."
The screen goes dark. Webb sets the tablet on a table I can't see and returns to stand over me.
"He looked upset," Webb observes. "Good. Upset means motivated."
I don't respond. I've learned that responding only gives him ammunition.
"You know," Webb continues, circling the table slowly, "I've been reviewing your file. I am impressed you can still shit with how much the Senator abused your asshole.” He stops at my head, looks down at me with something that might be curiosity.
"And yet here you are. Still breathing. Still hoping. "
"What do you want?"
"I want to understand." He pulls up a chair, sits beside me like we're having a casual conversation.
"What is it about you that made Jace Harrison malfunction?
You're not attractive, not in any conventional sense.
You're not intelligent, not particularly.
You have no skills, no value, no purpose beyond what others assign to you. "
Each word cuts. I feel myself shrinking, collapsing inward, becoming the small, worthless thing he's describing.
"And yet." Webb leans forward, elbows on knees. "And yet a weapon I spent fifteen years perfecting looked at you and decided you were worth destroying his entire existence for. Why?"
"I don't know," I whisper.
"Neither do I." Webb stands, brushes off his coat. "But I intend to find out."
He walks toward the door. Pauses with his hand on the frame.
"I told Jace I wouldn't hurt you," he says. "And I won't. Not physically. But there are other kinds of pain, Elliot Rowe. Kinds that don't leave marks. Kinds that the body can't protect itself from."
The door closes behind him.
I stare at the ceiling and try to remember what it felt like to be safe.
The first session begins an hour later.
Webb returns with two guards and a rolling cart covered in equipment I don't recognize. Monitors. Sensors. A headset with wires trailing from it like tentacles.
"Do you know what this is?" Webb asks, holding up the headset.
I shake my head.
"Neural feedback interface. It reads your brain activity and translates it into data I can analyze. Completely non-invasive. Completely painless." He smiles. "Physically, anyway."
The guards hold my head still while Webb fits the device over my skull. The sensors press cold against my temples, my forehead, the base of my neck.
"The interesting thing about trauma," Webb says, adjusting the fit, "is that the brain stores it differently than regular memories. It's not filed away in neat categories. It's fragmented, scattered, embedded in the nervous system like shrapnel. The body remembers what the mind tries to forget."
He steps back, checks a monitor on the cart.
"What I'm going to do is access those fragments. Bring them to the surface. Make you experience them again, as vividly as the first time." He turns to face me. "Not to hurt you. To understand. To see what's in there that made you worth saving."
"Please." The word comes out before I can stop it. "Please don't."
"I'm not giving you a choice." He picks up a tablet, swipes through screens. "Let's start with something simple. Your earliest memory of pain. The first time someone hurt you and you understood that no one was coming to help."
The headset hums. Something shifts in my skull, a pressure that isn't quite pain but isn't comfortable either.
And then I'm not in the room anymore.
I'm seven years old.
The foster home smells like cigarette smoke and mold and cat piss. I'm curled in the corner of a room I share with three other boys, knees to chest, trying to be invisible.
It doesn't work.
The oldest boy, John, stands over me with a belt in his hand. The buckle end. He's twelve, big for his age, with eyes that don't have anything behind them.
"You ate my food," he says.
I didn't. I haven't eaten anything all day. But it doesn't matter. Nothing I say matters.
The belt comes down.
The buckle catches me across the face, splitting the skin above my eye. Blood runs hot and wet into my vision.
I don't scream. I learned not to scream the second day. Screaming makes it last longer.
"You're going to learn," John says, raising the belt again. "You're going to learn what happens to little shits who take things that aren't theirs."
The belt comes down again. And again. And again.
I count the blows. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen.
At twenty-three, I stop counting.
At some point, I stop feeling.
I go somewhere else. Somewhere the belt can't reach. Somewhere the blood and the pain and the voice are just noise in another room.
When it's over, he spits on me and walks away.
I lie on the floor for three hours before anyone notices.
No one helps.
No one ever helps.
I come back gasping, choking, tears streaming down my face.
Webb is watching the monitor, expression clinical, detached.
"Fascinating," he murmurs. "The dissociative response developed early. Before Moore, even. You learned to leave your body as a child." He makes a note on his tablet. "That explains how you survived the Senator. You weren't really there for most of it."
I can't speak. I can taste blood in my mouth, phantom pain from a wound that healed fifteen years ago.
"Let's try another one," Webb says.
"No." The word tears out of me. "No, please, I can't—"
"You can. You will." He swipes the tablet. "This time, let's look at something more recent. Your first week with Moore. The moment you understood what he was."
The headset hums.
I'm gone again.
Moore's basement.
The chair. The straps. The table of instruments gleaming under the white lights.
Moore stands in front of me, explaining the rules again and again. His voice is calm, reasonable, the same voice he uses in his campaign ads. A voice that promises safety and delivers destruction.
"You belong to me now," he says. "Your body. Your mind. Your pain. All of it is mine to use as I see fit."
I don't respond. I don't know the rules yet. I don't know that silence is safer than speech.
"The first lesson is about expectations." He picks up a scalpel, turns it in the light. "You expect this to hurt. That's good. Expectations can be managed."
He sets the scalpel against my chest, just below the collarbone.
"But what you don't expect is worse."
He doesn't cut. He just holds the blade there, cold against my skin, while seconds stretch into minutes.
"The anticipation," Moore says softly. "The waiting. The not-knowing. That's where the real pain lives. Not in the wound. In the space before the wound."
He holds the scalpel there for an hour. Doesn't cut. Doesn't move. Just holds as he talks me through everything that is expected of me. Sex with him. With his friends. Random programming. Obedience. I don’t move. If I move the blade will cut me.
By the time he finally sets it down, I'm shaking so hard the chair rattles against the floor.
"Good," Moore says. "You're learning."
He walks away.
He doesn't touch me again that night.
He doesn't have to.
The lesson is already carved into my brain: the waiting is the weapon.
I come back screaming.
My throat is raw, my body convulsing against the restraints, every nerve on fire with remembered terror. The headset feels like it's burning into my skull, drilling through bone to reach the places I've hidden from everyone, including myself.
"Stop," I beg. "Please stop, I'll tell you anything, I'll do anything—"
"I don't want you to tell me anything." Webb's voice is patient, almost kind. "I want to see. I want to understand what's inside you that made a perfect weapon break his programming."
"There's nothing inside me." I'm sobbing now, ugly and broken. "I'm nothing. I'm no one. He made a mistake, he—"
"Jace Harrison doesn't make mistakes." Webb leans close, studies my face like I'm a specimen under glass. "He calculated. He assessed. He decided you were worth more than fifteen years of conditioning. That means there's something in you, Elliot Rowe. Something valuable. Something worth finding."
He straightens. Checks the monitor.
"We'll continue tomorrow. You need to rest. The brain can only process so much trauma at once before it starts to shut down, and I need you functional for the video calls."
He removes the headset, sets it on the cart, and wheels everything toward the door.
"Webb."
He pauses.
"Why are you doing this? What do you get out of it?"
He considers the question. For a moment, something almost human flickers in his hollow eyes.
"I built Jace Harrison from nothing," he says. "I took a privileged eight-year-old and turned him into the most efficient killer our organization has ever produced. That was my legacy. My contribution to The Silent."
He steps closer, looms over me.
"And then you came along, and everything I built started to fall apart.
Fifteen years of work, undone by a broken boy who can't even look me in the eye.
" His voice drops, turns cold. "I need to understand why.
I need to know what weakness I missed, what flaw in the conditioning let this happen.
Because if I don't, it could happen again. To other projects. Other weapons."
He turns away.