Psion Delta (30 page)

With
the support of a guard, she finally got up and hopped unstably on her good
foot. They passed the window of a truck where several guards had been standing
on the bed to film the fight. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the
glass. Katie stared at herself, barely recognizing the image facing her. Her
skin was badly scarred—more so than she remembered. It would be even worse
after the new gouges in her face from the rocks and blows from Leviathan’s
knuckles had healed. Her eyes were so badly bloodshot that the sclera of her
eyes appeared to have been dyed red. Before she had time to react, the guard
jerked her forward and locked her into the wheelchair. Then more guards
surrounded both her and Leviathan and wheeled them off through a tunnel of
chanting prisoners who still shouted her new name in worshipful adoration. She
glowed all the way to the infirmary.

The
injured foot and ankle took more time to heal than any of her previous
injuries. The doctor said it was a bad fracture, and she wasn’t allowed to walk
on it for several weeks. She returned to her cell in a cast and reveled in the
knowledge that she was the best fighter in the prison. The effects of her
victory were apparent immediately. “Katie Carpenter” had been erased from the
tongues and minds of every person within the prison walls, guards and inmates
alike. The only person who still referred to her by her old title was Schuller,
whose dislike for her had grown with every win.

Eight
weeks later, after being given a clean statement of health, the Queen eagerly
anticipated her next fight. Who would they think to pit her against next? Two
weeks went by without any word, so she decided to ask. The guard, Kosco,
grunted something in an impatient voice and moved on to the next bean slot. She
broached the subject a second time during her walk in the yard, but those
guards responded that they weren’t told about the fight schedules.

This
behavior continued for another month. The Queen was on the verge of doing
something bold to get the guards’ attention when they gave her a fight. She
hoped it would be a rematch against Leviathan, but instead she faced a lesser
man. She easily won. The crowd again roared its approval. They hadn’t forgotten
her new title. She was on top of the world once more.

The
fights continued, but the time between them grew longer and longer, until
finally she realized her error: she had convinced everyone that she would win
every time—that she could not be beaten. And as much as the guards and suits
liked to watch the Queen fight, they had a much greater interest in gambling on
fights where the outcome was unknown.

Around
the same time this realization dawned on her, the Queen noticed other changes
that were happening at Ultramax—things she both saw and heard. Rumors reached
her of fighters who scratched and cut their faces before matches to appear more
intimidating. Fight winners were turning down conjugal visits and asking
instead to have their eyes permanently reddened. Apparently, these fads were
growing in popularity. She also heard talk of more “anomalies” being sent to
the prison—people with the same condition the doctors had testified about in
her trial so long ago. Anomaly Thirteen, they’d called it. This excited her. If
more of these anomalies came, she’d face better challengers and fight more
often.

She
spent her days at the bean slot listening and talking to other inmates about
who was matched up against whom, who had won and lost recent fights, always
trying to piece together information about the hierarchy she was now deeply a
part of. People gave her answers because of the respect she’d earned by the
shedding of her own blood. Yes, there were new arrivals, and from the sound of
it, some seemed as unbeatable as she.

More
anomalies like me
.
Worthy opponents
. This intrigued her.
The desire to fight grew stronger. Finally the slip of paper for her next fight
came. The Queen held it tightly and kissed it before reading. Her opponent’s
name was only Diego. The whispers throughout the halls said that he, too,
possessed her anomaly.

He
was, by far, the ugliest person she’d ever seen. An enormous scar ran up his
face from his chin, twisting apart his upper and lower lip into segments. It
then traveled through his nose, where his nostril was missing, and stopped
above the empty socket of his right eye. The hideous disfigurement forcefully
reminded the Queen of her own lost beauty. The other half of his face was
unscathed, the other eye as perfectly good and normal as anyone else’s. In
fact, the Queen could tell that Diego had once been very handsome.

She
had, for a brief amount of time, considered throwing this fight. She hoped that
by losing she might increase interest in her stock as a fighter. Yet when she
stood in the yard that night surrounded by people chanting for the Queen—people
expecting her to win—she wondered how she had ever entertained such an idea.
Losing was not in her blood. It would never be. Whatever transformation she had
gone through on that fateful day when she’d killed her parents had made it
impossible for her to accept anything but victory. The only way to get back in
the fights was by reminding the crowd why they loved her.

She
won the fight. Diego fought well, almost as well as Leviathan. The crowd loved
her, cheered her, screamed when she won. And the Queen knew she had made the
right choice.

For
her reward, she chose the shave. She had to wait a week before getting it. It
was a long week in her cell. Her doubts returned. Had she made a mistake?
Should she have lost? When would her next fight come? Had she fought for the last
time? Not knowing these answers ate at her like an aggressive cancer and made
her ill every time she ate.

Schuller
was the guard on duty in her block the day of her shave. He said nothing to her
as they walked to the infirmary. The Queen wondered if she’d become just
another prisoner to him that he didn’t like. If so, she almost pitied him. She
had never forgotten the names burned into her memory: Schuller, Kosco, Meacham,
and Crowther. Crowther no longer worked at the prison. That didn’t matter. She wouldn’t
be in these walls forever, either.

Over
the years, the Queen had visited the infirmary dozens of times. She knew most
of the nurses and doctors by name. Not once had she given them any problems—not
during shaves and manicures, nor while having her wounds mended. Schuller
brought her into the room and prepared to lock her onto the operating table. As
always, she complied perfectly and calmly while the Elite got his keys.

Behind
her, the nurse prepared the supplies, placing everything neatly on a tray next
to the table. Usually they waited until the Queen was secured on the table
before bringing out the sharp objects. The Queen missed nothing, especially not
the straight razor already on the tray next to the cream and oil.
Sloppy
idiots. Thank you!
She thought of her life up to this point: the fights,
the days of sitting in her cell not knowing when or if she’d be called on again
to entertain the crowds. Most of all, she thought of the oath she’d sworn to
herself to be free. That razor was the chance she’d been waiting for.

After
Schuller removed the cuff from her first wrist, the Queen acted with
premeditated efficiency. With her free hand, she grabbed his keys and collar
activator. Next, she kicked him hard in the stomach. Then, in one smooth
motion, she snatched the razor from the tray and had it at the neck of the
nearest nurse before Schuller could recover.

“Your
gun and radio now!” the Queen ordered as she stomped on the collar activator.
The nurse squealed and quivered under the Queen’s tight grip.

Schuller
slid into a sitting position on the floor and rested his long body against the
wall.

“Now,
Schuller!”

“No.”
Schuller calmly took his weapon from his holster and trained his sights. “No,
Carpenter, I’m not going to do that.”

The
blade pressed deeper into the nurse’s throat and drew a red line of blood.

“Please,
Schuller,” the nurse pleaded. The Queen couldn’t remember anyone crying so
much, and wondered if the tears tasted as good as the woman’s terror.

“She’ll
kill us if I give her my gun,” Schuller said. The Queen saw no pity in his
face. None for himself. None for the nurse.

“Please
let me go,” the nurse begged as the blade cut her more. “Katie, pleeeeease!”

Schuller
stood, his gun still trained on the Queen. Every muscle in her body tensed, ready
for any sign that he might pull the trigger. She shielded everything but her
head behind the nurse. Keeping his eyes on the Queen, Schuller brought his
radio to his lips to alert security.

“I
said you were sick little freak the day you arrived here, didn’t I?”

The
Queen shoved the nurse at Schuller. The gun went off, barely missing both
women. As the nurse and the Elite collided, the Queen yanked at the gun in
Schuller’s hand, but his grip was tight and the gun fired a second time, again
narrowly missing her. Pushing his arm up and away from her with the hand still
in a dangling cuff, she slashed at him with the razor blade.

The
nurse rolled out of the way, gripping her bleeding neck. Schuller used his arm
to stop the Queen’s blade from hitting his stomach. They tussled on the floor,
and the blade slipped from her hand, skittering under a small refrigerator.
Schuller tried to aim his gun at her, but the Queen forced his wrist around
until the gun pointed back at his chest. With both her hands on the gun, she
pulled the trigger.

Schuller’s
body trembled at the invasion. Then something closed around the Queen’s ankle.
She looked back and saw a cuff connecting her to the leg of the operating
table. The nurse scrambled away and hid behind a rolling cabinet out of sight,
still clutching her wounded neck.

“No!”
the Queen shouted, pulling at her leg. “Take this thing off of me now! Right
now! Let me go!”

Schuller,
bleeding profusely from his chest, ignored the screams and brought his radio to
his lips a second time. “Infirmary . . . code—” The radio fell from his dead
hand. The Queen screamed at the nurse. Then she screamed at Schuller’s body,
but neither responded no matter whatever hellish names and curses she cast at
them. The guards arrived, but she complied with their orders to give up her gun
only when her neck began to burn from the shock of the collar.

When
the Queen woke up, she was no longer in her cell of nearly three years. She was
in a dark room not much bigger than a closet. She sat at the bean slot listening
for a long time, but heard no sounds of other inmates. Much later, when a guard
brought her meal, he spat in the bowl as he passed it through, not saying a
word. Days later a sponge was shoved through the slot, damp and smelling like
pine and piss.

“No
more showers,” the voice ordered. “You clean yourself with this.”

It
took weeks, but her life of isolation slowly sunk in. Nagging at her always was
the knowledge that she’d blown her one chance at freedom. If she had
immediately turned and killed the nurse after shooting Schuller, the cuff
wouldn’t have been placed on her ankle. Now her chances at freedom from this
tiny, lonely cell were nil.

Food
came. She ate it. Once every month or so, they brought her a book. Sometimes
she read it. Sometimes she didn’t. Occasionally she’d rip a page out of the
book if she didn’t like the words. Usually she ate the paper. Her food came in
wood bowls. Her spoons were made of plastic. She could no longer see her own
reflection in them, so she spent hours running her fingers lightly across her
skin, learning intimately every line and scar and imperfection. With the
plastic handles, she scratched her visage into the wall, exaggerating every
flaw.

I
am hideous.

It
took many months to get the portrait the way she imagined herself. She was no
artist, but her work was good. When it was done, she stared at it for a long
time, seeing the monster she had become. Then she began a new sketch, this one
showed what she would have looked like if she’d never gone to prison. She removed
the blemishes and marks on her skin, working and working at it until she felt
satisfied she’d done it correctly.

Equally
hideous.

It
was the woman untransformed. The woman who hadn’t embraced the freedom offered
her those years ago, her mind trapped in a shell of normalcy and naïveté. The
Queen detested it, but left it on the wall so she could see them side by side
and hate them both.

In
a meaningless march of monotony, time passed around her and her cell, but it
was apart from the Queen. She occupied herself as best as she could, but the
isolation was torturous to her mind and spirit. During that time, to help her
cope, her image of herself changed like an ever-turning kaleidoscope. She saw
herself as a creature separated from the world not only in body, but also in a
much more ethereal way. She began to believe that she must be kept apart for
reasons she could only guess at. Was it that her transformation—her anomaly—had
made her more than a human? Would this time away from the common man help her
grow and become even more powerful?

Her
imaginations suffered a winding path of climbs and falls that took her from the
heights of a goddess-like entity to the depths of a wretched creature of
Calvinistic origin, created only to be tormented at the pleasure of a cold,
cruel deity. She had spoiled her life. Fate had spoiled her life. Perhaps it
didn’t matter who had spoiled it because the consequences were the same. She
was Queen of nothing but a small room in the middle of a desert prison’s
basement. She was no longer a beauty, but the Beast. She etched more pictures
into the walls, filling them top to bottom with the strange visions of herself
and the world she wanted to reshape.