“Yes.”
“Do you remember life before that?”
Alik swallowed hard and looked out his window for a moment before responding. “Eidetic memory, remember?”
“Well, yeah, but I figured it happened once you were dosed and made…meta.”
“No, I have always had a perfect memory. The serum just enhanced it.” He pursed his lips together tightly, reached into the center console and grabbed the sports drink he had been sipping trying to replenish his fluids after getting sick a dozen miles back.
“Oh, wow. Alik I’m sorry you remember everything. Some things I’m glad time has made blurry to me.”
Alik shrugged, dismissively. “Back to your story, little sparrow,”
“Right, the story.” Farrow gripped the steering wheel tightly, but she kept going.
“Bjorn took a special liking to me,” Farrow’s voice sounded very small, like a little girl’s, but she kept going. “Even once I survived the first week and was sent to the girl’s barracks section A for the ‘new recruits,’ he would come find me and have me go work with him in his office. I would try to hide from him, but he always found me. I would ask for extra duties so I would be unavailable. I befriended the platoon leaders and instructors as much as I could—as long as they were women.”
“Why only women, Farrow? What happened?”
Farrow tried to take a deep breath, instead her throat hitched painfully. She let out a coughing fit. Alik offered her a drink to soothe her throat. After a sip, she got her coughing under control enough to talk. But her voice sounded distinctly different—pinched, tight and raspy.
“I never talk about this Alik. Once I tell you what happened to me, I never want to discuss this again. Are we clear?”
“If that’s what you want, of course,” Alik agreed to her stipulations sensing how important it was for her to feel in control of this conversation.
“He would come to my room in the dormitory late at night. The first time it happened I was just a little girl. I thought he was coming to be nice to me. He wanted to…” Farrow’s voice caught. “Alik, he said he liked me and just wanted to make sure I had enough blankets. It was a cold night—winter in Germany is very cold. He brought me a blanket the next night and I remember watching his beady eyes catch the courtyard’s light coming in from my small window. The blanket billowed over me and I... I giggled. It looked like a big soft billowing cloud. After losing my mommy and never having known my dad, the extra attention seemed nice—at first.”
Farrow stopped talking long enough to take another sip of the sports drink. Alik heard her voice tighten with emotion and knew this must be really hard to talk about. He even wondered if she ever told anyone else about the inappropriate treatment she suffered at the hands of that sick bastard, Bjorn.
But what Alik was having a really hard time doing was controlling his temper. Hearing the doe-eyed, sincere girl sitting beside him regress in body language and voice into a sweet little girl, made him crazy with rage. And hearing that new small voice roughen with unshed tears based on terror made him want to go beat the crap out of the monster who did that to her.
Now, Alik needed to take a slow, calming breath because he was very close to needing her to pull over again. This time he didn’t want to vomit so much as punch the hell out of some poor tree trunk.
Oh hell, he thought. If this conversation goes in the direction I think it’s going, I may need to do both.
“It seemed nice at first. What changed?” He prodded gently, through clenched teeth.
“Well, the visits became every night. He would say he was coming to ‘tuck me in’ at night. He’d…” she swallowed hard, “he said I was special. He called me beautiful and would tuck my long hair behind my ears. He would want to brush it out for me. His favorite was after I’d showered and washed my hair. Eventually, he insisted that I shower and leave my hair wet and tangled so he could come ‘help me’ with it.”
Nervously, Farrow ran her hand down the back of her cropped hair.
“Is that why you wear it cut short now?”
“Yes,” she said abruptly.
“The attentions progressed from him running his hands down my body when he’d ‘tuck me in’ and way too long hair brushing sessions to…more.” Farrow’s need to leave details out was completely understandable to Alik. Besides, he was feeling the need to be sick for entirely different reasons than retro-cogging.