“You wouldn’t let a Roomba with a knife strapped to its back wandering around your house, right? It’s simply too irresponsible and dangerous. Well, think of the impacted as living Roombas with potential atomic bombs strapped to their backs.”

The chair I was seated in was well-padded and comfortable. I silently drummed my fingers on the armrest while flicking my gaze up and down nervously. I had never really been comfortable putting my emotions into words, let alone voicing them.

“Coming to terms with my flaws is the next part of the process. I get that. It’s the ‘doing something about it’ part that scares me. I don’t know if it’s because it feels like I’d be betraying who I am or something…” I trailed off as I stared vaguely at the wooden desk in front of me.

“And who would that person be?” Dr. Santos asked as he leaned forward slightly.

“I don’t know…” I began. “…The person defined by my moral code, maybe? The set of value upon which I built- I have tried to build myself up until now?”

I was not exactly avoiding Dr. Santos’ eyes, but it felt like a substantial effort I wasn’t willing to make, so instead, I kept staring intently at the swirling patterns covering the desk.

“Do you think that changing those values is a bad thing, then? Are they set in stone?” Dr. Santos asked.

“No… How do I know what’s good for me? I’m sorry, but the prospect of changing my personality without any insurance just feels... terrifying,” I replied nervously.

More than just being lost as to where to start, though, I was terrified at the very idea of dealing with it. I don’t like being pitted against my demons.

“And that is fine, Alex,” he answered as he leaned back into his chair, a calm expression on his face. “Sometimes, changing for the better means taking a leap of faith. It can be tough to face the unknown. But the first step is to trust your own judgment.”

“And what if I don’t?” I muttered.

“Well, that’s the thing. You’re the only one who can act on that. And the best way to get used to it is by repeated exposure. How is your anxiety today?” He asked in a warm yet low voice.

It was alright, all things considered. Well, ‘Alright’ as in ‘it’s a stable 7 out of 10 on my personal anxiety scale’. It might have sounded sad, but in truth, it was a vast improvement compared to the 8 to 10 out of 10 I usually went through. I hadn’t had an actual panic attack in weeks, which was huge.

“Better,” I smiled faintly. “I had a close call when I heard noises outside of my apartment the other day; it turned out to be some drunk dude kicking trashcans around. Still, it took a good hour to get under control.”

“That is very good, Alex,” He said warmly. “Now, do you remember how impossible that seemed at the beginning?”

“Yeah…” I grimaced. I remembered how Dr. Santos’ lessons seemed like little more than gris-gris or mantras at first. I had tried applying them but had failed hard the first few times.

Then eventually, one day, it kind of worked. From then on, it slowly picked up, and nowadays, when I felt the stress going up, I usually managed to prevent it from escalating into a full-blown panic attack by rationalizing and controlling my breath.

“And yet you’re still going forward,” he smiled. “Which is no small achievement!” He spoke like a proud father, which made me hide a smile that was pretty much an instinctual response to the compliment.

I liked these little moments of complicity that made me forget he was a therapist I was paying out of my own pocket—or, more accurately, my mom’s financial assistance. I still wasn’t comfortable with her giving me what little money she made when I was earning some on my own, but I wasn’t exactly in a position to turn it down.

“Want to know a little secret?” He said, a tinge of mirth to his voice.

I nodded.

“It’s not things that are getting better. It’s you. You’re getting better at dealing with things. Every day we’re closer to the end of our sessions,” He said with a smile that felt genuine.

“We’re not there yet…” I muttered. We still got a looooong way to go.

“No, we are not. But we are far away from where we started,” he said serenely.

“I—” I started as my phone buzzed, marking 21:00, the end of the session. I took it out to stop the notification and noticed with mild concern that the battery was reaching below 5%.

“I’ll try to keep going forward, then,” I conceded before getting up from my way too comfortable chair.

“You know,” Dr. Santos sighed. “You don’t have to leave right when the session ends. I won’t charge you more to get to the end of the discussion.”

“I know, I know, but- I gotta go. I’m sorry,” I winced at my half-assed apology. He doesn’t like it when I do that. But I like it even less when I feel like I’m taking time away from him.

I reviewed the session in my mind as I made my way back home. Deal with problems as they come. Dr. Santos had said. Yeah, but how do I deal with a problem if I don’t know it’s coming, huh?

I struggled to keep my anxiety to an acceptable level while I crossed the mostly empty streets. I did not like this place. This district wasn’t particularly poor or rundown, but everything here gave me the creeps. The buildings were of a boring early 2000’s design, faded pastel colors, and five stories high in squareish clumps that all looked like giant cinder blocks. The buildings themselves stood like cacti in the middle of a gigantic paved desert. As if they had planned to build many more in it but had simply forgotten or just stopped caring after laying the tiles down. Even the floor was dull. The square concrete tiles were made of fake gray pebbles that made it look more like aquarium flooring rather than actual city-grade ground.

I warily kept my distance from the now condemned premises of a bankrupt private clinic from the ’70s that took up a few square kilometers to my right. I had visited the Molère hospital a few times before it closed a few years ago, and even then, it already looked as if it were on the brink of abandonment. The outside wall looked more like melted candle wax than cement, and the parking lot surrounding the building was riddled with cracks that usually appeared when trees were planted inside.

What I hated the most about the Capucine district was how eerily quiet it got at sundown. The lack of stores and public amenities made for an exceptionally uninteresting yet spooky part of the town. Which incidentally would make it a very prolific drug-trafficking turf.

My mood grew worse by the minute as I made my way through the ghost town. I was reflecting on how much I did NOT want to get mugged when I heard what sounded like a muffled scream from within the abandoned clinic grounds. Nope. Not dealing with this. My brain probably made it up. I quickened my pace as I furiously tried not to think about what I had just heard.

“Help!”

This time, a clear shout came from within the compound. That gave me pause

Wait… Maybe I can call the cops? I should—My train of thoughts got interrupted as a pained yelp resounded through the empty streets. Shit. I tried not to panic as I tried to think about what I should do.

Okay, I have to call for help. There’s no one around, and I don’t think yelling to call for the neighbors will get me anywhere, especially seeing how far the nearest residential building was. I did what I assumed was the next logical step and whipped out my phone. I dialed 112 and waited a long, tense 10 seconds before the call finally connected, to my immense relief.

“Name, location, and the nature of your emergency?” a voice spoke. The quality of the sound was really poor, and the static almost made it impossible to understand what was said.

“Hi, my n- name is Alexandre Sangain, and I’d like to report a… crime. Or worse,” I stuttered as stress made me stumble over some of my words. I stopped talking as the static faded halfway through my sentence. I looked at the cracked screen on my phone and froze in horror when I remembered the low battery.

Shit. What do I do?

First, I had to make sure of what was going on. Do I, though? I mean, I have to help. But am I in a position to help?

Another scream.

How long is it going to take for me to stop living in fear of what might happen? I remembered the words Dr. Santos had told me less than an hour ago. ‘Things don’t get better. I get stronger.’ And right now, I had to be strong. What if that guy died because of me, though? Okay, but… what if I died, though? It’s not like I haven’t thought about it before… No, that wouldn’t do. I wasn’t suicidal anymore, but I didn’t want to live a life in fear. Plus, there is no better way to deal with anxiety than through exposure. Right? Now stop mentally debating yourself and get moving!

I swallowed hard and finally came to a conclusion. If I didn’t at least try to help someone in danger, I would officially be ‘betraying’ my moral code like I had told Dr. Santos I didn’t want to do. I had to do something.

Now, do I run for help and risk having whoever’s screaming die first, or do I check it out? What if they’re hurt and time is of the essence? I should definitely check first… right? If it’s something like a mugging, I’d hear them shooting guns or yelling, right?

I braced myself and started jogging towards the source of the sound. I winced at every step, fully expecting to find something very gruesome at any moment. The closer I got to where I thought the screams were coming from, the less aware of my own body I became. By the time I heard the voice again, I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath. I struggled to breathe out quietly as I rounded a corner. At this moment, I distinctly heard somebody whimper in pain a few meters ahead of me.

The sound seemed to come from inside of a building, the door of which was ajar. I swallowed hard as I decided to quietly get closer.

I carefully peeked around the door, trying not to make a sound as I took in the scene happening inside. The place looked like an otherwise dull and empty lobby room had hosted some kind of a tornado party. Broken plastic benches littered the ground, some of the windows were smashed, and heaps of rubble occupied most corners.

In the center of the room laid a man in casual clothes, moaning in pain and clutching his stomach. He was small and stocky and looked to be bleeding from his arms. Even though the room wasn’t lit up, I could see that he looked to be in great pain.

Next to him, facing away from the door, was a tall bald man wearing a blood-stained white shirt. His smokey gray trousers were kept up by suspenders, like some kind of B-movie mafioso. The man was, I realized, also built like a freaking tank. Broad-shouldered and muscles clearly discernible through his shirt, he was also a good two heads taller than me. I would guess that he’d be nearing the 2m mark.

While I took in the scene before me, the bald man spoke.

“Aren’t you tired of this, Tim? Don’t you want it to be over?”

The man on the floor -Tim, presumably- answered with another round of half-choked sobs. The man in the suspenders sighed. At this point, I thought it clear that I should do something, at least try to call for help. But what? My phone is dead. And I don’t even know if I can find somebody in time.

“You know, Tim,” the man started, a heavy dose of condescension in his tone, “I don’t think you’ve fully grasped the seriousness of the situation. Scamming us was not the play here. Do you think we would be so stupid to think it wasn’t you?”

Mind racing, I pulled out my phone again in a last-ditch effort to try and call 112. To my immense dissapointment, the device didn’t respond to any key presses. I decided the next best alternative would be to run away. I darted back, aiming roughly towards the direction I thought the nearest building was.

My phone miraculously decided to come back from the dead with a light flash of the top LED. Oh my god, yes! I mentally sighed in relief and decided to take cover behind a large stell sign.

I dialed 112 once again, and to my utter satisfaction, it connected immediately.

“112, may I have your name, location, and nature of the emergency?” a feminine voice answer in a curt voice.

“Hi, my name is Al—” I started before being cut off by a large and hairy hand suddenly grabbing me by the collar. Said hand then threw me to the floor where I rolled. I kept my phone in my hand but didn’t think of calling for help as I gazed up at the stocky man who had thrown me.

“I… Wha—” I started in bewilderment as he suddenly threw himself on me and yanked the phone out of my hand. He immediately followed by putting me in a chokehold that sent waves of pain throughout my whole upper-body. I tried to yell in pain but failed to do so as my windpipe was slowly crushed by the man’s weight.

“Wrong number,” he barked into my phone and promptly bashed it on the floor four times while still pinning me to the ground with his other hand. After the second whack, the faintly lit screen completely turned off. His chokehold and the pressure of his knee on my windpipe prevented me from screaming and forced me to inhale dust as I hyperventilated.

“Marc, come here, we got ourselves a spectator here!” The man yelled into a tiny walkie-talkie he pulled from his front pocket. “Now, you stay quiet, and you live, got it?”

I nodded in panic, and the man released a little bit of the pressure on my neck. My closed eyes only saw flashes of red and static as we waited for his partner in crime to show up. My mind raced through all of the worst scenarios that could happen tonight at a pace I didn’t think possible.

The last drops of my panic-induced adrenaline caused me to start when I saw the accomplice—the bald one—stepping out of the abandoned lobby.

Fuck he looks even scarier from up close.

He walked quickly towards me and crouched next to my head. He inspected my face for a few tense seconds as I raggedly breathed dust and slightly drooled on the floor. After a few instants of staring, he looked down at the man mistaking my back for a snow-sled.

“Who sent him?” he asked in a cold voice. “How did he find us?”

Are you kidding? The whole neighborhood probably heard you! I thought in between two dusty breaths. The incompatibility between my lungs and the sandy nature of the air I breathed in caused me to cough, inhaling even more air in the process. I tried my hardest to move my mouth away from the ground as I gasped for cleaner air.

“What’s the matter, kid?” The man on my back spoke, “Dog got your tongue?”

“Cats do that, not dogs,” Marc said dismissively as he turned his gaze back to me. “Never mind what animal made you mute, you better have an answer for us, boy.”

A subtle click coming from behind his back punctuated the inquiry. I finally managed to jerk my head to allow me to breathe properly and sucked in a large amount of sweet, sweet, dust-free air.

“I wasn’t—I’m not— ” was all I managed to get out before the man grabbed my right hand and brought it closer to him, causing me to yelp in pain again. He then proceeded to place a knife on the middle joint of my index finger.

My heartbeat reached a BPM I’d classify as hard techno worthy. This situation had quickly gone far worse than I could have imagined.

“Nobody sent me!” I cried out, painfully aware of the pressure on my finger. “I was just passing by. I just heard somebody scream!”

“Yeah, right,” the man behind me snorted. “As if you were randomly walking in the middle of buttfuck nowhere. Come on, kid, you think we’re stupid? Who sent you?”

“Nobody sent me, I swear!” I cried out again. “I just heard somebody scream, and I wanted to help!”

Tears started bubbling at the corners of my eyes as I tried to pull back my hand from the vise-like grip to no avail. The man had an iron grip, not to mention hands twice the size of mine.

Marc’s only warning was a sigh as he proceeded to chop half of my middle finger off.

I dreaded moments like these more than anything else on the planet. That moment right before shit was about to hit the fan. Where you didn’t feel the pain yet, but you knew it was coming. I braced myself with what little mental fortitude I could muster. And then I yelled. Or I tried to, but the bald man—Marc—immediately stuck his massive paw over my mouth and nose, effectively sealing them. I kept yelling in rage, but the sound I made was barely more than a muffled whine at this point. It was like trying to break glass underwater, the intent was clear, but the result was pitiful at best.

After what felt simultaneously like an eternity and a few seconds, I ran out of breath and stopped yelling.

Marc let go of my mouth and wiped the snot and tears out of his hand on my back as I sobbed and choked on the dusty ground.

Reality slowly slipped away, as the only thing I could focus on was the pain throbbing at the end of my now half-finger.

Then something weird happened.

The pain… went away. It wasn’t immediate, but it receded rather quickly, like a needle cooling down after being sterilized by an open flame. All in all, it took around 5 seconds for it to completely go away. I opened my eyes and looked at my hand in confusion, and to my relief and surprise, I found that my finger had somehow grown back. I didn’t even think of the implications; I was just glad that the pain had stopped. But I then realized that something was really wrong. The regrown finger looked blood red, and its shape was wrong. It looked like some kind of… whatever an artist on an especially severe LSD trip might paint if you asked him to paint a finger.

“Holy fuck, what is that?” The man on my back jumped back, freeing me of the armlock.

As he let go of me, I quickly turned around and sat up to look at the object of our collective astonishment. In the last few seconds, the skin had turned from blood red to pale pink, but the shape was still really wrong. That’s when the realization hit me.

“I’m… I’m an Impacted?” I asked in fascinated horror. The implications were just too hard to deal with right now. Tales of people getting powers in unexpected situations were pretty widespread but had always seemed so surreal until now. The thing was, I realized with great chagrin that the ability to regrow shitty limbs would probably not be very helpful in my current predicament.

“Well, I’ll be fucked!” Marc marveled at the revelation. “A god damn down-to-earth circus freak, right here in our hands,” He got up with a really creepy smile on his face.

My dear old friend Tim chose that particular moment to act. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him peek through the door and look straight at me, then at Marc, and then at one of the exit opposite of us. Which he promptly started running towards.

As my barely nascent hopes of being rescued were crushed like dirt under Tim’s soles, I turned back my gaze to his former captor.

“Stay back, or I’ll use my full power on you!” I tried bluffing, beads of sweat probably covering most of my face at the blatant lie. It did seem to affect my formerly improvised chiropractor somewhat, but mark didn’t look as fazed by the statement. He still had that creepy smile, as if he had just found out he could torture a puppy in total impunity.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said with confidence as he put the knife back into his back pocket. “You’re right, I wouldn’t mess with that…” He spoke smoothly as I backed away.

As if this hadn’t gone bad enough already, this was the exact moment my clumsy feet chose to trip over a crack in the concrete floor. My powers very obviously did not extend to my sense of balance, as I ungracefully fell backward on my butt. I barely got enough time to catch my bearings when everything turned bright white for a fraction of a second, then all was blackness.

I woke up with the worst headache I’ve ever had in my entire life. Grabbing my head, I tried sitting up but failed immediately as a wave of nausea hit me. I purged the entirety of my stomach contents on the floor.

“Please don’t do that again,” a voice came from a few meters away. My ears were ringing, and everything around me seemed to be set on spinning as fast as it could. I struggled to take in the scene around me, but I distinctly saw some kind of vertical bars a few centimeters away. I wiped my mouth and chin of the remaining bile as I tried to focus on the strange shapes around me. After a solid 10 seconds of intense concentration, my vision started to sharpen a little bit.

I was in a jail cell. Or some kind of a large cage. The floor looked like solid concrete, so I’d lean towards the former. On the other side of the bars was a rather filthy and poorly lit room that looked like a cross between a creepy basement and a dirty gym locker room. Half of the walls were covered with cracked yellowish tiles, and the whole place reeked of humidity and mold. A few meters outside of my cell was a metal desk with a Pixar-style green lamp on it. In the small area illuminated by the light, I could discern the shape of a man sitting in an office chair, legs on the desk, and reading something. It looked like a magazine or something too thin to be an actual book.

I quickly reached into my pockets for anything of use, but sadly they had stripped me of pretty much everything. The only thing they had left was an old plastic button I kept on me in case the one above my zipper broke. Those kinds of concerns had lost some of their weight after the vents of today. Funny how, when terrible things happened, day-to-day nuisances tend to lose their significance. That was, I reflected, not the best time to have that kind of thought.

“If you don’t want me to make you lick it, you better not do it again,” he said, waving something in the direction of the vomit in front of me. It took me a few seconds to realize that while he was indeed holding some kind of a magazine in one hand, he was also holding a gun in the other. A gun he very casually waved in my direction as he spoke. I would not be betting on my newfound ability against a bullet to the head. Or any vital part of my body, for that matter. For all I knew, this was a one-time thing, or worse, it might regrow things the wrong war and kill me in excruciating pain.

“What are you going to do with me?” I asked anxiously. The tears had gone, but the stress was just as present as before I had been knocked out. “I told your friends I’m nobody. I don’t even know how you guys are. You could—”

“Don’t know. Don’t really care,” the man cut me off. He put his gun down on the table and flipped a page in his magazine. “Now, just shut the fuck up. I’m paid to shoot you if you ask too many questions.”

Once again, I decided to inspect the odd protrusion that passed for a regrown finger on my hand. It had lost its pinkish hue and now looked way paler than my natural tanned skin. The color wasn’t the only thing that had changed about my finger. While the overall shape still looked odd, the bones were clearly where they belonged, as I could still use my finger somewhat normally. It was the muscles and tendons that bothered me. They were twisted and looked wrong; whenever I flexed the finger, I could see knots and bulges form under the pale skin. Although the sight was quite gruesome, at least it didn’t hurt, I rationalized. Also, having a weird finger wasn’t the biggest threat to my life as of right now.

I wondered what would have happened if my hand had been cut off entirely. Would it have regrown all messed-up like my finger? Would the regrowing thing even work? Was this thing permanent, or was it like a fluke?

Maybe I was tripping all along because of the loss of blood?

Unlikely. I sighed. The vomiting and headache parts had been real enough. In dreams, I had theorized, when you’re not sure you’re dreaming, it’s because you’re not awake enough to realize that your senses aren’t sending the right signals. When you’re awake and feeling, you fully understand the extent to which everything sucks.

To get rid of the somewhat depressing and truly useless train of thought, I started inspecting my surroundings again. I had noticed at first that the room extended to my right. What I hadn’t realized was that there were other cells in it. Out of the three that occupied most of this basement, the one I resided in was the closest one to the stairs and was currently the only one occupied. The other two looked like they had been used quite recently, as they were—comparatively when compared to the rest of the basement—relatively clean. So they either had cleaned them after their last occupant had left, or they had simply not cared about the rest of the room the last time they cleaned it. Thinking about this was not helpful in the slightest. I sighed.

I was still quietly panicking and looking for a way out when a noise came from the corner of the room behind my warden. As he looked up, I understood that there must have been stairs facing away from me because I clearly heard heavy steps and a metallic rattle coming from upstairs.

“Who’s there?” the warden asked, hovering his hand over his gun.

“Second one in a day! I better go buy a fucking lottery ticket after this!” A familiar male voice exclaimed. “This one was lurking around the building and didn’t see or hear me coming, when… BOOM, bat to the head. Too bad she was wearing a bike helmet, though… I guess Fred will be happier if she’s alive.”

As I tried to put a face to the voice, the man reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped close enough that I could see that he had something slung over his shoulder. No, not something, someone. It looked like he was carrying a girl, who was wrapped up in chains for some reason.

“Who is she? And why’s she dressed up as Houdini?” The warden asked with.

“Who?” The man stopped in confusion and looked at his colleague. That’s when it clicked; that man was Marc’s sidekick. The one who couldn’t tell cat and dogs apart.

“Houdini, Samir. He was a magician. The guy that could escape chains and straitjackets,” the warden said somewhat tiredly. “Anyway, what was she doing? Journalist? Cop?”

“Huh, I don’t think she’s a magician, though.” Samir looked more confused than anything at the explanation. “Anyway, she has no ID, no nothing, so we’re going to have to wait until she wakes up before asking.”

“Alright, just drop her in the next cell. Here’s the lock.” The warden put down his magazine and threw a thick brass padlock to Samir, who caught it with his free hand

“Hey there, lil’ fella,” he said as he tapped on the bars of my cage. “Can’t regrow your way outta here now, can you?”

I didn’t reply. For the first time in a long while, anxiety wasn’t preventing me from speaking. I just didn’t have an answer to the unbelievably dumb question Samir had just asked me. So I just quirked a brow and remained silent.

“Hah! Pussy!” He laughed as he opened the cell next to mine and unceremoniously dumped his captive on the floor. He then proceeded to lock the door with a heavy-duty padlock—similar to the one on my own cell door.

“Call me when she wakes up, Ed. I want to be there,” Samir said as he made for the stairs. “And stop reading porn on the job.”

“What? It’s not—”

Samir just barked out a crude laugh as he started climbing the stairs.

After about half a minute of awkward silence following his colleague’s departure, Ed spoke.

“It’s not porn. It’s cars. Cars!” he said in a desperate voice.

“Uh… Okay?” I answered, not really sure if he was talking to me. Why would I give a flying fuck about what you’re reading in the current circumstances? Speaking of which, why am I not having a panic attack right now?

It was odd, but I found myself to be reasonably calm. Sure, I was freaking out on the inside, but I experienced none of the usually crippling symptoms of my regular panic attacks. Maybe my brain knows that making me more scared right now might not be the best plan?

Rationally speaking, it made more sense to keep the freaking out for after the stressful events. Right now, I needed to be sharp. So basically, I would postpone my panic attack, I decided.

I took the opportunity to take a closer inspection at my fellow captive. She was wearing a black biker outfit. Probably leather by the look of the wear marks on her jacket. She also wore black Doc Martens and a single biker glove in her left hand.

I squinted my eyes to get a better look at her dimly lit face. She was dirty blond, with long messy loose hair and her face was of a light pink complexion. She didn’t look particularly pretty. Not exactly ugly either, but the combination of her slightly too large nose and pronounced brow made her look a little bit… Neanderthalian? Wait, that’s actually super mean. Maybe she’s cavewoman-like but in an okay sort of way? Definitely a strong 8 out of 10 on the paleolithic beauty scale.

Jokes aside, the bruises on her face might have had something to do with her current appearance. She looked like she had been repeatedly punched in the nose and eyes. I couldn’t see it under her hair, but I was willing to bet there would be a large bump under there as well.

Aside from that, she looked quite fit. With visible muscled calves and hints of a flat stomach visible from under her jacket, she had the physique of somebody who ran often. She didn’t look to be very tall, but it was kind of hard to judge when she was lying down. I also noted that she wasn’t particularly curvy either, just fit.

I crouched next to the bars separating our cages to get a better look at her bindings. As I looked at the surprisingly large amount of chains constricting her arms, I noticed her lips quivering a little. A cursory glance towards the desk confirmed that the warden wasn’t watching.

“Hey… Are you okay?” I whispered as quietly as I could.

To my astonishment, she replied something in a whisper. Although I couldn’t quite make out the words.

“I’m sorry I didn’t catch that. Are you awake?” I asked tentatively.

“...tell him I’m puking or something,” she replied in a barely audible whisper.

“What?” I asked in confusion.

“Tell the porn guy that I’ve soiled myself and that it stinks,” she said again, a tad louder.

This girl has had a few of her bearings knocked out, it seems.

“Uh, why? Do you think he will care?” I quietly asked, still as confused as before.

“No, but he might get pissed enough that he will come close to the bars, then we enact our escape plan,” she replied with barely veiled exasperation.

She’s off her fucking marbles.

“Uh…” I very confidently whispered again, “...what plan, exactly?”

“You let me worry about that part,” she whispered back. “Your part in this is that you grab the dude’s attention, tell him I’ve soiled myself or something.”

This really sounds like a crap plan. Never mind that, why is she insisting on telling the guy she shit herself? Isn’t there a better way to grab his attention? Plus, if he really doesn’t care, he might not even move from his desk. If we’re going to do this, I’d rather come up with a better idea.

“Wait, I have another idea,” she whispered.

As I mulled over the matter, the girl started shaking in her bindings. No, not shaking, I realized, convulsing, hopefully on purpose.

“Pipe it down over there, I’m trying to read,” Ed called from behind his desk.

“Uh… I think she’s having some kind of a seizure or something,” I said.

“Not my problem,” Ed replied.

“Won’t your bosses be angry if she dies before you’ve… Interrogated her or something?” I asked.

“Don’t know, don’t care,” Ed said as he kept reading his magazine.

If I had to bring him to her fast enough, I had to think fast. I need something that will make him come right next to us to knock him out or something. Maybe I can grab him through the bars?

“I think she’s shaking her bindings loose.” I didn’t even manage to convince myself with the bald-faced lie.

Incredibly enough, that got the man moving from his desk; he crossed the room in a few quick steps to get a closer look at my cellmate’s chains.

“No, she isn’t, you fucking jackass.” He said as he looked at me.

I don’t know what happened exactly, but the next second he fell to the ground with a dull sound. It took me several seconds before I realized that a ten centimeters long steel punch was protruding out of his left temple.

I jumped back as I realized the man before me had just died. I looked at the girl in the cell next to mine.

“What the fuck just happened?” I yelled out in panic.

“I solved our problem. You’re welcome,” she replied with a sadistic grin on her broken face.