Chapter 1: Into the Abyss (4)
It started over a mistake—a message Elyse sent to the wrong target, one who turned out to be the relative of a local official. The target family complained, the compound's regional liaison exerted pressure, and Ahab needed a scapegoat.
Elyse was the scapegoat.
She was dragged into a basement room—D-Zone had many such rooms, all identical in their grim purpose—and beaten. Not with fists, but with a rattan cane, the kind designed to hurt without breaking skin. It left welts that turned purple within hours, welts layered over older bruises that hadn't yet healed.
She kept her mouth shut. Screaming only encouraged them.
After the beating, she lay on the concrete floor of the punishment room, tasting blood, staring at a water stain on the ceiling. Her body hummed with a vast, directionless anger—not just at Ahab, not just at the men who beat her, but at the entire machinery that had ground her up and was still grinding.
Sylvie found her hours later, still on the floor. The other woman knelt beside her, examined her injuries with clinical precision, and produced a small bottle of antiseptic from somewhere—Elyse didn't ask where or how.
"Your efficiency rate is consistently among the top three," Sylvie said while applying antiseptic to a particularly vicious welt on Elyse's shoulder. "Ahab knows that. He won't kill his best worker. This is just a reminder."
A reminder of what?
"Of who owns you," Sylvie said, as though reading her mind.
Elyse let out a bitter laugh, which immediately made her ribs scream. "No one owns me."
Sylvie's hands stilled for a moment, then she continued applying the antiseptic. When she spoke again, her voice was almost a whisper.
"Then prove it."
Those three words lodged themselves in Elyse's chest like shrapnel.
In the days that followed, she moved through the compound with a new intentionality. She didn't stop gathering information—she redoubled her efforts. She memorized guard phone numbers overhead during shifts. She mapped the underground drainage system that ran beneath the residential buildings, which she learned about from a maintenance worker who got drunk and talked too much near the canteen.
She also started training herself, in the way someone trains when they know their life depends on it. She ran laps in the tiny courtyard allotted for exercise, doing push-ups and sit-ups in the women's dorm after lights-out. She wasn't strong—the beatings and malnutrition had seen to that—but she was determined, and determination, she discovered, could carry the body further than muscle alone.
Sylvie noticed. She said nothing, but occasionally Elyse caught her watching with an expression that might have been approval.
Then came the night that changed everything.
It was after midnight. Elyse was lying on her bunk, eyes closed but not sleeping, running escape routes through her mind for the hundredth time, when she heard footsteps. Unusual—they patrolled the dorm hallways at a different time, and these steps were too light for a guard's boots.
She cracked an eye open.
Sylvie was standing in the doorway, her face barely visible in the dim glow of the emergency light. She gestured—come with me.
Elyse didn't hesitate. She slid off her bunk, careful not to wake the woman sleeping below, and followed.
Sylvie led her through the compound via a route Elyse hadn't known existed—a service corridor behind the kitchen that connected to a maintenance shed, which connected in turn to the drainage system Elyse had only heard about. As they moved, Sylvie whispered information in short, clipped sentences.
"Thursday. Supply truck. Skeleton crew. The gate code changes at 5 a.m.—I have Wednesday's code. I've been gathering intel for a long time, Elyse. I'm not just a prisoner here."
Elyse's heart was hammering. She'd suspected, but hearing it confirmed felt like stepping off a cliff into empty air.
"Who are you?"
Sylvie paused. In the darkness, her eyes gleamed.
"Someone who's been trying to find a way out—even if it kills me."
She didn't give a name. She didn't give a title. But Elyse understood.
They kept moving.