Save Her

Natalie - Chapter 2

Natalie - Chapter 2

They don’t put the handcuffs on Natalie anymore after the first day. The same female interrogator tries interviewing her day after day, but Natalie dodges most of her questions or makes smart-ass comments, but never gives them what they want, because, she figures, there’s nothing they can do to her, and that makes her bolder. As soon as she confirms that they intend to deliver her baby here, somewhere in this horrible bunker-dungeon-prison-hell-hole, she just refuses to give them their desired answers. They can’t do very much about it, she figures. They can’t hurt her because of the baby inside, and they can’t stop feeding her or use electric shocks or any other torture for all the same reasons. Her baby protects her, which is ironic because the baby is also the reason she’s here. She might answer their questions if she thought it would help to get her out. She’d do anything to get back with her love. They can’t harm him even if they try, she figures. He had made himself too powerful. He had coded his nanos to be too strong.

Despite the lack of helpful information coming from Natalie’s lips, the woman in gray continues to question her every day without regard to any waste of time. The interrogator is patient. Very patient. Her patience is agonizingly irritating to Natalie, but Natalie understands that this is part of the psychological battle. Natalie’s smart. She knows she’s smarter than most. If it’s a psychological battle they want, it’s a psychological battle they’ll get. Game on.

She’s just under three months pregnant now by her mental calendar, but her belly-size says she’s much further along, and she wonders if it’s possible they had somehow made her sleep longer or enhanced something some other way because she’s showing way too much for just under three months. They feed her well and always make sure she has all necessary prenatal vitamins for both her and her baby’s health, and she takes everything they give her because it’s obvious they only have her child’s best interest in mind, at least while it still lives inside of her. She feels pangs of worry thinking ahead to after the child is born when her captors will no longer need anything but her milk. And, being a first-time mom, she worries about everything that can go wrong before delivery. Whenever those thoughts invade, she immediately tries to calm the panic with deep breathing and a relaxation technique that involves thinking about Drayden. She thinks about how he looked up and smiled at her after she had hit him with her car, then how nervous he had acted the second time she saw him, how handsome he was on their first date, them watching RomComs together, or walking hand-in-hand in Paris or on the beach in Maui, or making love in his flat, or in her room when her boarding school roommate, Livia, wasn’t there. Those were wonderful memories for her, and she wished to share those re-flooding endorphins with her little one so that in some possible brain-wave sort of way her baby could also associate calmness with Drayden, just the same way that Natalie does.

So, after weeks when the questioning went a little something like this:

“Tell us about the book of passwords.”

And she answered like this:

“He loves reading out loud to me with an inflection like he wishes he were an actor, and it’s hilarious to see him — really it is. Because he’d be the absolute worst actor imaginable. I don’t know what it is about him that makes me say that. He’s good at everything else. But acting? No way. When he reads to me before falling asleep, he first folds his pillow in half so that his head is perfectly propped, which seems to make his voice lower and more resonant? It’s sexy like that, I tell him, and he smiles every time. He likes it when I say the word ‘sexy.’ Sexy. Like that. Sexy. He says my accent is sexy. I tell him I don’t have an accent but that he does. Ha. He lets me snuggle close enough to read the words myself, but I never look because his voice is so relaxing. I love the predictability of him lightly clearing his throat about every page or so. I don’t think he even knows he does this. He’d deny it and argue if you said anything about it. He’d playfully argue, anyway. Sometimes I think he argues just to converse about something, or just to see if he can make himself seem right, even when he knows he’s absolutely wrong. Ha. He’s wrong a lot. Like clearing his throat. I mean, that’s not even something he needs to do anymore. Silly.”

“What do you remember from the book of passwords?”

“I thought it was his handwriting in it, but only later on did I find out it’s not. His handwriting is a mess. A sloppy mess. Like his brain is simply going far too quickly for his fingers. A mess. Gibberish until you can see the pattern. His lowercase letters don’t have the right hooks, like his p’s could be a’s, and his a’s almost look like i’s which look exactly like his lowercase t’s, which are far different from his brother’s because they swoop and go down in a very methodical, scripty way. Oh! Whoops! There you go. Look what you did there you sneaky sneaky witty one. You tricked me into giving you too much. Your persistence has finally paid off! I slipped and said it was his brother’s handwriting. You tricky tricky woman.”

“We knew that already. What passwords are inside? What are they for?”

“But you already know everything. Don’t you?”

“We know he’s a cybercriminal. Did he tell you that?” the interrogator asks.

“You mean the health insurance thing? Oscar? Of course! I’m proud of him for that. He’s like a cyber superhero. SuperDrayden. No, SuperDray! But no because he has that whole nanotech thing. Umm, how about Super Nanoman? No, that’s kinda ridiculous. Oh, I know! I’ve got it! SuperNan! No, that sounds too much like—”

“You harbored him to safety. That makes you an accomplice.”

Natalie shrugs. “So arrest me. Oh wait,” she says, looking around at the cement walls around her and the ugly fluorescents above. “Oh yeah, that’s right. Big bummer. You’ve already arrested me for being pregnant.”

“Go back to the beginning. Why did he need the passwords?”

And so it would have continued had they not finally smartened up the way evil people do: with threats that matter. Natalie would have disregarded their questions, stalling as long as she could until she escaped or Drayden saved her, had it not been for her best friend, Livia.

It was a morning like every other morning. After a hearty breakfast of eggs and fresh berries, two guards come and get her out of her secure room and turn the direction they usually did toward the interrogation room, but then surprise her and lead her down a different hallway she had never been down before. One guard opens a heavy steel door, and the other motions for her to enter the small well-lit fluorescent room. Inside is the female interrogator. On the other side of a pane of glass in an adjacent room is Livia. Her best friend sits at a metal table and cries hysterically. Across from her is a male interrogator Natalie doesn’t recognize. Natalie can’t hear Livia’s cries.

Natalie runs to the window. She pounds on the glass. It’s thick.

“Livia! Livia!” Livia can’t hear her. Natalie turns to the female interrogator. “Let her go! She hasn’t done anything! She doesn’t know anything!”

“She thinks she’s here to help find you,” the female interrogator says. “She thinks Drayden is responsible for your disappearance, so she’s telling us everything she knows.”

“Don’t! Don’t do this to her!”

“What choice did you give us?”

Natalie turns back to the glass. She hits it again, but this time she doesn’t hit it hard. And then she hits it one last time, so soft that it barely sounds even inside their room. “Please,” Natalie says, her voice breaking.

“You still refuse to answer our questions?”

“Give her a tissue. Give her water,” Natalie says.

Livia. Her best friend. The only one until Drayden who understood her and her introspective and artistic ways. Their boarding school computer system had personality-matched them, but Natalie always thought it was much more random than that because Livia was as random as they came. Natalie would tease her like that and not admit that some algorithm could have placed them so perfectly because there were so unlike each other.

Livia’s bleached-white hair was the first thing Natalie noticed when she stepped into their shared living space. It struck her as beautiful and reminded her of a recent trip to the National Gallery where she stared at a George Stubbs painting of a white horse for hours, trying to figure out the lighting of its mane and why it captured her attention so. The rest of her — Livia, that is — would be a continued study for Natalie because light seemed to hit her differently always, refracting off her high cheekbones in a way that defied its particle nature, in a way that mystified how physics should be. She would be Natalie’s most prized model, a dream within a dream of her painter’s brush. Her lipstick the day they first met matched the mystery of her dark eyebrows, which gave away her Hispanic heritage, and convinced Natalie that a Spanish or Mexican accent would come out of her mouth. But she sounded as American as Jennifer Lawrence when she said: “You’re staring, sweetie.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

“Don’t worry about it, Hun. I’m used to it. So, will we be sharing this spacious space? If so, we’d better learn each other’s names. I’m Livia. But when you get exasperated with me, I’m sure you’ll call me Liv. Either one works. I answer to both and ignore both equally.”

Their stuffy boarding school tolerated Liv’s extreme dislike of the norm and ignored her hair and her somewhat gothic ways because her father was absolutely loaded. A hedge fund manager, a billionaire several times over, is what Natalie’s parents told her after they met Liv and then did their snobby research on her heritage and upbringing. As soon as they learned who her father was, they treated her with respect and even admiration, because he was from old steel money that he was able to turn into new wealth by proper investments. What Natalie’s parents didn’t care about was how smart Liv was. She has a photographic memory and the highest grades in Natalie’s classes. She takes her grades seriously, which Natalie appreciates, and doesn’t take for granted that she can intellectually run circles around everyone at the school. She’s rarely without a book in her hands and stays fit with sit-ups and pushups, and leg squats and calf raises every morning when she wakes. Sometimes, just to be mean and funny, Livia would try to wake Natalie to do the workout with her. “Leave me alone, you evil, horrible witch,” Natalie said the last time Livia shook her awake. Livia was the perfect roommate for Natalie. Her extroverted rebellious nature balanced Natalie’s introverted desire for calm. Natalie would do anything for her best friend. She loved her as much as she loved anything in the world.

Natalie looks over at the glassed-in room at her best friend. Her tears pain Natalie. She’s never seen her cry and can’t imagine what they might have said to her to break her down.

Natalie turns to the interrogator quickly enough to cause the two guards to flinch towards her. “How do you even get into this career path?” Natalie asks. “Look at her! Look at how upset you’re making her! When you go home tonight to sleep in your bed of salt and rocks, I want you to think of that pretty face full of tears!”

“You refuse to answer our questions. We can easily make it look like she’s responsible for your disappearance. Or worse. The choice is yours.”

“You’re evil!”

“Answer our questions!”

It’s the first rise of emotion from the interrogator that Natalie has witnessed. All other jokes or threats had gone over without even a twitch of the interrogator’s face. Her angry reaction startles Natalie. It frightens Natalie at how quickly it came on. There was no warning.

“If I talk,” Natalie starts. “If I answer your questions, you’ll let her go.” It’s a request, but Natalie’s monotone voice makes it sound like a statement. They’ve won. Natalie is beaten.

“You’ll answer all our questions,” says the interrogator. The anger that raised her voice is dissipated, but the threat of the anger still lingers in the crease between her eyebrows and in the penetrating gaze of her eyes.

“He needed the book of passwords because of his brother’s syncing account.”

“What’s the address?” The interrogator asks.

“Www.externalsync.com.” Natalie says.