The electrical shock Matsu just sent up Emi’s arm wakes her up just in time to give her one first and final look around the waiting room. Everything is upside down, because she is strung up by her leg with her arms still tied tight at her back, but she notes the walls are painted brown with mud. The strain of fighting sends her tingling limbs buzzing with pain until her body sways like an underweight punching bag.
[WARNING: MOTION DETECTED]
As is his instinct, Liam starts to bounce. He lines up a brass-knuckled punch that lands in the gap between Emi’s tied-back arms where a thin string of muscle is the only active guard for her bendable and breakable spine.
Liam laughs at Emi’s barbaric shouts of pain and frustration. Upside down, the pressure in her head builds as she continues to spin, her screams oscillating like a siren. After several minutes, she starts to slow enough to read the words carved into the circular sewer cover sitting beside the open hole a few feet below that waits with an open mouth to swallow her whole: Here Hangs the Devil’s Daughter.
What do they want from me?
“Vengeance,” Bee answers.
Emi asks the two inmates—Matsu and Liam—making her wait, “What do you want from me?”
Liam smiles, revealing teeth of bronze and silver.
[BONUS OPPOTRUNITY: ESCAPE METHOD—SEDUCTION]
The promise of profit changes Bee’s tune, “I can help you find some gold to add to your collection, grai.”
Having no clue she is talking about his teeth, he unloads on her metal skull like it’s a speed bag hanging at shoulder height, each punch landing in rapid succession with a soft thud.
“Whoops…turns out grai doesn’t mean what I thought. Guess I should’ve read the full definition.”
“What…happened…to…your…tail?” Emi asks in quick jabs between Liam’s punches.
His already fuming face all-but steams with fury; he pulls back to unleash a killing blow. Matsu freezes him from the corner, knocking him out cold with the black eyes staring down his spit-shined beak: “We just woke her up; if I have to use more resources to do so again you will pay for them.”
Liam appears to breathe heavier the lower his hands drop.
“Good boy,” Bee says as enthusiastically as possible.
Liam can’t help himself. Even with her metal-infused skull, the punch puts Emi straight to sleep. Bee plays along, pretends to be out like a light: “You punch even stronger than you look, big fella. You put us out like a light.”
Matsu pokes his beak against the scar on Emi’s neck and reopens the old wound before doing the same to his disobedient dog.
…
A yellow light wakes Emi up. She clicks the symbol with her mind, opening the details:
[PRESSURE WARNING]
Emi can’t see anything past her display because even with thermal vision, all is one color: red or black. Blood coats her face as it continues to flow from the reopened cut just below her voice box, in the same spot her own blade once spilled her blood. Steady droplets of blood fall far below, echoing like the second hand of a giant clock. She tries to raise her hands to her head to stop the noise, the pain of the effort reminding her where she is.
A sound makes her flinch, the added pressure in her upper body from the movement escaping in a scream that echoes off damp walls. From the waist down, however, she feels nothing, all blood having pooled according to the principles of gravity.
She takes a deep breath, trying to calm herself; her gag reflex kicks in to save her from the smell of human feces and decaying bodies marinating in bleach-infused salt water on the sewer floor below. She spits up what little she could stomach since arriving at Jashi’s farm, including what dim traces of Charles’ shining pink essence is still left over from the hot spring she so recklessly chased him into.
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A man groans beside her in the dark, swinging no more than a detachable left foot away. He too is hung by the legs from The Devil’s Daughter’s sewer lid. Emi plays dead, using the opportunity to converse with all those gathered in her own mind.
Jashi set us up.
Bee types a message: [Did you set us up?]
Emi protests: What are you doing? We can’t trust him.
Somewhere below, rats skitter away in the darkness of the sewers. “What do you think they’re running from?” Bee asks like she knows the answer.
The well-hung man beside her tries to move but can’t; his soft sobs are his only answer.
[Jashi: You haven’t moved in hours. What’s your status?]
[Current vibe: Just hanging out.]
Emi at last takes control of the conversation: [You wanted them to take me?]
[Jashi: Did she not tell you her plan? She told me she did.]
What the fuck does he mean, your plan?
Bee sends a feeling of good vibes via the neurons of the brain around her. Emi calms ever so slightly. Bee answers, “We need their research.”
Emi lashes out by screaming and wiggling to make Bee work double-time to limit the activity of pain receptors she has taken over responsibility of. The movement makes her bump against the inmate hanging with her. He sobs louder, the noise almost coming out as a shush.
Where did you bring me?
The sounds of rats having died down, a slow hiss, like the release of hydraulics, pushes upward like unnaturally cool steam. The soft cries from the man beside her turn to muffled screams, his body swings into hers. She rejoins him in screaming—the pressure of his touching her blood-filled shoulders threatening to pop them.
When the complaining stops, Bee passes along Emi’s question: “Hey, stud. Nice of you to hang out with us; I know we didn’t get off to the best start, and I am highly aware of how boring she is to talk to, but she’s more of a physical performer than a verbal one.”
What are you doing?
“We get ￥10,000 if we get out of here using seduction as our means of escape. The viewers back home must have really enjoyed how you pulled off that first kill of yours.”
Emi pauses, still swaying gently from the hook in the sewer lid, remembering the scene of a boy swinging from the tree.
“At least he wasn’t upside down. Funny the way karma tends to escalate things.”
Karma is bullshit, you’re the one who brought me here!
“Just an observation…do with the information what you will.”
“Are you a man or a woman?” Emi asks the person hanging beside her, the one she is suddenly on a blind date with.
“Could be neither…” Bee offers like she is trying to help.
A man mumbles back, as if he is chewing over his gender.
Bee thickens her Australian, “I can’t tell if it’s your accent making it sound like you have a mouth full of marbles or the towel in your mouth, but I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”
He mumbles louder, the towel nearly scratching the back of his throat as he tries to displace it.
Why can’t I see?
“Our face is covered in blood.”
Obviously…but why?
[Jashi: You still there?]
“They slit an opening, so the pressure didn’t burst our head too fast.”
What do they want with us? What kind of research are they doing here?
“Ask your date, he used to work here.”
Emi, her mind fuzzy from too much blood, does as Bee suggests, “You used to work here? Who are you?”
The man mumbles unintelligibly in his native English language.
Quit stalling and answer me, Bee.
The echoes of metal over concrete sound below. Emi tries to shush the man beside her, but he gives away their position by shouting behind the towel like he’s screaming into a pillow. When the white lights flood the sewer, revealing it is yet another lab, Emi clocks it even through the mask of blood wrapped around her face like a hood. She stupidly tries yet again to raise her arms, this time to cover her artificial eyes that aren’t even sensitive to light.
The two inmates hanging by their feet and dripping blood scream some more; they appear to be false vampire bats screeching down to the scurrying rats below.
In the concrete wall, hydraulics hiss, a crank turns. The two test subjects start to lower at a painfully slow pace: according to Unit 731’s research, any faster typically pops skulls. Bodies bumping every few millimeters, Emi reminds herself of the training her father gave her: Behind enemy lines, your only ally is the enemy.
Emi brushes the man’s hand, where she feels the brass of his knuckles: “We’re going to be fine; we’ll get out of this in one piece.”
“You’re kidding, right? When is the last time you left somewhere without a piece missing?”
[Jashi: You’re moving—I’ll assume that means the plan is back in motion.]
Want to explain the plan now that we’re already in the middle of it?
Bee responds to her partner, Jashi: [*Thumbs up*]
Then to Emi, her tool, “I already did. We are here to see their research and bring the recording back to Jashi. Bonus points if you seduce this sad man riding with us who used to get high off the toxins of his former masculinity.”
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