The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

beside her navel. Then it was inside her, and though the effect would take several minutes to set in, she could feel the drug itself blooming cold and sharp across her stomach.
    The pines blurred and swam, her body shaking hard now and jarring the tears. The baffle across her mouth—there to rein in her screams, which might carry unusually far in these mountains—did not prevent her from hearing her own voice, pleading no, over and over like a mantra. She couldn’t stop that, either.
    Now came the rattle of the crank under the table, the surface pitching over sideways until it was almost vertical, her body no longer resting on it but held by the straps.
    Looking sideways now instead of up.
    Looking right into her father’s eyes.
    His own straps held him immobile against the base of the nearest pine, his head trapped between the blocks of the casing that kept him from looking anywhere but straight at her.
    Her tears spilled out sideways. His remained pooled in his eyes.
    Then the rat-faced man moved out of view behind her, and got ready to work on her, the same way he’d done it each time. She could never see for herself what he was doing, but her father’s expression reflected what it must look like better than any mirror could have.
    She could picture it, of course. It couldn’t have been more obvious what was happening to her. The very first time—something like three days ago now, just after the rat-faced man had strapped her down—he’d opened her upper arm with a scalpel and parted her triceps wide with a wedge clamp. He’d avoided damaging the artery, of course; it wouldn’t do to let death rescue her that easily. His prize had been the radial nerve, thick as a pencil once he’d freed it from its lubricated sheath beside the bone. After that, he’d been able to access it immediately each time.
    He was about to do that now, making a big show of his preparations. She was sure it was part of the torture, the psychological aspect of it, all the cues to whet her anticipation of the pain: the zipper of his tool bag opening slowly, the clucking sound of his tongue, like he was sad to have to be doing this, and then the sigh.
    Now her father’s eyes moved, because the rat-faced man was looking at him before beginning.
    “What kind of daddy you being, then?” the rat-faced man said, his English broken, lyrical. “How you expect you look yourself in the mirror after this? How you let your little girl get hurt this long?”
    Then the high-pitched laugh, rapid-fire, like a squirrel chittering.
    Her father’s eyes hardened and looked away from the man, meeting hers again, his tears overrunning now.
    This was supposed to be part of the torture too, obviously: making them lock eyes while he hurt her. Maybe it worked on some people, but they’d miscalculated sorely in this case. Her father’s eyes were all that made this bearable for her.
    Of course, the point of the eye contact wasn’t its effect on her. The eye contact was for him. He was the one they were trying to break.
    Was it working? Was it breaking him?
    No, not a chance of that. Why had she gone through all of this, if he was only going to submit in the end?
    More to the point, he was just stronger than that. Of that much Paige was certain. Her father knew the stakes, which were bigger than this clearing and anything that might be done to them in it. Telling these people how to switch on the Whisper was simply not on the list of options. End of debate.
    Blinking through her tears, she tried to look strong, tried to send him assurance. It was all okay. Really, it was okay, even now when she was shaking like this, and so fucking scared, even as she could hear the rat-faced man rummaging in his bag and bringing out the tool, her tears intensifying because any second it was coming, even now, she had to send him the will to bear watching this, because giving them what they wanted was so much worse—
    The tool snapped to life with its grating hum, and a second later its teeth closed around the exposed nerve, and the image of her father shattered like a reflection on broken water as she screamed.
    Travis lay very still on the rock shelf and tried to recall the mindset of a killer. It was far back along the corridor of years, where he’d meant to leave it forever.
    Until now.
    Through his binoculars he watched the little guy with the string mustache move the instrument back and forth inside the young woman’s arm. Even through the muffling attachment