Chapter 2
You wake, disoriented, smells and sounds and memories racing back suddenly and leaving you panting, horny, and panicked all at the same time. "Deep breaths," you tell yourself, and do for yourself, feeling your stomach and chest slowly rise and fall as your back lays against the bed.
The panic attacks were more apparent now-without the adrenaline of running through the woods to distract you, they had become increasingly paralyzing, dominating your mind and body until you could get yourself under control. Meditation had been more of a necessity than a tactic in prison, and you found that you could get your body under control in a few minutes at most. The deep breaths continued their effect, not eliminating the panic but dampening it, cordoning it off in a corner of your mind so you could activate yourself again.
You sigh, thinking: "Has it really only been ten days since we escaped from prison?" It feels like a lifetime ago-the indignity of life as prisoner disassembled and remembered like a movie, a tragedy that happened, but to someone else, a body just like yours, but inhabited by a different spirit, one you had emerged out of, as you had emerged out of the prison.
This shell had been necessary-every moment of the past year contained a threat of a beating or worse. The only choice was to submit, express extreme deference to authority. The only logic of the prison had been to obey and the only commandment was to survive. Living outside of the prison had reminded you what it was to be alive.
You feel yourself getting wet, and slip your hand between your legs, gently massaging yourself as you think back to last night. It was our final night in the farmhouse, and as we were cooking dinner you felt me behind you, my hands on your hips, pulling you close to me. My lips, pungent with whiskey, whispered into your ear: "We leave tomorrow. Tonight, we fuck her however you like."
Your mind had gone blank for a moment, before flashing through memories from the last few nights that made you weak in the knees and filled with a sudden, carnal desire to be pleased. You quickly walked to and used the bathroom, splashing some cold water on your face and taking deep breaths, shaking your head at the intensity of the reaction. "You knew this was coming," you say out loud as you look at yourself in the mirror. "Eventually, we'd have to leave." You take another deep breath and relax your grip on the rim of the sink.
Your mind drifts back to the first night, the sharpness of your senses coming back to you after the intensity of your orgasm. Looking around the room to see the woman, still tied and on her knees, weeping to herself on the floor. You continued to watch her as I slowly got up, and walked out of the room, muttering something about using the bathroom.
She suddenly looked up at you, her eyes turned pleading, "I told him the codes, the schedules, everything. Please, please, please, woman to woman, let me go. You've done everything you want with me. Please." Her eyes widened as you stood up and walked over to her.
"So, you are a security officer for the state? You work at a prison?" You whisper.
"Yes, I do," she says, nodding quickly, "but I'm not important. I'm just a regular guard, I, I, I don't know anything more than what I told him. Please, I'm Manu just like you, just let me-OHHHhh"
Your hand hurts from the intensity of the punch, squarely landing against her temple and making the guard collapse onto the floor. You flick your hand back and forth for a second, flexing your fingers. "Nothing seems broken," you say to yourself, and then curse your foolishness. A broken hand out here would spell disaster. There's just no place and time for that kind of recklessness when on the run from the state.
The reaction had been involuntary, practically a somatic jerk of the arm provoked by your experience of the guards at the prison. Even the nicest of them, the ones you desperately tried to convince acted like your friends who had joined the military, were pieces of shit in the absolute sense of things. They would only hit you once with their batons to reprimand you, and seemed to lack the sadism necessary for the protracted beatings and rapes perpetrated by some of the guards. Revolutions, it turns out, are a two-sided affair. It is not enough to demand a better world, that better world has to be snatched from the state, kicking and screaming.
No journalist recorded or documented what happened in these camps. Termed "reeducation camps", they were simply prisons anyone marked as an enemy of the state: a title that made you subhuman, not deserving of the basic protections of the legal system. While guards were disincentivized from outright killing the prisoners, they were encouraged to make their life hell. From simple annoyances, like roll-calls every two hours during the night, to vicious punishments, like being forced to stand outside in the cold, almost naked, for hours, before being forced into scalding hot showers that left your skin blistered and pustulent for weeks afterwards.
Ironically, for someone largely unaffiliated with the revolution, life at camp had also provided an opportunity to learn about the history of your country, a topic you had never learned about because your parents could not afford to send you to school until you were in your teenage years, and in need of much more practical education than was provided in history and social studies classes. You knew that Mantus was located within the traditional territory of the Manu, the largest ethnic group in the country including in its number the current ruling dynasty, but knew little of the country beyond that. Your town was rural, and rather poor, and when some of the rebels began speaking of Manu-priviledge and Manu-supremacy, you couldn't help but roll your eyes.
You can remember clearly laughing the first time someone used those terms with you, thinking back to the backbreaking farm labor of your youth, before your parents had opened up a creamery, and you had spent your early twenties making butter, cheese, and creams. It was a hard life, but it was a relatively good one in Mantus. You had a roof over your head, enough to eat, and a likely proposal of marriage in the future. There were plenty of people in the town that were worse off, some even homeless.
Yet, as the cadets patiently (and occasionally pedantically) explained, it was not so much what you had but what you didn't have: surveillance, violence, and forced labor. In other districts within the country, people lived in conditions that were akin to a kind of slavery-forced to work long shifts in dangerous factories and mines, extracting and refining materials to make luxuries that they themselves would never experience. They didn't enjoy the simple freedom to walk alone at night, the ability to save up your money to build a bigger house, or move to a bigger city.
You were shocked to hear stories of soldiers marching into towns and requisitioning houses, food, and women from the local people, arbitrarily throwing people out of their homes to make everyone, rich and poor, aware of their marginalized status, their fungibility in the eyes of the state. When you asked what the soldiers were doing there, it was the cadets' turn to laugh: "They were there to do what they did," one of the young cadets from Golgi told you one afternoon as you were washing dishes, the sound of the industrial dishwashers providing the one of the only covers for conversation available to you. "As far as I could tell, their whole purpose was to remind us that we were nothing to them."
"After a week or two of eating the town's food stores and looting whatever homes and shops they wanted, they would depart, often kidnapping a few people under the auspices of needing to conduct further interrogations, a euphemism that many people grew sickly grateful for." The cadet shook her head sadly.
These conditions laid the groundwork for revolution, but it was a particular event in the Golgi district that lit the match. During one of these army visits, a young soldier had made a terrible mistake. "See," that same cadet explained to you, "almost every town had a few people that were supposed to be untouchable. Religious figures and functionaries who served the state, obviously, but also those people who were vital to the regional industry. My town, for instance, mostly supplied labor for a set of factories in the area that produced car frames. Not very glamorous work, but useful. Important. Now, there's a lot of basic, hard work involved, but almost all of it involves machines and machine parts, liable to break or malfunction at any moment. Thus, the machine technicians, the experts who kept the factories running and were not replaceable, were always 'randomly' spared from evictions and beatings. If you were vital to the interest of the state, the state somehow knew not to hurt you."
"Those spared, at least in my town, were never pushy with their privilege. They understood its precarity, and no one wanted to find out just how far that privilege would extend. The exception was a guy named Brendan. Brendan was young, but vital. He had one of those intuitive understandings of machines where he could just hear a particular grinding sound, or the absence of the right click, and know what valve to tighten, joint to oil, and so on. He had been quickly promoted up the ranks, and was now the full-time machine technician for three of the factories in the area. If anything broke down, he was there in an instant, and it allowed the factories to set production records that had showered the town in government praise and rewards."
