If You Want to See Her Whole
Sophia buried the tightness in her gut and forced out a joke. The major did not so much as sneer. He only stared straight through her, his face utterly dry, and she swallowed against a throat gone parched.
She had spoken with him more than once. Her platoon had been thrown into battle after battle and stood as the ace of the 2nd Company, the unit with the finest record of them all, so she herself had been called into operational briefings from time to time. In the field she had always moved to take in every piece of counsel he gave.
Major Louis Kane was the very model of a soldier—formidable in a fight, exact in command, fluent in every tactic that mattered. He had no patience for empty jokes, and no one had ever seen him waste breath on idle talk, which was why the whole unit found him difficult to approach. He seemed to have no interest in women either. Prisoner or spy, civilian or soldier, he looked at any woman the way a man looks at a stone. And yet that very polish, that gentleman's reserve, had earned him no small number of admirers inside the Bunker.
So she knew she would not be subjected to anything filthy. What she could not read, no matter how she tried, was what lay behind his eyes.
In the next moment Louis came toward her. He drew a key from his trousers and, without a flicker of expression, unlocked the chain binding her hands.
Her mind raced—the odds of dropping the major and getting out, and the reason he would suddenly free her. The first was not even ten percent. The second, she could not begin to guess.
Only then did she notice that Louis's right little finger was wound tight in bandages, and that a scratch still marked the back of his hand.
"It was you, Major."
The words left her under her breath.
"Get dressed."
Louis gave the order short and returned to his chair. He sat and spread open the documents lying on the table. Sophia glared at him as she slowly pulled up the trousers and underwear that had been dragged down around her. Arms worked past endurance for hours trembled without cease.
"Name: Sophia Yu. Nationality: Korea. Korean name: Jiyeon Yu."
Eyes on the file, Louis began to recite. His pronunciation of Jiyeon Yu was unnervingly exact.
"Assignment: 16th Division, 5th Battalion, 2nd Company. Graduated second in the thirty-third class of the military academy and deployed at once. Rebel suppression in Sector 4. Recapture of the armory. Thereafter, platoon leader of the 2nd Platoon..."
Listening to her own profile spill out in that flat, unbroken voice, Sophia set the situation back in order, piece by piece. The man who had attacked her in the jeep and dragged her here was Major Louis Kane. Of that she was certain. Tony Brown had informed on her, and Wilson was dead. If the division itself meant to interrogate her, then the operation had succeeded.
She could not take Derek at his word, but her judgment was that things were not yet dire.
Watching the calm of a man who might at any moment decide to tear out her fingernails and toenails, Sophia slowly lifted a hand toward the cloth bound over her mouth, her eyes searching all the while for a weapon that could end her life in a single stroke. Even if she could not beat a monster like Major Louis Kane, she still had the power to decide one thing. Her own death.
Sophia froze where she stood. She should not have let the shock show, but it was already too late. She smoothed her face and knew he had seen through her anyway. She pulled the cloth from her mouth and glared at him.
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"Your beloved Ella."
He knew her sister's name.
"I don't have a family."
"I knew you were born outside the Bunker. That you'd been operating as the rebels' ace—that I learned only this time. A weakness always makes a person wretched. Wouldn't you say?"
Cold sweat soaked through her uniform. Louis had been in the interrogation room only a few minutes, and already he held it completely. He was right. A weakness made a person wretched. That she had been born an outcast who could never enter the Bunker, that she had a sister she loved, that she was dragged this way and that to protect what was precious to her—all of it was a fate she had been born to. A weak fate, suffering without end inside a wheel that allowed her no other way to live.
"I don't understand what you're saying, Major."
"Shall I describe your sister for you, feature by feature?"
Wilson was the only one who knew the situation, and Wilson was dead. Even if, against every odd, they had confirmed that Ella existed, she would have made it safely into the rebel base. Sophia turned the thought over like a reassurance. Louis's next words shattered the calm she had barely managed to hold.
"Or would you only believe me if I put her in front of you?"
"Nonsense."
The word tore out of her before she could stop it.
"Whether it's nonsense or not, you'll see soon enough."
The man's sculpted face held no feeling at all. Those blue-green eyes, praised by everyone as beautiful, had never looked so cruel as they did in this moment.
"No one knows that child exists. So what you're saying is a lie, Major."
This interrogation was Major Louis Kane's complete victory.
"Why would no one know? Aiden Miller knows. So does Operative Wilson."
Sophia's hands shook.
"Aiden evacuated after the operation succeeded, and Wilson is dead."
"Who told you that? John, your contact, would have been the one to report that the operation succeeded. And who told you Wilson was dead? Captain Derek Smith?"
The slant of his smile was unmistakable mockery. Even the contact was exposed. Sophia tried to remember John's face when he had brought word of the operation's success, tried to recall what he had done, and came up with nothing. If he had been working as a double agent, then she could not even be sure the operation had succeeded at all.
And Wilson's death? Derek was not clever enough to feed her false information on purpose. Not unless their own side had been deceived as well, and the division had dug a pit deep enough to trap her and the whole operations team.
Her head spun. From the moment Ella's existence was exposed, the ground under Sophia's feet had been shifting.
"What do you want?"
She raised the white flag without raising her voice. Louis said nothing. It was Sophia, anxious, who spoke first.
"Let me see Ella first."
"I'm the one who sets the terms, Sophia. You're in no position to do anything but comply."
It was an order, heavy with command. Sophia stared at the superior officer who never wavered, who kept his calm through anything.
"Unless I confirm Ella with my own eyes, I can't believe a word you say, Major. And I certainly won't give you so much as a scrap of information."
The location of the rebel base. The roster of its officers. The size of the resistance. She could surrender none of it before she had seen Ella. There was still a chance the girl had already taken shelter at the base. If Sophia walked into a trap, opened her mouth, and put her sister in danger, she would never forgive herself.
"Sophia. No—Jiyeon Yu."
Louis spoke her name, hard and precise.
She could not make sense of it. What could her life possibly mean to Major Kane? She had braced herself, certain the division was hiding some other design, but days passed and nothing happened.
There was no torture, and no further threat. They did not bind her. They did not starve her. Today, as on every day, she studied the servicewoman who came in on the hour with a bowl of corn porridge.
The women who brought her meals were always different. Faces she had never seen, so they must have belonged to another company. Every one of them looked tense, and when Sophia asked anything at all they pressed their mouths shut and said nothing.
"The army must have corn to spare, if they're feeding even a spy."