VI. The Girl Who Lost Her Voice

They keep her in a room at the end of the hall. White walls, barred window, a simple bed with restraints. The orderlies call her Liya because that’s the name on her chart, but she doesn’t answer to it. She doesn’t answer to anything.

During the day, her eyes are always open, wide and distant. In the rec room, she sits in the same chair, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around herself as if she’s holding the pieces of her together. She never speaks.

When night comes, the quiet breaks. She screams until her throat swells under the strain, until her voice dissolves into hoarse rasping. The sound carries through the halls like an animal dying slow. It doesn’t stop until the antipsychotics kicks in. Sometimes even then, she tries to keep going, mouthing a scream that won’t come out.

The nurses whisper that it’s because she’s mad. One of them says she used to obsess about water before they started giving her the heavy doses. They think she’s afraid of drowning. They don’t know she already has.

When they bathe her, they have to restrain her first. The moment her skin feels the water, she thrashes, kicks, bites. Her body convulses in panic so violent that no one can believe it comes from someone so small. They inject her with enough sedatives to drop a grown man. After that, she’s still. Vacant. Empty.

The aide who washes her hums while he works. He thinks no one notices the way his hands linger on her, or the way his eyes wander. She doesn’t react. The drugs have turned her body into a thing she no longer feels. When he dresses her again, she stares at the wall. She then goes quietly, without a fight, wherever she is led.

The doctors call her progress stable. They’ve all given up trying to reach her. She’s the kind of patient who never leaves a place like this.

I’ve seen soldiers like her before, on battlefields in other worlds. Men who couldn’t reconcile what they’d seen or done. They kept breathing, but something in them had gone quiet forever. She’s like them. Broken by memory, not madness.

I know better than to pity her. Pity serves no one.

I record what I see: subject located, consciousness diminished. Potential: none.

She might survive this world, but she will never live in it.

The search continues.

M.

Up Next: The Girl Who Lived With the Dying