Shattered by Donna Ball Page A

any of the others, longer than she deserved to live, longer, she sometimes thought, than she had ever wanted to. She had no way to measure the passage of days, or perhaps it was months or even years, so she could not say how long long was. Forever, or yesterday. It was all the same to her.
    She was confused a great deal of the time, and she had forgotten a lot. She remembered almost nothing of the early days, and now she realized—in a dim uncertain way that she did not entirely trust—that the confusion and the lethargy were due to the drugs he gave her. That he still gave her drugs was almost certain, hidden in her food or in the bottled water that always tasted strange, but somehow they didn't affect her the way they used to. She could think more clearly now. And she was remembering.
    She thought it all began when he brought her to this place. She wasn't even sure where this place was, but she knew she remembered it, or remembered things about it. She didn't like remembering. Most of the time it was a painful thing. It made her cry out inside for the things she remembered. It made her desperate and helpless; it made it hard sometimes to pretend. And pretending was how she survived.
    At first she had screamed in the dark, alone and terrified in the small closed space. She had screamed and screamed until she became aware there was no one to hear her except the wind and the sea, and she had screamed still. She screamed giant silent puffs of air until finally she screamed the last of her spirit away and all that was left of her was a husky breath of air, like the remnants of her ruined voice. Sometimes, after that, she used to hear the others scream, in voices that never left her dreams, but she was never tempted to join them. No one had screamed here in a long time.
    She thought about killing him. She dreamed of it sometimes and she awoke from those dreams feeling peaceful and quiet, believing for those first few moments of wakefulness that she had really done it, that it was over and she was free. She knew just how she would do it, too. With something sharp. She would hurt him like he had hurt the others. She would see the look of terror in his eyes just as she had seen the terror in other eyes, and then she would kill him. In her dreams she always killed him more than once, killed him even after he was dead because dying just once did not seem like enough.
    She knew she would never do it, though. She knew she wouldn't because she had had chances—a paring knife left carelessly in an apple, a heavy tool put down within easy reach, a line cutter or fillet knife merely waiting to be tucked into the folds of her skirt when she went on deck—but she had never taken them. She would never kill him, any more than she would ever try to get away. And the worst part was that he knew it.
    But things were changing now. She was stronger. Things made sense to her more often now; horrible, terrifying sense. But it was like cloud patterns: If you looked at them long enough, pictures began to form, and it was better to see dragons than to see nothing at all.
    Possibilities began to form when she discovered the telephone. It was a tiny thing, barely bigger than a credit card, and he carried it in his briefcase. When it rang, he unfolded it and spoke into it. It was amazing. He made calls from it. He spoke to people outside this place on it. For the first time she began to believe—really believe—that there were people outside this place, a world that existed apart from the one he ruled, and slowly, in bits and pieces, memories of that world began to come back to her.
    It took many tries before she figured out how to work the phone. She kept pushing buttons, the same seven digits over and over again, and nothing happened, not even a dial tone. Finally she noticed the “power” button. When she pushed it, she got a dial tone, but still she couldn't make the call go through, and she was frustrated to tears. Before that day, it had never