The Day The Sun Fell From The Sky Read Online Free Page A

truth than I would ever like to admit.
    “I lost one of my best men. My own recruit. I trained him myself. To you. To a Knax. To a lying manipulative b**ch!” He leans over and slaps me across the face.
    I’m not sure if my amnesia is a blessing or a curse. A victim and a witness will be traumatized in different ways by the same act of violence. Thanks to my amnesia, I am being forced to witness my own torture.
    “I am not going to kill you.” Vinn tells me in the video. “But I can’t say that they will not.” He points off screen somewhere, presumably at Padd’s team. “They can do whatever they want to you. I will not stop them. But first, Hash has something to give you.”
    The medic, who had been helping me with my recovery and probably saved my life, steps into view.
    “I’m really sorry.” He apologizes to me before holding out a needle. “This will make you hurt more.”
    “Don’t skirt around it, Knax. It’s a pain amplifier. Just say it. It will magnify whatever she gets given from here on.” Vinn says to the laughter of the other soldiers.
    “It’s okay.” I can hear myself telling him in the video.
    This at least partly explains the guilt that he was showing earlier when he kept trying to tell me to forget what had happened. It was because he had been forced to take part in it.
    “Now, there are a lot of things that we would like to do to you but first, we need to undress you.” Vinn is saying in the video. “Iv has done a wonderful job with you. I daresay that you are her finest work.”
    Now that I know what they are about to do to me, I look away. Even though the incident is in the past, it’s not something that I want to see repeated before my eyes.
    “What’s the matter Knax? Can’t take a little home theatre?” The soldier that’s supervising my “education” asks me.
    I want to say something to him that not even Mish would say out loud but I hold my tongue at the last minute. I turn back to face the screen.
    One of the soldiers comes up to me and fondles my breast. “They feel good. Let’s see what they really look like.”
    He takes some sort of a cream and rubs it into the tip of one of the skin pieces covering the drag mark on my chest. Then he pulls on the tip and rips the whole thing off.
    The scream I produce is like nothing I’ve ever heard from my mouth before. Seeing that kind of footage normally induces empathic pain in a witness but since I am both victim and witness, my body reacts beyond what I can control.
    “Word on the street has it that female Knax have nicer breasts than Venry girls. Let’s see if this is true.” Another soldier comes up to me and repeats the same actions of the first soldier.
    By now, I am no longer trying to hide the amount of agony that I’m in. Something else creeps into my eyes. Something that I’d hoped I would not see: fear. My body remembers more than my mind and I am shaking from what I am seeing in the footage even though I can’t remember the actual incident.
    One by one the soldiers come up to me, make some sort of derogatory comment about my body and then rip a piece of the fake skin off. My prior injuries are reopened and there is blood everywhere. When the patch of fake skin that Padd’s Knife had pierced through when he was stabbing me is ripped off, you can see the strain on my face as I close my eyes from the pain.
    The next soldier decides to force me to open my eyes by stomping on my foot, knowing that it had been blistered from my “walk”.
    I don’t know how much longer I can take watching myself being treated in this way. A witness at a live event would have protested by now. I am beginning to understand some of the loathing and sarcasm that Hash displayed during our conversation together. How many times has he been witness to torture? How many times has he been forced to contribute to the torture in some way?
    “Don’t be shy.” The supervising soldier speaks into my ear as I’ve now closed my eyes and