I thought it would be safe now to open my eyes, because my father would be smiling down at me, but when I opened them I was in a cell—not the one I shared with Solina—one with a single bed in it. I heard a sharp snap. The pounding pain had subsided to a muted throb and I could move my head. I saw the door, with a window in the top and an eye bulging as it peered at me. There was a second snap as a shutter slid across the window, leaving me once more in darkness.

I kept dozing off into phantasmagoric dreams, where I was eight or nine or ten, with my mother as she made me practice scales until my arms hurt so much I begged her not to make me do music anymore, or with Boom–Boom at a Fourth of July picnic where the fireworks made my head ache and tears run down my cheeks. The fireworks smelled, too, like some kind of horrible uncleaned toilet.

The snapping shutter roused me periodically. I could move my arms now, but the pain in my ribs and gut was so great I didn’t move them much. I was alternating between drenching sweats and chills so violent they caused a rattling at my feet. I thought my bones were clanking, but when I tried to sit up to look at my feet, the pain in my stomach stabbed me brutally. I cried out and lay back down. Once when the shutter opened I had a flash of awareness: my legs were manacled together. It didn’t matter—I was in too much pain to walk anywhere. I shut my eyes again.

Someone asked again if I was still alive. I knew the voice, but my mind floated off. She’s not in good shape, a second man answered. She stinks, the first voice said. She’ll be in back, Polsen, you won’t smell her once you get her inside. Wenzel can’t drive; you’ll have to come along. Put on some gloves and a mask. Change her shirt; we don’t want to get into the mess we had with the other one, having to come up with a clean shirt because this one’s got burn marks on it.

CO Polsen. He was tearing off my shirt; he was going to treat me the way he had that other woman, and I was powerless to stop him. I would not cry I would not give him the satisfaction I would not cry when he touched the raw skin on my breasts. I was jerked upright, and the pain across my abdomen was so ferocious I blacked out. Then I was sick and my father was carrying me, but he was too rough, he was hurting me, my head and my stomach.

“No, Papa,” I begged. “Put me down.”