Then it struck her—like a bullet between the eyes. Sarah hadn't broken from her own agony, but what about others'? The girl's file flashed in her mind's eye—page seventeen, surveillance photos: Sarah handing a wrapped sandwich to a grinning blonde child in a patched sundress. *Lily Simon, age 12. Possible blood relation unconfirmed. Last seen at Greenvale Orphanage.*

Renne's boot tapped a staccato rhythm against the concrete floor as she calculated. Greenvale stood just eight kilometers west—a twenty-minute drive if she commandeered a vehicle now. But protocol demanded signed authorization for minor extraction, and Central Processing wouldn't rubber-stamp that request until tomorrow morning at the earliest.

Her jaw clenched. Paperwork—always fucking paperwork, even now. She glanced at Sarah's unconscious form, the child's breath wheezing through cracked lips. The girl would live. Renne knew her burns like a chef knew cuts of meat: the labial destruction was strictly superficial, the clitoral ablation painful but survivable. Even the bladder trauma had been limitted, and it would function normally given one or two weeks under antibiotic. Sarah would piss razorblades for the next fifty years, but she'd piss. That should've been enough.

Renna's hand twitched toward her walkie-talkie, fingers brushing the chipped plastic casing. Dr. Chen was one of the few medical expert worked for the government in this province, and if Sarah could restore some of the appearance of her burnt private, his hand was necessary. The lieutenant's thumb depressed the transmit button with unnecessary force. "Medical team to Chamber Seven. Priority burn stabilization. Requesting Dr. Chen specifically." Static crackled in response—no questions, no delays. Good.

She didn't wait for confirmation. The walkie-talkie clattered onto the instrument tray, knocking aside forceps crusted with flakes of Sarah's carbonized skin. Renna's boots echoed through the corridor as she strode toward Records, each step measured to project calm she didn't feel. The modified interrogation report burned in her breast pocket—three pages of carefully curated lies emphasizing Sarah's "violent resistance" and "self-inflicted injuries." The orphanage extraction request nestled beneath it, its phrasing deliberately vague: *Supplementary material witness requires immediate retrieval for correlation of intelligence.* Neither document would withstand scrutiny, but bureaucracy thrived on plausible deniability.

Chen's reflection in the polished chrome cabinet doors showed a man who hadn't slept in thirty-eight hours. His lab coat hung loose on shoulders permanently hunched from leaning over operating tables, the cuffs frayed where he'd absentmindedly chewed them during complex graft procedures. The computer screen's glow accentuated the web of capillaries in his eyes as he proofread the burn gel study's conclusion: *...demonstrates 23% faster epithelialization in third-degree chemical burns compared to standard silver sulfadiazine—* The com unit crackled to life mid-sentence.

"Dr. Chen to Interrogration Chamber Seven. Priority stabilization." The voice lacked urgency—just another clinical request in a govermental facility. Chen's stomach dropped when hearing that.

He knew what "Interrogration Chamber" meant—it meant tortured prisoner. Chen had spent twenty years patching up wounds, from civilian accidents to battlefield injuries, and yet, nothing churned his stomach like the deliberate cruelty of torture wounds. A car crash victim's burns told a story of tragedy; a soldier's gunshot wounds spoke of war. But torture wounds? They whispered of calculated malice, of pain inflicted not by chance but by design.

Chen's fingers tightened around his medical bag, the leather strap biting into his palm. He had written reports—so many reports—detailing the unnecessary damage: third-degree burns in patterns too precise to be accidental, deep-tissue bruising that suggested prolonged restraints, nerve clusters deliberately targeted. Each time, the reports vanished into the system's black hole. Once, he had even dared to confront a lieutenant about it—only to find himself reassigned to a battlefield hospital for three months. Now, he treated the wounds and kept his mouth shut, knowing that complain would do nothing and the best he could do for those prisoners was to treat them to the best of his ability.

The corridor lights flickered as he approached Chamber Seven, casting long shadows that made the peeling institutional paint look like flayed skin. He braced himself for the usual tableau—some hardened insurgent, maybe with whip marks striping his back or a cauterized bullet wound in the thigh. Perhaps burns arranged in methodical grids where electrodes had been applied too long. Chen's stomach twisted, but he kept walking. He had seen worse.

Then the steel door hissed open, and the air left his lungs in one horrified rush.

The child lay splayed across the interrogation table like a broken doll—small enough that her wrists barely reached the restraints, her feet dangling inches above the footplate. Charcoal-colored burns striped her forearms in parallel lines spoke of deliberate torment. Her chest was a ruin: the right nipple a gaping crater oozing yellowish fluid, the right reduced to a blackened nub amidst melted skin that sagged like candle wax. But it was the devastation between her thighs that made Chen's knees buckle—the pubic mound charred to a crisp, shedding flakes of carbonized flesh like coal dust whenever her unconscious body twitched. What remained of her labia had fused into a single grotesque mass, the clitoris visible only as a tiny black protrusion still faintly smoking.

Chen's hands moved before his mind could process the horror—scalpel flashing as he debrided necrotic tissue with millimeter precision, his motions honed by years treating landmine victims. His niece Alice flashed behind his eyelids—same age, same slight build—currently interning in Pediatrics West. The comparison nearly made him retch. This child's urethra was forced open, her bladder undoubtedly swollen from the infection when urine meet internal burns. He inserted the catheter with trembling fingers, bile rising when steaming urine hissed into the collection bag, its acrid stench mingling with the scent of charred flesh.

None of his wartime patients had injuries like this. Not the POW with nails driven under his kneecaps. Not the village elder whose tongue had been torn out with pliers. This was artistry—the labial burns too symmetrical, the clitoral ablation too precise. Torture required purpose, but this? This was desecration. His suture needle paused mid-stitch as Sarah whimpered, her unconscious body recoiling from phantom pain. The sound was barely audible—just air escaping through cracked lips—but it shattered his professional detachment. Alice whimpered like that during nightmares after their parents' funeral.

Methodically, he cataloged the violations: seventeen separate burn zones, five requiring grafts. The urethral trauma alone would require reconstructive surgery no child should endure. His pen hovered over the damage assessment form. Standard procedure dictated vague terminology—"thermal injuries to lower extremities"—but his hand trembled with something hotter than fear. The third-degree burns encircling Sarah's clitoris formed a perfect halo. That wasn't interrogation. That was pain inflicted for sick pleasure of degenerate bastards, and he knew many among the Interrogration Bureau was one.

The walk to Records took him past Chamber Nine, where muffled sobs slithered under the door. Chen's grip tightened on the folder until the cardboard edges dented his palm. Last year's transfer notice flashed behind his eyelids—the way Colonel Voss had smirked while assigning him to the artillery-battered field hospital near the Kroskov front. "A change of scenery might improve your bedside manner, Doctor." Chen had nealy died from shelling nine times in that three month.

The post-stabilization damage report file trembled in his hands. The damage photos alone warranted court-martial—close-ups of her ruined pubis showed the clitoral ablation's surgical precision, each burn timed to maximize nerve exposure before destruction. His pen had hovered over the diagnosis field before carving the truth in block letters: DELIBERATE GENITAL MUTILATION UNDER TORTURE. Not "thermal trauma." Not "combat-adjacent injury." Words that would get him transferred to a mass grave disguised as a field station.

Alice's laugh echoed in his skull—bright and careless from just yesterday when she was doing intern on the hospital, her braces flashing as she demonstrated suturing techniques on banana peels. Twelve years old. Top of her class. The army would "reassign" her to some frontline triage unit where teenage medics bled out holding pressure on shrapnel wounds. He'd seen it before—child corpsmen clutching their own intestines while still trying to tourniquet a lieutenant's stump. Chen's fingers spasmed, crumpling the report's edge. One honest document versus Alice's life. No contest. It hurt his conscience to do this, and he silently apologized to the little girl lying on that dreaded torture room.