What Remains of Rebecca Palmer Chapter Three

 

Chapter Three: Acquiescence

 

They had taken my shoes.

 

Spoken aloud, it sounded trivial. But when they ordered me to unbuckle them and hand them over, I began to cry with all the shock I had not yet been allowed to feel.

 

I stood in a windowless room somewhere underground that was bleak and cold, where the air had the weight of dead, buried things. It smelled of cold cement, disinfectant, and something faintly metallic, like old water sitting too long in pipes.

 

Harsh strip lights ran the length of the ceiling, humming faintly, casting a flat white glare that left nowhere for shadows to hide. The light was merciless. It drained colour from everything it touched, including me. The walls were bare concrete, painted a tired institutional grey that had been scuffed and repainted so many times it had lost any claim to smoothness. In places the paint had bubbled and cracked, revealing darker patches beneath, as if the building itself were bruised.

 

The floor was unfinished cement, cold through the stocking-clad soles of my feet. Every sound echoed slightly - footsteps, breathing, the soft scrape of a chair being dragged back into place - giving the impression that the room was larger than it really was, or emptier, or both. There were no windows. No clocks. No indication of time passing at all.

 

A single metal table stood in the centre, bolted to the floor, with two chairs on either side. One was lighter, clearly meant to be moved. The other – mine - was fixed, its edges worn smooth by countless previous occupants. I became acutely aware of how many people must have sat there before me, waiting, just as I was.

 

She was already in the room when I entered.

 

The woman was older, perhaps late fifties or early sixties, with iron-grey hair pulled back so tightly it seemed to stretch the skin of her face. She wore a severe, practical uniform in dull charcoal, unadorned except for a small insignia pinned at her collar. Her posture was rigid, disciplined, as if she had been constructed rather than born. She did not rise when I was brought in. She simply looked at me, slowly, thoroughly, the way one inspects an object rather than a person.

 

Her eyes were pale and sharp. Appraising. Uncurious.

 

“Sit,” she said, without lifting her voice.

 

I obeyed before I consciously decided to. The chair was cold and unyielding beneath me, its metal back pressing straight into my spine. The click of the door closing behind me sounded louder than it should have, final in a way that made my stomach tighten.

 

She opened a thin folder on the table, its pages stark white, edges perfectly aligned. I noticed that my name was already printed at the top.

 

Rebecca Palmer.

 

Seeing it there, reduced to ink on paper, made something in me recoil.

 

“You will answer the questions you are asked,” she said calmly. “You will not volunteer information. You will not cry. You will not raise your voice. If you do all of this, the process will be… efficient.”

 

Efficient. The word settled over me like dust.

 

I told myself this was a misunderstanding. That it would be corrected.

 

My father had powerful friends.

 

Men who owed him favours. Men who knew his value, who would not allow a mistake like this to stand. People like us did not simply disappear. Not without questions being asked.

 

I held onto that thought as if it were a fact, not a hope. Something solid. Something guaranteed.

 

Her pen hovered above the page, poised, patient. She did not need to threaten me. The room itself did that for her - the lights, the walls, the chair, the certainty that I was very far from anywhere that had ever loved me.

 

For the first time since the van doors had closed, I understood something with terrifying clarity: this place was designed to erase resistance. To make compliance feel not just sensible, but inevitable.

 

And sitting there, under the glare of the lights, I felt myself beginning to disappear. 

 

I flexed my toes, feeling nothing now but the tights that I wore. Why had they taken my shoes? What possible purpose did that serve? The cement floor felt even colder now that I lacked my flat leather footwear. My shoes had been made in Milan. My father had brought them back from a business trip, proud in a quiet way, as if their quality reflected something about me—about us. The box had been beautiful, lined with silk paper arranged just so. Even then, I had understood that they were more than footwear. They were permission.

 

For my baby girl, he had said.

 

Sitting barefoot on the cement floor, I understood that this was why they had taken them. Not for practicality. Not for control. But because they represented a version of myself this place could not allow to exist.

 

I thought again of my last sight of my father, before one of the men had pulled a leather hood over my head and buckled it tight around my throat. I thought of his limp, seemingly broken arm, of his red, swollen eyes that he could barely see through, and of the look of despair as he realised just what they were about to do to me. It is a terrible thing for a daughter to see her father truly helpless and broken. Fathers are always meant to be a tower of strength against anything that the world can throw at you.

 

The leather hood had smelled stale from the dried sweat of numerous men and women who had been confined like that before me. I couldn’t see as I was bundled into the back of the same van as my mother and my father. When I tried to speak, I felt one of the men jab me with the end of a baton. It was just a warning. They could have done far worse.

 

And so I sat there as the van doors were slammed shut and locked. I sat on the floor of the van, breathing hysterically into the foul, tainted leather of my hood – a hood that was buckled shut around my throat. They hadn’t bothered with restraints, which I suppose indicated how little threat I seemed to pose. Somewhere in the darkness, I knew my mother and father would be sitting close to me. I heard chain links move, and I suspected they were secured in a way that I wasn’t. I wanted to say something. I wanted to speak to them before we were separated, but I feared what might happen if I tried.

 

I sat down in the steel-backed chair facing this stern, middle-aged woman, and my first thought, absurd and humiliating, was that I desperately needed to pee.

 

My hair was damp, from being confined inside the leather hood. I hadn’t been given the option of tidying my appearance. I had simply been marched down a ramp into a basement, and only then had the hood been unbuckled and I became suddenly accustomed to the harsh strip lighting on the ceiling.

 

“Please,” I said to the men who marched either side of me. “Where is my father?”

 

One of the men cuffed me.

 

I didn’t ask again. 

 

“Your name is Rebecca Palmer,” said the middle-aged woman as she regarded me. I didn’t know whether that was supposed to be a question. Was I supposed to confirm? 

 

“Yes,” I said. 

 

The woman simply picked up the folder, closed it, and walked out of the room.

 

“What?” I turned my head. “What?”

 

A man came in, carrying a steel bucket of water. Before I could react, he threw the ice water over me, drenching me in a single moment. I screamed and shook, feeling the sudden cold. I was wet now, and began shivering uncontrollably. Then, and only then, the woman returned and took her seat again opposite me.

 

“That wasn’t a question,” she said. “That was a statement. You will answer questions, but nothing more.”

 

Strands of my hair hung before my eyes, dripping with ice water. I repeated the mantra to myself again, more quietly this time.

 

My father had powerful friends.

 

I didn’t name them. I couldn’t. The words felt less complete without faces attached, like a sentence missing its ending.

 

Surely someone would notice. Someone would intervene. They would have to.

 

The thought wavered, but I forced it to stay.

 

“Do you understand?” asked the woman. I nodded quickly.  And then swiftly added, “Yes I do!” fearing that a simple nod wasn’t a sufficient answer to her question.

 

“How long have you known that your father was a subversive threat to the Steel Worlds?” asked the woman.

 

“What? I… what do you mean? He’s not. I mean… no! please come back!”

 

Again the woman closed the folder, rose from her seat and left the room, Again, a man entered. 

 

“Please, no!" I cried, as he threw the contents of a battered steel bucket of ice water over me. I began crying once more, my teeth chattering. In the centre of the cement floor there was a large vacant plug hole through which the ice water pooled and drained.

 

Again the woman returned to the room and took her seat. I sat there, arms folded about my body, my teeth chattering.

 

My thoughts became simple. Cold. Don’t shake. Don’t move. 

 

The ache in my bladder had become constant now, a tight, humiliating pressure that occupied more of my attention than the questions themselves. I answered automatically, nodding when I should, speaking quickly when I was afraid silence might invite punishment.

 

Somewhere beyond the edge of my awareness, the lights hummed and the room existed, but it felt distant, unreal. What mattered was my body — how it could be made uncomfortable, exposed, corrected.

 

I understood with sudden clarity that this was the lesson. Not fear. Not pain. Control.

 

“You will answer the questions, and you will not lie. We will know when you lie,” she said. “We always know when you lie.”

 

I sniffed, feeling snot drip from my nose.

 

“How long have you known that your father was a subversive threat to the Steel Worlds?” asked the woman.

 

I answered quickly, terrified of the sound of footsteps returning. “Just a few weeks,” I said. I didn’t want her to leave again. I feared that eventually they would use something other than ice water in a bucket. The woman seemed pleased by my response now.

 

She did not look at me when I finished speaking. Instead, she glanced down at the page and placed a neat tick in a small box beside my answer.

 

The sound of the pen against paper was soft, precise. Final.

 

I realised then that my response had not surprised her. It had merely satisfied a requirement. I tried to summon the phrase again, but it didn’t land the way it had before.

 

My father had… connections.

 

Even as I thought it, I knew how small it sounded in this room. How irrelevant. Connections did not open locked doors underground. They did not stop men with clipboards and buckets of ice.

 

I let the thought go. There was no room for it here.

 

The questions continued, but they no longer pretended to seek answers.

 

They circled, repeated, returned in slightly altered forms, as if testing not my knowledge but my endurance. Dates I could not know. Meetings I had never attended. Names that meant nothing to me. Each time I hesitated, each time confusion crept into my voice, the woman made a small mark on the paper in front of her.

 

Not a note. A tick.

 

She did not look at me when she did it.

 

“How often did your father speak to you about his work?”

 

“I - he didn’t. Not really.”

 

Tick.

 

“Did he ever express doubts about the Steel Worlds?”

 

“No.”

 

Tick.

 

“Did he instruct you to destroy documents on his behalf?”

 

“No, never.”

 

Tick.

 

The pattern emerged with sickening clarity: it did not matter what I said. The act of answering itself was the test. My voice grew hoarse. My hands shook uncontrollably now, my wet clothes clinging to me, icy against my skin. I was painfully aware of my bladder, the pressure sharp and humiliating, every minute stretching it closer to disaster.

 

I tried to sit still. Tried not to beg.

 

At some point, without ceremony, the woman closed the folder.

 

“That will be sufficient,” she said.

 

Relief surged through me so fast it made me dizzy.

 

She stood, gathered her papers, and paused only to glance at a small digital display mounted high on the wall. It showed blocks of time, neatly segmented. One of them blinked from amber to green.

 

“Standard intake resistance,” she said, almost to herself. Then she left, accompanied by one of the guards.

 

I sat there, soaked, shaking, alone.

 

I don’t know how long passed. Time had lost its edges. The strip lights hummed. Water dripped from my hair onto the cement floor, each drop echoing like a countdown.

 

Then the door opened again.

 

This man was different.

 

He was younger than the woman, perhaps in his forties, with greying hair at his temples and a softness around the eyes that made him look almost tired rather than cruel. He carried a clipboard, not a folder. He closed the door gently behind him.

 

He looked at me and frowned.

 

“Oh,” he said quietly. “You’re freezing.”

 

The concern in his voice hit me harder than the water had. My throat closed. I couldn’t speak.

 

He pulled a metal chair back and sat opposite me, angling his body slightly away, as if to give me space. He slid a folded blanket across the table toward me.

 

“Go on,” he said. “You can take it.”

 

I hesitated.

 

“Please,” he added. “No one will object.”

 

I wrapped it around my shoulders with clumsy hands. The rough fabric scratched my skin, but the warmth was immediate. I let out a small, broken sound that might have been a sob.

 

“I’m sorry about earlier,” he said. “It didn’t need to be… quite like that.”

 

I looked at him now, searching his face desperately for truth. “My father,” I whispered. “There’s been a mistake.”

 

He sighed, rubbing his forehead with two fingers. “I hear that a lot,” he said. Not unkindly. “And sometimes – sometimes - it’s even true. But that’s not really my department.”

 

He glanced at the clipboard, then back at me. “What is my department,” he continued, “is helping people get through this phase with as little… lasting difficulty as possible.”

 

I nodded quickly. Too quickly.

 

“I’ll do whatever you want,” I said. “I’ve answered everything. I swear.”

 

“I know,” he said. “You’ve been very cooperative. That’s good. That helps.”

 

Hope flickered. Weak, but alive.

 

“But,” he added gently, “cooperation isn’t just about answers. It’s about attitude. Acceptance. Understanding that we’re all on the same side here.” He leaned forward slightly now, lowering his voice. “You’re not in trouble because of what you know, Rebecca. You’re here because of what you are. A dependent. An extension. A liability that needs to be properly assessed.”

 

The words slid into place with horrible precision.

 

“I can advocate for you,” he said. “I really can. But I need to be able to say that you understand the seriousness of the situation. That you’re willing to be… guided.”

 

I nodded again, tears slipping down my cheeks.

 

“Yes,” I said. “Yes. I understand.”

 

He smiled, small and relieved, as if we had reached a sensible agreement. “Good girl,” he said, and then, catching himself, added, “Good. That’s good.” 

 

A tiny shiver ran through me. My shoulders tightened, and I clutched the blanket closer around myself, hunching instinctively. My stomach knotted; the pressure in my bladder spiked in sudden awareness. I didn’t think about any of it - my body just reacted, before my mind could make sense of the words. My eyes blinked towards him. He had said ‘good girl’ by accident? He had swiftly corrected himself? I shivered, still cold and wet beneath the blanket. Did this mean…?

 

He stood, straightening his jacket. “We’ll get you cleaned up. Dry clothes. Some paperwork. Nothing difficult.” He paused at the door. “Try to rest while you can.”

 

The door closed softly behind him. The lights hummed on.

 

Wrapped in the blanket, shivering despite the warmth, I clung to the thought that had not yet fully died inside me - thinner now, frayed at the edges, but still there.

 

My father had powerful friends.

 

He did.

 

He must have.

 

I just had to cooperate a little longer.