Oliver Shelling was being held at the same prison Patch and Rexx had been held, unbeknown to them. In a separate section. His interrogation had been stricter than either of his allies. After they searched his home and all of his traitorous paraphernalia found and destroyed, they thoroughly searched the rest of the Zone, including the office building where Oliver spent his days.

After finding everything, they assumed he was a ringleader of some kind, though Oliver had never done much more than be an eccentric artist and a witness to what was taking place around him. In fact, leading the compos away from Rexx and Patch was the proudest moment of his life, and the only time he felt like he’d stuck his neck out. He’d always convinced himself that he didn’t have it in him. That he had to hide himself away from a society he hated and could be of no use to. 

It wasn’t until the moment came, when it was him or them, that he knew what to do. In that moment, it wasn’t even a question. He saw himself creating a diversion in his mind, and before he knew it he was doing what he imagined. He hoped every second of every day since that it wasn’t for nothing. That they made it. Not that anyone would tell him either way. He held onto a sliver of hope that maybe, just maybe, they would somehow come back for him.

The first few weeks of being imprisoned were absolute hell. He thought he would be prepared after all the conversations he’d had with the elders, and the visions he’d formed in his imagination and paintings of what these places would be like. He was wrong. There was no military redemption as he was told time and time again since childhood. The elders were right. Only slave labor.

After he arrived, he suffered through daily interrogations, and was beaten to unconsciousness more than once. He’d wake up in his cell and every bone in his body ached. Then, it would happen again. 

When he wasn’t being interrogated, they left him alone in a cell no larger than his bathroom at home, and less appealing. A toilet sat in one corner, and large drain in the center of the room. These weren’t the incinerator toilets used in home but emptied into pipes whose destination you couldn’t see. The mild scent of refuse never left the air. 

Oliver could only imagine why a drain had been placed in the center of a room like this. Did people often just waste away in their cells? And it needed a good hosing down afterward? It wouldn’t surprise him in the slightest.

They served him meager amounts of food, and he could feel himself getting skinnier and skinnier. He was never a muscular guy, always taller and lankier than most, but he’d never been able to make out the knobs of his elbows so clearly, or the bones above his ankles. The bruises on his light brown skin stressed the changes his body was going through, and he felt naked without his long hair or beard. When he touched his own face or head, he didn’t recognize what he felt. He would pace in his cell sometimes, the rage piling up inside of him like a volcano ready to erupt.

Oliver hoped it would all just end. That one day a compo would cause something to rupture and put an end to all of this misery. That in between shooting electricity into his body with both the pacifiers and the cuffs and getting so enraged at his insolence they would switch to using their fists, he would just cease breathing. Instead, he held his tongue through it all.

The Board Member only took part in his questioning one other time after the day of his arrival. He’d displayed photos of the paintings that had been stacked in the corner of Oliver’s living room; of the random items he’d scavenged and hidden away in Zone 36.

He showed pictures of Noah and Sophia, their dead bodies lying end to end, nothing but the soles of their lifeless feet touching. Tears streamed down Oliver’s cheeks when he saw this and he muttered under his breath. "This can’t be happening. Not to you. Not to you. I’m so sorry. So so sorry." But still when pressed for more information about what the Veritas Ring was trying to accomplish, he didn’t budge. "I don’t know. I’ve never known."

After a month of only seeing the outside of his cell during his interrogations, apparently they had given up on him. One day, his cell doors opened and arrows led him outside to a blinding sun and a sea of grey faces.

Now, Oliver had been at the prison for over six months. His sanity was starting to wane. He didn’t know what was going on, only that about three months beforehand, activity around the prison was a little haywire. There was a storm, and suddenly compos were running this way and that shouting commands at each other. 

There had been an escape, that much he had understood, and there was something wrong with the fence. Even though he didn’t know for certain that she was being held in the same prison or if she had even been captured at all that night. Oliver held out hope that if she had been captured, that it was Patch who had escaped, and maybe even Rexx along with her. That one or both of them had gotten out. 

He thought about them every day. Wondering if they were carrying out the plan. He thought about how much he hated the board and how impotent he felt at not being able to do a damn thing to help.

Oliver had been tasked with assembling pacifiers during his time in his cell. At first he couldn’t stomach the work without having flashbacks to the jolting pain he’d felt the night they captured him. Knowing that he was participating in inflicting this pain on someone else. After several beatings for moving too slowly, he did the work without complaint, and the flashbacks were merely replaced with a grim reality as a necessary disassociation began to take hold. 

The rituals he muttered to himself became tighter, so he said the same words under his breath as he worked, for hours at a time to drown out the images on the screen that played from dusk to dawn on the far wall of his cell.

Don’t Lose Hope. They Might Come for You. Be Ready. 

The fifteen minutes of outside time were all that kept him from going off the deep end. He would go out, and while most would huddle together, no energy to exercise or even walk in the meager triangular path that lined the pie-shaped wedge of the yard. Oliver made himself move. Even if it meant him wasting away quicker.

He didn’t take the walking path that circled the yard, instead he walked through the grass, and it became a soothing ritual for him, walking in the same steps he’d walked the day before, until after about a month the grass wore where he stepped. The guards all eyed him like he was crazy. He could hear them whispering as he passed. But, he kept going. Something about the sameness, about the ritual, was soothing to him. He liked the path he had formed for himself. It kept him centered. It was his and no one else’s. Soon, the piercing siren would sound, indicating it was time to return to his cell. He’d take one last breath of fresh air. The next day, rain or shine, he would do it all again.

Next Chapter: The Patient