Forty-Eight Hours Without a Name or Light

The day Rebeca announced the «elite test» was the first in nine months that the military alarm did not sound at five in the morning. In its place, a thick, almost solid silence seeped in beneath the door of my cell. I woke with a start, skin prickling, as if the air itself were holding its breath. Outside, in the yard, the others were still going through their usual routine: gasps, footsteps on the gravel, orders in low voices. I, on the other hand, was alone. The number 317 tattooed on my right buttock pulsed with a dull burning, as if it knew what was coming.

I tried to eat something from the bowl left over from the night before. It was empty. They had emptied it while I slept, as a warning.

At seven, the door gave way with an electronic click. Two guards with covered faces came in without saying a word. They tore the sheet from me —my only privilege for weeks— and got me to my feet. Naked, as always. They tied my wrists behind my back with a nylon cord that dug into the scars from previous punishments, the ones that no longer hurt because the skin had hardened. There was no breakfast. Only a glass of murky water that they forced me to swallow in one gulp. It tasted of chlorine and surrender.

One of the guards, before taking me out into the corridor, shoved two thick fingers into my cunt without warning. He moved them inside with methodical slowness, checking something, like someone inspecting merchandise before shipment. I felt his knuckles brush my inner walls, the involuntary wetness my body produced by pure reflex, that biological humiliation I could not control. He pulled his fingers out, brought them to his nose, and smelled. Then he ran them over my lips, forcing me to taste my own flavor.

—She’s ready —he told the other one.

Rebeca appeared in the doorway with her wooden rod swinging between her fingers like a pendulum. She wore the same uniform as always: black trousers, white shirt, thick-soled boots. Nothing set her apart from anyone else in the outside world, except the way she looked at me. As if I were an object in the process of being finished.

—Congratulations, 317 —she said, not meeting my eyes—. You’ve reached the mark. You’re one of the top five.

I didn’t answer. Silence was the only currency I still had.

They took me down a corridor I had never seen. The lights were dimmer; the polished concrete floor reflected my bare feet like a dull mirror. The corridor had no windows or signs. Only doors with no numbers, no markings, no indication of what was on the other side. At the end, a steel door with no handle. One of the guards pulled out a black card and slid it through a reader set into the wall. The door opened with a hydraulic hiss, as if taking a breath. Inside: only darkness. A void that smelled of rubber and cold disinfectant.

—In —Rebeca ordered.

I crossed the threshold. The cold of the floor climbed up my legs to my waist. The door shut behind me with a dry slam that rang through my bones. Not in my ears: in my bones.

Then the darkness became absolute.

There were no visible walls. I moved one step, two, three. My fingers brushed something padded, like thick foam covered in fabric. I turned. The same in every direction. A box. A soft tomb that left no echo, no trace of sound. I tried to scream, but my voice drowned in the padding and came back to me distorted, as if someone else were speaking from my own throat. Panic rose.

Rebeca’s voice came from somewhere behind me, cold and precise:

—Listen carefully, 317, because I won’t repeat it. For the next forty-eight hours we’ll suppress all your senses. Earplugs, leather blindfold, gag. No light, no sound, no touch beyond the padding. Every six hours you’ll receive a protein shake anally: it’s your only nourishment. Don’t try to resist. There’s nothing you can do. When you come out of here, you won’t be Laura anymore.

I felt her cold fingers at my nape as she adjusted the blindfold. The leather flattened my eyelids with even pressure. The world went dark.

Before the final layer, I felt Rebeca kneel behind me. Her hands parted my ass cheeks with clinical calm. A finger coated in thick gel pressed against the opening of my asshole and pushed. It entered without hurry, first to the first knuckle, then deeper, twisting, stretching me. A second finger joined in. The sensation was obscene: the burn, the invasion, the awareness that they were opening a path they would later use for two days. The fingers came out with a wet sound. Then came something thicker, hard, plastic —a silicone tube with a wide base— which she shoved all the way in with one thrust. I screamed against the invisible gag that still wasn’t in place. The scream hung in the air like something that did not belong to me.

—That stays in there for the whole session —Rebeca said, in the voice of someone jotting down a fact on a form—. It’s the access.

Invisible hands shoved me to the floor. I felt silicone earplugs slot into my ears: silence became absolute, without texture, without the other breathing that until then had given me scale. Then the rubber gag filled my mouth, with a thin tube descending down my throat. I could only breathe through my nose, in short, wet gasps that sounded enormous inside my own skull. Finally, Velcro straps wrapped around my ankles and wrists, immobilizing me in a fetal position.

And then… nothing.

No light. No sound.

No touch beyond the padding that wrapped me like a second skin that had not asked permission to exist. Only the thick bulge inside my ass, present, insistent, marking each heartbeat with a pressure that would not let me forget it.

Only my heartbeat, amplified in the cavity of my chest, counting seconds that led nowhere.

***

I thought of Nicolás. Of his hug the day I left. Of how he smelled of modeling clay and fruit. I tried to reconstruct his voice saying “mama,” but the memory fell apart like smoke in the first layers: first the tone, then the volume, then the opening syllable. The void did not keep memories. It processed them and returned them empty.

I counted so I wouldn’t lose the thread.

One. Two. Three. Four.

I got to three hundred and forty-seven before I forgot since when I had been counting.

The sting came without warning. I felt someone yank the plastic plug from my ass with a dry pull that left me open, exposed, with a damp hollow sensation between my cheeks. Then the tube for the shake slid in, thinner but longer, advancing through my intestines with deliberate slowness. The thick, warm liquid spread gradually, filling me with an obscene, constant pressure. I tried to expel it. My body did not obey. The sphincter muscles contracted around the tube in spasms that only served to make me feel every centimeter of the intrusion. The liquid settled there, heavy, reminding me that even that was no longer my decision. The plug went back into place, sealing everything inside me.

And then, without any explanation, a finger began to massage my clitoris. A gloved finger, cold, mechanical, tracing circles with clockwork precision. It wasn’t pleasure: it was a demonstration. My body responded despite me. My nipples hardened against the padding. A stupid, hot wetness began running down my thighs. The finger kept going, impassive, until a brutal orgasm ripped through me like a jolt, involuntary, humiliating, a spasm that shook my body bound in fetal position and that no one else registered, because I was the only witness. Then the finger withdrew. The lesson was clear: my pleasure belonged to them too.

I started talking to myself. Or I thought I did.

—Andrés… please… get me out of here…

My voice came back distorted by the padding.

I am Laura. I am Laura. I am thirty-two years old and I have a son who smells like modeling clay.

The void answered somewhere inside my head: You are 317.

The hallucinations gave no warning. I saw Nicolás in the yard of a house that had never existed, running after a red ball. I ran toward him, but my legs wouldn’t move. I remembered I was tied up. He turned and looked at me. His eyes were two bottomless black holes.

—Mom, why do you have horns? —he asked, with his exact voice, the one I thought I had forgotten.

I tried to touch him. My hands were claws.

The ball exploded into white silence.

***

The shake came a second time. This time it burned. I felt it spread slowly, swelling me. I screamed inside the gag. The sound came out as an animal moan, muffled and useless, swallowed by the padding before it could fully exist.

Someone —I didn’t know who, it didn’t matter— pried my legs apart in the darkness. I felt foreign hands parting my cunt lips, fingers exploring without tenderness, measuring. Then a real cock, warm, hard, entered me in one thrust to the hilt. There was no preamble, no question. They fucked me there, tied, blind, deaf, with my ass full of the shake and the plug still shoved farther down. Each thrust shoved me against the padding and made the plug shift inside, provoking a filthy, parasitic pleasure I shouldn’t have felt but did anyway. The cock hammered my cervix with a steady, mechanical rhythm, neither fast nor slow, a functional use of my body. I felt the hot load spill inside me, a thick gush that filled me and then began to trickle down my thighs as the cock withdrew. No one cleaned anything. The semen cooled on my skin like an anonymous signature.

Then came another cock. And another. I lost count. I also lost disgust. Bodies entered and left the padding like shadows that left no face behind. My cunt became a used channel, slick with foreign semen and my own treacherous wetness. At some point I felt someone fucking me from behind while another cock slid into the gag, pushing the tube, forcing my throat. I couldn’t breathe for a few seconds. When the man came, I felt the semen going straight down into my stomach through the tube, mixing with the shake below. I was a container full of liquids I had not asked for.

In the darkness I saw Andrés. He was in our bed, with another woman. She was thin, with my face from before the mark, before the number. He kissed her on the mouth I no longer used for anything of my own.

—Laura is dead —he said, without sadness—. This is the new version.

I lost all sense of time.

The void became solid. It crushed my chest, occupied the space between my lungs. I started counting again to anchor myself.

One. Two. Three.

The numbers mixed with the heartbeats, with the memory of previous punishments, with the smell of chlorine that I could no longer smell because the padding absorbed everything.

One hundred. One hundred one. How long had I been here? Minutes? Days?

The tube was pulled out. The liquid came out of me in a hot, humiliating stream, mixed with semen and whatever else had been inside. I felt the mixture slip between my ass cheeks, sticky, foul, a human residue that had been food, cum, and waste all at once. The smell was sour and final, a form of forgetting rising from below. I tried to cry. There were no tears. Only a dry void where my eyes used to live.

Then I heard a voice. It wasn’t mine.

—317… 317… —Rebeca whispered from somewhere inside my head—. You are no longer Laura. You are the void.

I saw Rebeca in the darkness, though darkness should not allow anything to be seen. She was naked, wearing my old body. She laughed calmly, without cruelty, as if merely noting something obvious. Her tits were mine: firm, with the pink nipples Andrés used to suck on Sundays. She stroked between her legs with two fingers and showed me the wetness gleaming on the tips.

—Look at what you’ve achieved, 317 —she said, pointing at something behind me—. This body is no longer yours. It’s ours. We use it however we want.

She turned my face toward her with a force that shouldn’t have existed in a dream. She sat astride my face in the darkness and lowered her cunt to my lips. I tasted it —salty, thick, with a metallic undertone— filling my mouth even though the gag was still in place. My tongue moved on its own, obedient, licking, sucking the clit with the desperation of someone searching for air. She moaned above me, in my own voice, and came into my mouth. I swallowed. I had no choice. I swallowed what was mine and was no longer mine.

I turned. In the darkness there was a mirror that could not exist but did exist. I was bones. Loose skin hanging from my arms like wings that had never learned to unfold. My nipples were two open wounds. The number 317 shone on my buttock like a red-hot iron brand. Between my legs, a thick white trail ran down to my knees.

I tried to scream.

The mirror shattered.

The fragments fell inside me and made no sound.

***

The door opened.

The light burned my eyes like acid. Hands dragged me out. I fell onto the polished concrete floor. The air smelled of chlorine and something metallic I couldn’t identify. Sound came in gradually: first the hiss of ventilation, then footsteps, then voices that still weren’t forming words.

Someone yanked the anal plug out, arching my back. I felt everything that had been left inside come out: shake, semen, wetness, an impossible mixture with no name. It spilled onto the floor between my legs. No one reacted. Rebeca looked at the puddle with the same indifference with which one looks at a used plate.

I tried to speak.

—Thre… one… sev…

Rebeca crouched in front of me. She stroked my hair with the same patience one uses to calm a frightened animal. Then she lowered her hand and slid two fingers between my legs, gathering what was still inside. She brought them to my mouth. I sucked them without thinking, without deciding. She smiled.

—Welcome back, 317 —she said—. Two kilos lighter. And three days of your mind.

They got me up. My legs didn’t fully respond, as if they had forgotten their function during the absence. I walked with help toward the corridor.

I saw the other four elite girls. They were all mumbling numbers under their breath. All of them had empty eyes, like screens gone dark after a lightning storm. One of them —408, the one who once slipped me a piece of bread under the cafeteria table, so long ago it felt like another life— wet herself without realizing it. Piss ran down her thighs, mixing with the dry semen already stuck there. No one cleaned her. No one stepped aside. No one seemed to see it.

Something inside me wanted to feel compassion. I couldn’t find the place to keep it. The place was occupied by the void.

***

That night, in my cell, they brought me a small mirror. I held it with both trembling hands. Sunken cheekbones. Eyes ringed with dark shadow, as if someone had drawn arches with charcoal. The ear tag was rusted at the edges. The tattoo on my buttock was now a shiny scab that itched when it brushed the fabric. Between my legs I still felt the opening, that dilation that wouldn’t close, as if the body had accepted staying that way, open, available, forever.

I tried to say my name.

—Lau…

Nothing. Only a dry croak, with no final consonant.

I curled up on the bed, with the mirror face down on the floor so I wouldn’t see it anymore. I slipped two fingers between my legs, without desire, only to check. They went in without resistance all the way to the palm. I felt nothing. Neither disgust, nor pleasure, nor curiosity. I pulled them out and smelled them. They smelled of disinfectant and old semen. The void was still inside me, installed like a guest who had not asked permission. I was not a woman. I was a hollow space in the exact shape of someone who used to be named Laura.

I closed my eyes.

The darkness no longer frightened me.

It was the only thing I knew for certain.