When My Friend Became My Executioner

It has been eight months since I crossed the steel gate. Two hundred and forty days have melted into a single scar that still won’t close. My body has lost fifty kilos in that time—I now weigh barely sixty, a skeleton wrapped in loose skin hanging from my bones like wet cloth—with the number 318 branded onto my left thigh and the metal rings in my ear and septum tugging at inflamed flesh every time I move my head, leaving red marks that are already permanent.

Worst of all, though, wasn’t the body. Worst of all was the elite test: forty-eight hours in total darkness, with sealed earplugs, blindfold, and a tight leather gag, without human contact, fed every six hours through a tube with a thick liquid that tasted like nothing. An isolation that stripped my identity away in layers, like peeling a fruit, until I forgot my own name. When they took me out, I could only babble the number 318. The other four elite girls did the same.

It took me a whole week to recover fragments of myself. First Nicolás’s baby powder smell. Then Andrés’s voice saying, “I’ll be waiting for you,” that last morning before admission. And finally my name, Verónica, which came back like an echo from the bottom of a deep well. In the recovery cell, the doctors noted on their tablets that “sow 318 presents partial dissociation, stable progression,” while I lay motionless staring at the white ceiling, feeling like a shell someone had emptied out.

Every night, before trying to sleep, I took out the folded photo I kept tucked behind the mattress seam. Andrés with Nicolás in his arms in that square that smells of orange blossom in spring. I pressed it to my chest and counted: how long I’d been inside, how much time was left, whether the math still checked out. It was the only thing that still belonged to me.

***

This morning there was no trumpet. Only silence: dense, almost physical, the kind that seemed to compress the walls of the whole farm as if the place were holding its breath before exhaling its next cruelty.

At six-thirty, my cell door opened with an electronic click that rang through my still-fragile bones. Two guards came in without looking me in the eye. They yanked me to my feet, tied my wrists behind my back with nylon rope that sank into the marks from previous lashings as if reopening them, and put a glass of chlorine-tasting water in front of me that I had to swallow in one go. No breakfast. No explanations.

They dragged me down the main corridor. Through the narrow window in the hall, I caught sight of the rest of the submissives in the outer yard, jogging in circles under a barely risen sun, their panting reaching me muffled by distance. I was headed the other way.

***

The graduation hall was a room I had never seen before. Stainless-steel walls that reflected the light like slightly distorted mirrors, white tile floors so clean they seemed to mock everything that was coming. In the center stood a dark-wood sawhorse with leather straps already spread out. Beside it, a raised podium where the sector chief waited.

Sonia wore the same uniform as always, but with a new pin on her lapel. Beside her stood Clara.

Clara wore a new gray uniform, freshly pressed, with the farm’s emblem embroidered over her left chest. In her right hand she held a still-green bamboo rod—the kind that hurts twice as much because it doesn’t snap, it gives and springs back—and in her left a silver stopwatch. Her brown eyes, the same ones that once whispered to me “hang on, Vero, hang on” in the dark corridors of the first weeks, were now looking at me from behind something I no longer recognized as her. A screen. A new distance.

Sonia smiled like a mother presenting her daughter at a school closing ceremony.

—Sow 318 —she said, and her voice rang through the empty hall with obscene clarity—. Today is a special day. Sow 217 has completed her full cycle and has shown unwavering loyalty. We are promoting her to sector supervisor.

Clara didn’t blink.

Sonia handed her the rod with both hands, as if it were a scepter or a sword. Clara took it without a muscle trembling.

The guards shoved me into the center of the hall and forced me to kneel on a metal grate whose cold drove through my knees like ice needles. Clara approached, her shadow falling over me, and crouched just enough to speak in my ear.

—I’m sorry, Vero —she whispered.

Her voice didn’t tremble.

***

Sonia pronounced the punishment with the same indifference used to announce the weather: eight hundred squats with weights hanging from the vaginal lips, and for every incomplete repetition, one lash with the rod.

The guards brought the clamps. Bigger than the ones they had put on me in previous months, with serrated steel teeth on the inner edges. They opened with a metallic snap that froze my blood. The first bit into the left lip—swollen from previous scars, sensitive to the limit—and the pain was immediate and brutal, like a red-hot needle driven into raw flesh. The second went on the right lip. The weights hung there, swaying very slowly, like pendulums promising the worst.

—Begin —said Clara.

I went down.

The weights pulled downward with a force I hadn’t expected, stretching the flesh to its limit. I came back up. The pain doubled, adding a layer of burn on top of the last one. I went down again and felt the first tear: small, like a seam giving way millimeter by millimeter. A thread of hot blood began running down the inside of my thighs.

At fifty repetitions, my legs burned. At one hundred, they shook as if they hadn’t rested in weeks, which was almost true. At two hundred, blood made a dark stain on the white tiles beneath me, and the weights tugged at flesh that no longer had any resistance left to give. At three hundred, I stopped feeling the lips as part of me. They had become something alien, two throbbing masses hanging from my body with a weight that was no longer only physical.

Then the rod hissed through the air.

The first strike crossed my back and opened an old scar from previous months. The second landed on my thighs. The third on my ass. Each blow was precise, calculated, with no visible fury. Only duty, carried out in absolute coldness.

—This is for the escape attempt —said Clara, in a low, almost intimate voice—. For making me doubt. For thinking we could get out together.

She lashed me again. Stayed silent. Lashed me again.

At five hundred repetitions, my legs stopped responding. I collapsed onto my palms and the crash of the weights against the tiles tore a sound out of me that I didn’t recognize as mine: something between a scream and a squawk, the voice of someone who hasn’t really used it in weeks. Clara grabbed my hair with her free hand, forced me back onto my knees, and looked me straight in the face for the first time all morning.

—If you stop, we start over. If you make it to eight hundred, we’re done —she said.

Think of Nicolás. Think of Andrés waiting for you. Four months. Just four more months.

I got to my feet.

***

At seven hundred eighty, the weights were no longer pulling on the vaginal lips: they were pulling on pieces of flesh that had torn and were hanging by little more than a thread. At eight hundred, I collapsed sideways. The white tiles received my weight without concern. Blood formed a small pool under me and I could no longer close my legs.

Sonia clapped once. The sound was obscene in the hall’s silence.

—Physical punishment complete. The second part of the graduation remains.

Clara turned her head toward Sonia with a blink that lasted too long. The sector chief came down from the podium and walked slowly to the wooden sawhorse. With the tip of her index finger she traced the leather straps as if appraising a head of cattle, then looked at me.

—Before any supervisor may carry the rod alone, she must use a sow’s cunt in front of me. Let it be clear for both of you which side each one is on. Lift 318.

The guards lifted me by the armpits and laid me on my back across the sawhorse. The leather straps closed around my wrists above my head, my ankles spread at an obscene angle, and my waist, leaving me exposed, with my legs forced wide open and my shattered lips dripping blood onto the dark wood. Clara came closer with the rod still in hand. Sonia made a gesture.

—Put the bamboo down. Use the other thing now.

Clara laid the rod on the podium with almost ceremonial care and began to unfasten the belt of her gray uniform. She pulled her pants down to mid-thigh. Underneath she wore a black leather harness with a thick, long dildo, broad at the base and with carved veins in the silicone. The tip was lubricated with something shiny that was already dripping. It was the new badge of office: no longer the submissive who had whispered in the dark, but the supervisor with another woman’s cock strapped to her hip.

She positioned herself between my legs. I turned my head not to look, and she turned it back by grabbing my chin with her hand.

—Look at me, Vero. Look at me while I fuck you. It’s the only way Sonia will sign off on the pin.

She pressed the tip of the dildo to the entrance of my swollen, torn cunt. She pushed slowly the first time, almost pitying, and even so the pain was so brutal that I arched my back against the straps and let out a hoarse howl. The torn flesh opened wider, and I felt the thick silicone sink centimeter by centimeter into a dry, inflamed channel that wasn’t ready to receive anything. A fresh thread of blood ran beneath my ass and dripped onto the wood.

—Harder —said Sonia, bored—. You’re not fucking her, you’re petting her. Break her properly.

Clara closed her eyes for half a second. When she opened them, they weren’t the same. She grabbed my hips with both hands, drove her fingers into the fresh rod marks, and started fucking me for real. Long, dry thrusts that made her thighs slam against mine with a wet smack. The sawhorse creaked beneath my back. The weights still hanging from my ruined lips swayed with every impact, dragging at the torn flesh, sending white waves of pain straight into my brain.

—That’s it —panted Sonia—. Tear that sow’s cunt open. Let her feel who’s in charge.

—Take it, sow —Clara hissed, and it was no longer the tender whisper from the dark corridor, it was the voice of a supervisor—. Take the cock, 318. Swallow it whole like I’m putting it in you.

She fucked me with a contained fury I recognized as my own when I tried not to cry. Each thrust tore a squawk from me, each withdrawal left an emptiness that burned worse than the rod. I felt the dildo slam against the bottom of my cunt, pushing something that shouldn’t have moved, and blood running down my ass and dripping between my cheeks onto the wood. My skinny breasts jolted with the rhythm of Clara’s hip strikes, small and flat from the fifty kilos I’d lost, and the septum rings pulled at my face every time my head bounced against the sawhorse.

—Say it —ordered Clara, without stopping—. Say who’s fucking you.

I swallowed saliva and blood.

—The… supervisor two-one-seven —I babbled.

—Again.

—Supervisor two-one-seven is fucking my cunt…

—And what are you?

—Sow three-one-eight.

Sonia smiled from her podium with the satisfaction of someone seeing a graft take. She came over to the sawhorse and, without taking her eyes off Clara, shoved two fingers into my mouth to the back of my throat, pressing my tongue down so I couldn’t close my teeth.

—Now in the ass. Pull it out of the cunt and put it in her ass. No more lube. So the supervisor learns a cock of her own doesn’t ask permission.

Clara yanked the dildo out of me with a pull that tore a howl from my throat. It came out soaked, dark, with threads of blood stuck to the silicone. Without giving me time, she set the tip against my asshole and pushed. The ring resisted for a fraction of a second and then gave way with a burn that made me see white. I felt the thick silicone force its way to the back, burning every centimeter, forcing flesh that hadn’t been used in months of isolation. My eyes filled with tears I hadn’t shed in weeks and that now ran down my temples into my hair.

—Fuck her ass —said Sonia, almost humming—. Let the supervisor come inside the sow. Symbolically. And the sow should be grateful.

Clara started pounding my ass with short, dry strokes, faster and faster. The harness base knocked against her clit with every thrust and I noticed, beneath the unbuttoned uniform, her flat stomach tightening. She was coming. She was coming while fucking my ass in front of Sonia, with the rod resting on the podium and the new pin waiting for her on her lapel. Her breathing cut off, she clenched her teeth, and let out a low, rough moan, almost embarrassed. I felt her trembling against my spread thighs while the orgasm shook her in silence.

—Thank you, supervisor —I had to say, because protocol required it—. Thank you for fucking my ass, supervisor two-one-seven.

Clara pulled the dildo out slowly this time. She stepped back two paces, the harness dripping onto the white tiles, and stood staring at the blood and shit staining the silicone without really seeing them. Sonia clapped again, two short claps.

—Graduation complete. Supervisor two-one-seven is confirmed.

Clara pulled up her pants with hands that were no longer quite so steady. She tucked the harness in beneath her uniform, without cleaning it, as if that were part of the uniform now too. She picked up the rod from the podium. She was a supervisor again.

She knelt beside me. She said nothing for a time I couldn’t measure. Then she took a piece of ice wrapped in a cotton cloth from her pocket and carefully pressed it against the most damaged area. The cold was a brutal shock. Then something that felt like relief arrived, though it wasn’t quite that.

—It’s the only thing I can do —she murmured, so softly it sounded like she was speaking to the floor.

The guards took me to the infirmary, dragging me by the armpits. They laid me on a cold stretcher and the duty doctor poured alcohol over the tears without warning. The pain folded me inward. There was no voice left to scream: only a dry squawk that died in the white ceiling before it could reach anywhere.

They cleaned me. Bandaged me. Left me there.

Clara came in after the doctor had already left. She stayed in the doorway with her arms crossed and her eyes shining, looking at me as if she wanted to say something she couldn’t find. After a long minute, she turned around and left. I heard her footsteps recede down the metal corridor until silence swallowed them.

***

That night, in my cell, I curled up against the concrete wall and counted my breaths until I stopped shaking. My whole body was a map of pain: my back, my thighs, my lips, my knees, my ass torn open and my cunt raw. But the worst part wasn’t physical. The worst part was the empty space where the certainty of having someone on the same side used to live.

I took out the photo. Andrés with Nicolás in his arms in that square in the city that smells of orange blossom in spring. I pressed it to my chest and closed my eyes.

I didn’t cry. There were no tears left for that.

There was only the count: four months. And the new certainty, hard as the steel of the walls, that Clara was no longer my ally. She was my supervisor. And I was still sow 318, with four months ahead of me and the memory of a square smelling of orange blossom as the only thing that still truly belonged to me.