Chapter 1: The Girl and the Cat (Calcinatio)
The girl sat with her back against a wall and watched as the cat lapped milk greedily from a bowl the guards had slid under the door.
She folded her arms over her knees, and the little animal paused and blinked at her with green saucer eyes, thick milk clinging from its whiskers and chin like a fu-Manchu mustache. The girl surprised herself by laughing.
It was, she realized, the first time she had laughed since the soldiers had appeared at the door of her parents’ house several weeks ago.
At the time, she had been sitting on the floor playing with their family’s cat, Gengi. She never called the creature by that name, of course. To her, it was Gertrude, after an obscure patroness of felines from 7th century Francia.
“Absurd!” her mother had scolded her. “Cats do not need saints. Besides, what would happen if someone heard you calling that name aloud outside our house? Name it Gengi–it looks like a little golden tiger. Gengi is a safe name.”
Thinking about Gengi made the girl sad. She wondered if anyone would bother to feed the animal after her family was taken away. One night shortly after arriving in the camp, the girl hid under a metal bed and held her hands over her ears as screams of agony and fear echoed in the hallway beyond her cell. There, she noticed a scratch drawing on the wall depicting a little girl with pigtails gesturing playfully toward a cat. There was writing, too, in a script that she couldn’t read. It looked more like Arabic than Chinese. The drawing had faded with time, but she was sure that it had been made by another girl just like her. Eventually, she began talking to the girl, always quietly and always after she was sure the guards were well away from her door. Sometimes the girl spoke back to her, in a language she could not understand.
The guards had placed this cat in her cell a week before, without any explanation. They even put a litter box in one corner and came twice a day to empty it. At first, the cat looked as terrified as the girl had felt, refusing to come near her. But on the third night, it unceremoniously jumped into her bed and began nustling against her shoulder just before she drifted off to sleep. When she woke up the next morning, the animal was curled into a soft ball near her feet.
She resisted giving it a name. Naming something created a relationship. It implied ownership or at least control, and the girl had never felt more impoverished or out of control in her life. She had nothing. No home. No toys. She had not seen her parents since they were shunted into a different area of the camp after they arrived. Her entire world was this cell, the food the guards brought her, and the incessant blinking green light on the side of a surveillance camera mounted near the ceiling. And now, the cat. Eventually, she relented and decided to call it Maomi.
Days passed, then weeks. At any rate, she thought it was weeks, for time seemed to take on a completely different meaning in the camp. The soldiers continued to bring food for her and Maomi, whose initial reticence had blossomed into nearly canine levels of affection.
For several hours each day, the girl was allowed out of her cell. During this time, she sat quietly with hundreds of other children in a vast amphitheater of a room, as teachers explained to them all that they had been deceived. They were here to learn, said a kindly-looking professor from Beijing. To learn the truth, and to be liberated from the lies their parents had taught them. But to learn, they first had to un-learn, and so the teachers showed them videos and monitored their responses.
Cameras lined the walls of the classroom, and beneath them sat rows of unsmiling men and women in white coats who whispered to each other and entered notes into their glass tablets from time to time. One of the men always seemed to be staring at the girl whenever she glanced in his direction. He was younger than the others, and handsome. She fidgeted with the biofeedback bracelet she wore like all the other children in the room and tried to keep her eyes on the teachers.
One day as class ended, the Staring Man approached her before she could be led back to her cell. With no more than a quick nod of his head, he dismissed the guard. When the soldier had withdrawn, the staring man knelt to her level and smiled, drawing a piece of candy from his pocket. His smile never reached his eyes.
“I think you may be very special, child,” he said. “But I need to be sure. Come with me.”
Something in the man’s demeanor gave her goose pimples. Maomi would be wondering where she was, and for the first time since she had arrived at the camp, the thought of returning to her cell didn’t seem so bad. She hesitated, but the man took her by the hand and led her through the same door that the teachers used.
Sharply dressed men and women smiled solicitously at the man as he led the girl down a long, bright corridor, but he didn’t acknowledge any of them. Eventually, they arrived at an unmarked door, where the Staring Man placed his hand on a biometric reader and leaned his head forward, pressing his eye against a small camera of some kind. The door popped open with a click and a hiss, and he led her inside.
The girl suddenly noticed that she was feeling…not sleepy but strangely languid. She felt it first in her fingertips and toes. Then, the tingling-buzzing sensation moved up her limbs towards her torso. She thought about trying to run, but her legs wouldn’t respond, and several people in white coats caught her by the arms. She couldn’t blink her eyes.
The technicians placed her into a mechanical chair in the center of the room and strapped her arms and legs to it. She could see the Staring Man out of the corner of her eye, standing to the side with his arms folded across his chest.
A mirrored wall in front of her shimmered briefly, then resolved into crystalline transparency. On the other side of it, she saw what appeared to be some kind of hospital or medical unit, with doctors and nurses scurrying about in masks. One of the technicians on her side of the partition swabbed her left arm with alcohol before inserting a small hypodermic needle. Another placed drops in her eyes.
A Westerner was there and seemed to be in charge. The Staring Man kept his eyes fixed on the Westerner, while the others in the room, having fulfilled their duties, quickly left.
“Welcome, Xingyun,” said the Westerner in flawless Mandarin. “I am so sorry that we had to meet this way, but my hope is that we will get to know each other much better in the coming months. My colleague has told me about you. He thinks you may be special. We are going to find out if that is true. Please do not fret–no one is going to hurt you. If he is right, then you are far, far too valuable for that.”
On the other side of the glass wall, guards carried a small metal box and placed it on a table underneath bright lights. One of the doctors approached it and held up his forearms as a nurse stretched purple nitrile gloves over his hands. Another nurse brought a tray of scalpels and held it at his side.
Xingyun heard a voice say, “You may proceed,” and the doctor nodded in their direction.
A nurse opened the box and pulled something from inside it. An animal. More specifically, a cat. Maomi.
The cat hissed and shrieked as it tried to escape the nurse’s grip, but she quickly injected it with something, and its body went limp. The doctor picked up one of the scalpels, a small one, and began to cut into Maomi’s exposed belly. Xingyun could see that the cat was still alive, its breathing quickened by stress. Rivulets of blood trickled from the incision, and Xingyun tried to scream. No sound came from her throat. She tried to close her eyes, but her eyelids were frozen in place.
“It is, after all, only a cat my dear,” said the Westerner. “We will get you another one when we are finished.”
The doctor continued to cut into Maomi, delicately and precisely. Xingyun felt the pain in her own body. She was certain that her own belly was being split open. The pain subsided only slightly when the doctor stopped cutting and handed the scalpel back to the nurse. He peered over his mask at the tray as if it were a cart of dim sum before picking up a small saw. Without hesitation, he began to remove one of the cat’s legs, which twitched despite whatever injection it had been given.
Gasping, Xinyung felt the pain somewhere below her own knee. Muscle, tendon, and bone yielded to the serrated blade of the saw, and Maomi’s leg–or was it her leg–spouted blood before the nurse cauterized the stump.
Over the next hour, the doctors pulled the cat apart, piece by piece, and Xingyun felt as if her own body was being carved open.
At last, the Staring Man walked over to the Westerner, whose eyes had remained on the girl the entire time. The Westerner nodded as the staring man whispered in his ear.
“I’ve seen enough for today.” The Westerner walked to a terminal mounted on the wall and pressed his hand against it. “Thank you, Doctor. That will be all for now.”
Not long afterward, the paralytic began to wear off, and Xinyung was again able to wiggle her toes again. The odd tingling-buzzing sensation radiated out from her chest into her limbs. Finally, she was able to blink and close her eyes. When she opened them again, the Westerner was there.
“You did well today, Xingyun. Very well. But there is still more we need to learn.”
The technicians unbuckled her restraints and eased her into a wheelchair which the Staring Man pushed through the door into the hallway beyond. It was dark outside now, and the hallway was empty. Neither of them spoke until they reached her cell.
“I will see you again tomorrow after your classes,” he said. “You must do everything Dr. Channing tells you. Do you understand?”
Xingyun nodded.
The Staring Man opened the door to her cell and helped her inside. Maomi was gone, along with the litterbox and the bowl of milk. Xingyun could still smell him.
After she was sure that the staring man was no longer outside, she crept under her bed, curled up on the floor next to the scratch drawing of the girl and the cat, and cried quietly until sleep came.
When she awoke in the morning, she saw that another cat had been placed in her cell. It was Gertrude.
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