Page 49 of Swerve
“You call being a prostitute for you a choice?”
“Such a crass word, prostitute. What we do here can’t really be equated with that.”
“Sex for hire. Isn’t that what it is?”
“We prefer to think of it as providing pleasure to those who can afford to pay for it. And who don’t mind being generous when they get what they want.”
“I won’t do it.”
The woman sighs. “I am afraid that if you don’t soon come around to our way of thinking, I will be forced to have you spend some time with some of the less-desirable members of my team. And that will make your almost interlude with Sergio seem like an infinitely desirable thing. It would be a shame too because there would be mandatory recovery time for you. I’ve only had to play this card with a few of our girls, but it wasted valuable resources for us all. And if your situation required a hospital visit, well, you know we would simply have to end things there.”
Mia’s bravado wavers despite her attempt not to let it show.
“Once I make the decision to send you down that avenue, I will not change my mind. I’ll give you one more night to come around to our way of thinking. I will check in with you tomorrow morning, and if you are still in this oppositional state of mind, you will be spending tomorrow night wishing you had. It is very simple really, this decision that is before you.”
Mia swallows hard, despair replacing the blood in her veins so that she suddenly feels incapacitated by it. The fight leaves her, and she leans against the wall, sliding to the floor. She looks up at the woman, staring hard at her before she says, “Okay. I will do what you want. But only if you let Grace and me be together.”
The woman folds her arms, studies Mia for a few long moments before saying, “I suppose that can be arranged. But first, my dear, you need a shower.”
Knox
“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.”
?Barry Eisler
HE SHOULDN’T HAVE let her come along.
He doesn’t need the distraction.
For the majority of the drive into downtown DC, he again uses music as an excuse for them not to talk. But at some point, she reaches over and turns it down. “What was it like being a SEAL?”
He glances at her, expecting to see casual interest on her face, but she is looking at him with serious eyes, and he resists the urge to be sarcastic. He considers the question and then says, “Every day is another opportunity to probe your weak points. SEAL candidates undergo six months of training by professionals whose mission is to find any weakness that might make you inferior when it comes to serving your country at the highest imaginable levels. They basically try to throw more challenges at you in six months than they believe a normal human being can handle.”
“But you handled it?”
He shrugs. “Sometimes, that still surprises me. My class started with one hundred and forty-eight men. After six weeks, we were down to thirty-seven.”
“And I’m assuming those are some of the country’s most qualified young guys?”
“The competition is stiff.”
“How did you survive it?”
He’s quiet for a few moments, and then, “There have been accounts of soldiers who were shot multiple times, but weren’t aware of it until the fight was over and the danger had passed. That’s the power the brain has to adapt. You can train the brain to prepare for survival. The military calls it battle-proofing. Using the mind to visualize scenes of survival to produce psychological strength. It’s sort of like meditation, I guess. Developing the ability to see in your mind a scene that you might have to live through. Like a firefight. You think of all the details you imagine you would experience. The sound of the gunfire. The smell of a nearby explosion. The screams of frightened women and children. The idea is that if the brain imagines something in extreme detail, it’s as if you’ve lived through the experience, and if you have something similar happen to you, your brain has already conditioned itself to surviving it. So, during some of our make-or-break exercises, like riding out a night in shark-infested ocean waters, I had already lived through that night in my mind. I would lie in my bunk, imagining a shark brushing past my leg while I barely managed to stay afloat. I felt my heart thudding in my chest, prayed the shark wouldn’t feel the pulse of fear. I made my brain accept that the fact that I would not move any more than I had to, to stay afloat. I wouldn’t try to swim away or shove the shark away from me.”
Emory studies him, shaking her head a little. “That’s the opposite of what most of us humans do. We wait for the lightning bolt to strike before we understand what our response will be. So we are reliant on our most basic instincts. Fear, the irresistible urge to flee the danger rather than face it.”
He nods, left hand on the steering wheel, his right thumb digging into the scar on his thigh where a bullet had once been lodged. “And you have to create a trigger.”
“What kind of trigger?”
“Your ultimate reason for living. The thing you go to when giving up seems like a good option.”
“What was yours?”
“In training, it was my parents. I knew how proud of me they would be if I made it as a SEAL. I would picture the look on my dad’s face if I could tell him that I’d made it. I wanted them to be proud of me like that. And then later, when I actually got on a SEAL team and had to fight for my own life and the lives of my team, my trigger was the determination that we would all return home alive. I would envision each one of us greeting our families at the airport. I made myself see their smiles and happiness instead of flag-draped coffins and grief.”
She nods once, looking out her window. “I wonder if Mia is envisioning coming home. Living for the moment when I open the door, and there she stands. When she can scoop Pounce up in her arms and hug him tight. What if she gives up? What if she can’t imagine ever coming home?”
