She did allow herself one last freedom, turning her head around to survey the space she was going to be killed in.
The room was dark, and incredibly bare. Nisha vaguely noticed walls covered in some sort of dark gray paint, but it could honestly be any color. A single very warm colored light was the only thing illuminating the room, positioned above Nisha’s chair in the vein of those interrogation scenes in spy movies she would watch sometimes because they were the only thing on tv and she liked having something to focus on as she sat and ate dinner. There wasn’t any sort of table, to divide the interrogator and interrogated in this room, however. Just a light and a chair, which, when Nisha quickly turned her head to inspect it further, was connected to vaguely medical looking equipment. The mask around Nisha’s nose was connected to several tubes that ran from the side of the mask, down to several gas tanks duct taped to the back of the chair.
Someone behind the chair turned a nozze on the top of the tanks, and Nisha heard a slight hiss sound from behind her. Frantically she began to wiggle in a last ditch effort to escape, not really knowing why. Even if she was able to escape her captors grasp, she still would have to make it past the door she was rushed through, along the hallway she was pushed down, and through the entrance she didn’t have enough time to really process. Escape was as implausible as there being some heroic rescue that swept through, saving her valiantly from the clutches of her captors. Of course Nisha knew neither was going to happen. This wasn’t a fairy tale, this was real life. Grand gestures of heroism didn’t exist.
Sure enough the strong hands were holding her more forcefully now, with a pressure so immense that her corpse would surely be bruised tomorrow, if not within a few hours. Recognizing the ineffectual actions of freedom Nisha accepted her face, stilling and closing her eyes as she breathed in an odorless and unknown gas and simply waited for the rest to come.
‘This is what you always wanted, isn’t it?’ An undisclosed voice asked in her head, it's sound so ephemeral it was as if there was several different voices, all whispering together and in near perfect union. ‘A good death?’
Nisha’s heart was stilling now, and in her semi-delirious state she could almost see in the darkness of her vision, a long meandering line. It was bright, blinding white and thick. Thinner lines diverged off of it, reaching off into the black expanse, little hands ending the stroke. They grabbed at pieces of the darkness as if it were simply grass on a hill and curved their short fingers into the nothingness, using the grip to pull the large line slowly, slowly, slowly, more and more forward. As they moved closer, the white began to expand, sluggishly overtaking the darkness of Nisha’s mind. As each arm moved itself forward she could hear it quietly moan with the effort of its daunting task. Combined together, the moans created a dissonant chorus, every second becoming louder and louder as they fulfilled their task.
‘Fear not, my love” the mysterious voice (voices?) said, above the chanting of the arms. The white was beginning to overwhelm the black now, so intense, so strong that Nisha could almost feel her eyes burning, as if she was both staring directly into the rays of the sun and having her eyes pressed deeply at the same time. “I have bigger things for you yet.”
With that, the white completely overtook the darkness, and Nisha was gone.
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