Excerpt: Abyssania

“Can you explain what exactly you were doing, miss?”

Des stares blankly at her ‘interrogator,’ sitting across her at this burnished steel table. Her hands are cuffed together and she had been told in a nasty voice, courtesy the officer who had brought her in here, to keep them in sight, on top of the table. “Are you new at this?” she asks, eyebrows pinched together.

The interrogator blushes, but clears his throat and continues, “I was asking your name.”

“Oh,” Des says, “Oh, I get it now. It’s Officer, actually, which should be obvious, you know, Officer Des Winter.”

As he scribbles this down, the kid is clearly avoiding her eyes, so Des smiles widely when he looks up again, showing teeth; his ears go red, looking awfully like a deer in headlights, and she imagines his superior officer is standing behind that mirror shaking his head with exasperation right about now. “What’s your name?” she asks, still grinning.

The door slams open and an older woman storms in, fixing Des with a dirty look. “Out,” she says, and the boy blanches so quickly Des is worried he might pass out. He scrambles to collect his things and hurries for the door; when a pencil clatters to the ground, he hesitates for a second, and flees.

“Might want to send someone to stop him from drowning himself in the men’s,” Des suggests.

“Hands,” the woman says instead, key at the ready. Shrugging, Des lifts them off the table, one cuff hanging open off her right wrist, the other hanging below it, her left hand free. The policewoman just takes them, stuffing the key back into a pouch at her belt, and the cuffs at the small of her back.