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Author's Note: Written for fic challenge #5.

Silence
by Tara O'Shea

They were blue gloves.

She'd wondered why, at first. The men and women who had done this to her—they had worn simple white gloves. Gloves that showed the smears of blood as they'd cut her open, changed her. Made her into what she was now.

But their gloves were blue, and they always wore them, even though they never touched her. There were always two of them, standing and watching, and asking all the questions. The tall one had a face like granite. Like he was carved from immobile stone. But River wasn't afraid of him the way she was the other man. The one who always watched her. The one with the smile, and the smooth voice, and eyes that seemed to strip her naked, as if he could see into the very core of her. As if she was a laboratory animal.

"What do you want?" she asked him, throwing the words over the should of the medtech who was securing her restraints (his name was Michael, and he had had tuna fish for lunch, and his shoes were too tight and pinched, but that was because they were new, and he'd never told her his name, or that he had nightmares about her face from which he woke, sweating and terrified).

They were the first words she'd spoken in days. They'd worried, after the last procedure, if she would go catatonic the way the others had. If she'd end up in the "vegetable patch" like the little boys and girls who had come before her. She didn't know how many others, but she could se