23 April 2017, Sunday, La Rochelle
Niana was in bed at the La Rochelle General Hospital. While her physical wounds were healing nicely, her psychological ones would take longer. She often woke up and sat in a corner, shielding herself from imagined attacks. She would wake up and pick up objects and replace them. She had rearranged her room several times, before the nurses realised what was happening.
Her doctor called her brother, Etuarti, and told him about her strange behaviour. She seemed normal in conversation, but she would drift away midsentence. The doctor continued assessing her. She had been affected badly and was responding negatively to the pain she had endured. It was difficult to get her to open up about how the incident had affected her emotions. She could relay simple details like their names and facial features, that they were aggressive and abusive, but she never said the words, “they hit me” or “they hurt me”. Her state was strange, but not unexpected. The best the doctors could do was to give her sleep medication and painkillers. She was to be discharged
24 April, Monday, La Rochelle
Niana was discharged and sent back home. She stayed in bed the whole day. A nurse had been employed to assist in her convalescence at the family townhouse. The nurse brought her food in bed. Niana was clearly hurt by what she had experienced because it was difficult to get her to open up. Etuarti was frightened by this new Niana. She was plastic, unresponsive and inanimate. She used to laugh, sing and talk, but all of that was gone, or hopefully, temporarily absent. Although she consented to talking to a psychiatrist, she gave him no useful details.
Etuarti was bitter about her condition and what she had gone through. He wanted Muttar Mimahid to suffer for the pain he had put his sister through. In that state of mind, he was irrational, reckless. She had managed to take his identity card, during her captivity. It was useful, but Etuarti did not know how he could use it at that stage. He heard on the news that the Al Jaheed base at Osnek had been attacked. That was where she had been found. His contact in Latianburg told him that no one by the name of Muttar Mimahid was found among the dead, injured or captured.
Etuarti wanted Muttar to endure the same anguish that his sister had endured. He hated him. He did not trust the Latian legal system to successfully prosecute and in the unlikely situation that he could be tried in an Oan court, it would go soft on him. He decided to take justice into his own hands and punish Muttar himself.
He instructed his Latian contact to organise a bounty hunter to find, torture and terminate Muttar. He knew Niana might be against it. She had always been avowedly pacifist, even when she was bullied or hurt, she stuck to her faith and her beliefs. If she was still the same person he had grown up with, he expected no less from her now. He carried out his plan in secret, paying large sums of money to get the most precise and brutal butcher hell could contrive. He eventually found one: Khalat.
