Paige watched as the clerk delivered the envelope to the judge. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?” There was no way to be graceful when you were wearing restraints that weighed half as much as you did. Her lawyer gripped the chain running between her armpit and her upper arm, to help her get to a standing position, but she stumbled anyways, bumped into the table. It was so hard to move with the restraints. This court is now in session, the honorable Peter Regan presiding.” The barbaric setup left her jaw, her tongue and the muscles of her neck radiating tension and pain. The interior of the mask was the worst thing, because the arrangement extended into her mouth, a framework of wires keeping her mouth fixed in a slightly open position, her tongue pressed down hard against the floor of her mouth. A leather mask reinforced with the same metal strips that were on her body and a cage-style grille of small metal bars was strapped over her lower face. She would have demanded that her basic rights be met.īut she couldn’t say anything. She would have argued with the man that had been hired as her defense, instead of waiting hours or days for a response to each of her emails. If she had been able to, she would have had a comment or two to make about that, or at least she could have asked the lawyer to tidy her hair. She knew it only made her look more deranged, more dangerous, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it.
Unable to use her hands, her hair, the vibrant and startling yellow of a lemon, had slipped from where it was tucked behind her ears and strands now hung in front of her face. Which meant she got trussed up like Hannibal Lecter, as though she were already guilty. The prosecution had argued that she could have enhanced strength, that she could be a flight risk, and her lawyer hadn’t done a good enough job of arguing against it, so the restraints had gone on. If any of that was a real possibility, she wouldn’t have been allowed in the courtroom. She didn’t have enhanced strength, no tricks to slip her restraints, and she wasn’t about to run anyways. The irony was, a pair of handcuffs would have sufficed.
She got distracted and annoyed by its appearance in her peripheral vision each time it flashed. The heavy metal collar around her neck, thick enough around it could have been a tire for a small vehicle, blinked with a green light just frequently enough that she forgot to anticipate it. Chains seemed to connect everything to everything else, preventing her from moving her arms or legs more than a few inches in any direction before she felt the frustrating resistance and jangling of the chains.
Strips of metal had been tightened just under her armpits, near the bottom of her ribcage, her upper arms and waist, with two more bands around each of her ankles. It would have been intolerably heavy if it weren’t for the hook on the back of her chair, which she could hang the chain on. The buckets themselves were linked together behind her back, with comically oversized chain links. Her hands were buried in a pair of reinforced metal buckets, each filled with that damn pastel yellow foam.
The other restraints weren’t so bad, but that was only in a relative sense.
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