Chapter Fifteen: Luna Speisshofer's Point of View

                Scarlett pulls a box out of the corner and stands up to hold it in the torchlight.  “It looks like crackers.  They’re out of date, but this box obviously hasn’t been opened.”

                “What’re you waiting for, then?  Open them,” Grace says, leaning forward eagerly.

                “Anyone got their knife on them?”  Scarlett asks.  Mallory pulls her pocket knife from her pocket and flips it up to Scarlett. 

                Scarlett flicks the knife open and tears into the box.  Sure enough, there are ten rolls of crackers in the box.  She tosses us each one roll and puts the rest back into the box. 

                Mary, who is now a bit less disoriented, picks at a cracker while the rest of us chow down.  We all agree that some water would be nice, but nobody answers when we pound on the door, which is locked from the outside.  Not that we were expecting anything, but it seems like the food brought a bit of hope with it.

                I hear Grace start to say something as the torch goes out.

                I hear gasps to my left and a little shriek from Scarlett.

                “Well,” Grace says wryly, “that’s the end of that.”

                Katie’s voice comes from the wall to my left.  “I hope nobody’s thinking that at least it can’t get any worse.  Because it could get a whole lot worse.”

                “Wait a minute…,”  Grace says.  She snaps her fingers.  “Maryann, you can summon fire, right?”

                “It’s Mallory.  And my powers don’t work down here,” Mallory says from next to me.

                “Yeah.  Mine either,” says Scarlett, whose voice is a bit strained, telling me that she’s trying to get some water out of her hands.

                “Same here,” says Lois.  “It’s like someone turned off my powers.”

                “Weird.  Very weird,” says Grace.

                “Wait.  I could hear everyone’s thoughts right when we got here.  Not the guards.  They must’ve had some sort of blocking technology.  But yeah, I heard Scarlett thinking about food.  And then…,” Lois pauses for a moment.  “Well, it started to get foggy as I ate more…those crackers!  Don’t eat the crackers, you guys.  Once they’re out of our system, and don’t ask how we’re going to get rid of them, but anyway, once they’re out we should be okay.  But it might be days….”

                “Well, either way, these people weird me out,” says Katie.  “I know that about half of us in here speak English, but they didn’t, I could tell that much, and they had to have had translators or they wouldn’t have understood some of us.”

                “Okay, I’m going to move to the other wall because this is too cramped,” I tell them.  I scoot my way across the room so that, if there were light, I would be facing them.  I hear more shuffling and mutters of scoot over. 

                It gets quieter and quieter.  I assume everyone’s asleep, because of the sounds of even, paced breathing.  I decide that sleep is a good idea, and drift off.

               

I wake up to the sound of the door creaking open.  Light shines through; it makes a line across Mallory’s sleeping face.  She opens her  eyes a bit and puts her hand stretching out from her eyebrow to make a visor.

                A boy about seventeen comes in.  His head almost brushes the ceiling of the room and the torch he’s holding makes his gray eyes sparkle.  His black hair has streaks of light flashing across it as the fire flickers.

                “What…?” I say, still half asleep.

                “I’m William Holloway.  I’m here to rescue you.”