The
cold metal presses against my temple as my captor rips the wretched bag from my
head. My friends sit on the couch, well,
some of them anyway, and they stare at me wide eyed. My wrists ache from the ropes tying them
together.
“Please,”
I say, my voice hoarse.
Lois
looks appalled. She must’ve read my
captor’s thoughts. “May we gather a few
things?”
“No,”
the man barks. “I have food. “
“We’ll
come,” Lois says gravely.
“Thank
you,” I tell her.
The
cold metal of the pistol presses harder into my skull. “Shut up.”
I close
my eyes.
I feel
the bag being shoved over my face again.
The man pulls on the back of my shirt.
I stand up and he walks us a short distance, and then, after removing
the hated bag, shoves us into a van whose back windows are blacked out and
whose front seat is separated from the back compartment by a thick sheet of
metal. There’s a row of benches on
either wall. Katie and Lois sit on the
same side as me and Scarlett, Mallory, a confused Mary, and the brown-haired
girl sit on the other side. I wonder
where Aly is.
Lois
asks me what happened, even though I can tell she’s heard my thoughts
already.
“When
the bombs went off, this goon and his men came and captured me,” I say, nodding
toward the front when I mention the man.
“They took me to some prison sort of place. I imagine that’s where he’s taking all of
us.”
“Is
your family okay?” Katie asks.
I
nod. “Not sure why they weren’t brought
along, though. Where’s Colette? And Aly and Violet? And who’s the brown-headed girl?”
The
girl looks angry. “My name’s Grace,
thank you very much. And Clarisse went
with Vivian to find someone named Nora Michelle.”
I raise
my eyebrows at Scarlett.
“She
means Colette and Violet. And the
person’s named Nadia May. And Aly…we couldn’t
find her. But we think she’s alive
because Jared’s cabin is still standing and that’s where we assume she was when
the bombs came down.”
“That’s
good,” I say. “What’s wrong with Mary?”
Mallory
looks at me. I see that her eyes are
rimmed with red. “Malcolm. He didn’t make it into the cell—.” She starts crying.
“Oh,”
is all I say.
We
drift into silence.
The van stops a while later, coming to a screeching halt and
snapping me awake. I’m a bit angry
because it’s the first time I’ve gotten real sleep since before the bombs
dropped. Mallory has stopped crying, but
she’s still breathing shakily as we get off the van.
The man
barks commands to us and ties our wrists before shoving burlap sacks over our
heads. It crosses my mind that we could escape
if we really wanted to. I want to say
something about it to Lois, but the man makes sure we walk in a straight line
and before that he rearranges us so I have no idea of my position and therefore
who’s in front or behind me. At some
point, more men join us. From what I
hear, there’re six new ones, so that each of us has a guard. Or, rather, a jailer.
After
walking for about a half hour, we come to a stop. We’re pushed inside a building, I think, and
forced to sit down. Our bags are
removed to show that I was right. We’re
in a room about ten feet across. The
wall and floor is cold against my back and legs.
The man
who drove us here steps toward us. “Who
are you?”
No one
answers.
“I
said, who are you?!” he shouts.
I
cringe against the wall.
Grace,
however, is leaning toward and glaring up at him. “Why do you need to know?” She says this in a growling tone that makes
me want to hide in a hole.
He
slaps her. “Tell us.”
Grace
brushes her bloody mouth against her shoulder, smearing the blood. “I’m Grace Abbott.”
“Who
are your friends?” the man asks.
“Scarlett
Jones, Mallory and Mary Cane, Kathryn Wilde, Lois Adler, and Luna Speisshofer,
but you’re already buddies with Luna there, aren’t you?” Grace snaps.
“Where
did you come from?”
“Me? Virginia, United States.”
“And
the others?”
“They
have their own voices. Why don’t you ask
them?” Grace glares at him.
“Where
did you come from?” the man asks us.
“Where
you picked us up,” Lois says calmly.
“Before
that,” he barks.
“Some
of us were born there,” Lois informs him.
“And
the ones who weren’t?” The man’s voice
is still hard, but he’s not shouting anymore.
He’s obviously getting what he wants.
Mallory
speaks up. “I was born in London.”
The man
nods.
“Australia,”
Katie mutters.
The man
nods and crosses his arms. He looks to
one of his comrades. “Take them to the
cellar.”
The
bags are pulled over our heads once again and we’re taken down some stairs into
what’s not a room so much as a hole.
There’s just enough room for us to scrunch shoulder to shoulder together
against the back wall. There’s a torch
mounted on the wall that provides a dim, eerie light. It’s cold, and I’m
grateful that we have to scrunch together, even though we can’t sit with our
legs in any position but stretched out or scrunched to our chests.
“So,”
says Grace.
“So,”
says Lois. “Why didn’t you warn
us?”
“I
can’t see things unless I want to or am searching for them. I didn’t see this because I didn’t want to,”
Grace says simply. I can tell that she
would shrug if there was enough room.
“Well,
it’d be nice to search for these kind of events from now on. Think you could do that?” Lois says the last question in a sweet,
fake-nice voice that one would use when addressing a young child.
“On one
condition. Stop talking to me in that
voice, okay?” Grace does the same thing
Lois did when she says ‘okay.’
Lois
rolls her eyes with a sigh. “Okay.”
“Hey…!”
Scarlett scoots forward and points to the corner with the least light. “Food!”
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