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by Jaymin Eve
The descent levelled out after a few more steps, and whoever held me let go, flinging me easily across the room. All of the air was knocked out of me when I hit the floor, skidding a few feet across the stones, pain now screaming up my back and sides. It fit in well with the chest pain. They were all friends coming together for a little pain-party. It had been hard enough to breathe through my gag, but the blow to my body had me gasping and wriggling around like a dying dweller. Probably something I was about to become.
Forcing myself to calm, trying my best to ignore the pain, I focused on the simple task of getting air into my lungs. Simple and easy. In and out. Except of course my attackers were still in the room, and they were so not done with me yet.
The bag was ripped off my head, and since I hadn’t been expecting it, I ended up smashing my skull into the stone floor with the sudden motion. Stars danced before my eyes and I fought through whatever darkness was trying to claim me. If I blacked out, I was definitely going to end up dead.
Rome! Coen! Abcurses … come on assholes. Hear me!
The screaming for the sols continued in my head, even though I had already resigned myself to having to get out of this mess without any help. That was the way of Willa Knight. Lone Soldier. Professional Escaper of Death. Once the ringing cleared in my head, I was able to scramble up to my feet and back away from the three sols across from me. When there was a little distance between us, I tore the material from my mouth, licking out with my tongue in an attempt to moisten my lips. They tasted salty, my tears still trailing along my cheeks.
I didn’t have to wonder why Elowin was letting me back up, from what I could see, the room was small, circular, and made of thick stone. She stood with her muscle-sols in front of the only entrance: a heavy stone door with metal bars for reinforcement.
She took a minute step closer to me, her face creased in lines of dark fury. “I warned you, dweller. You have meddled in things which should never have been touched. Crossed lines which have already started a wave of trouble that will probably take us entire life-cycles to repair.”
I tried to speak but my throat was so dry that nothing more than a squeak emerged. It took me two attempts but finally I managed to say, “What are you going to do with me?”
They hadn’t just killed me, which meant that they either wanted something from me or else they wanted to brag before killing me. Neither option gave me any great hope of escaping this alive.
“As far as anyone in Blesswood is concerned, you ran away. We have witnesses. Your belongings have been packed up. No one will know the truth. You see … if we killed you now, the gods would notice. They have an eye on you and for whatever reason have chosen to … indulge this little fantasy world that you’ve created with the Abcurse sols. A fantasy which is causing more problems than your stupid little brain can even comprehend. The gods don’t care about routine life on Minatsol. But I care. I see how important it is, and my entire life is dedicated to making sure that dwellers and sols have a distinct place in this world. Distinct, and purposeful. So you’ll stay in this basement. No one knows about this wing of Blesswood, it’s long forgotten. We’ll feed you for a few dozen sun-cycles, until this all dies down, until the gods forget about you, and then you’ll go … back to your village.”
Yeah, right. I could see in those icy eyes that I was never walking from here free. She just wanted to make sure the gods no longer cared about me before she ended my life. She was afraid of hurting her chances of going to Topia.
“Pretty sure the gods won’t like you chaining me down here like an animal,” I lied.
She laughed. The light and airy sound made my skin crawl. “Don’t overthink your importance here, dweller. There is a slight possibility they are monitoring your energy, which would mean they’d know if you died. But they aren’t going to be literally watching every move you make. They don’t care about you. They care about the Abcurse brothers, which means that as soon I remove you from them, I remove you from the attention of the gods.”
Yep, Elowin had a touch of the crazy going on. “What about the Abcurses?” There had to be something she feared enough to let me go. “They’ll look for me. They’re not going to be happy about what you’ve done.”
She waved my concern away. “I’ll deal with the brothers. They’re in need of a little reminder that they’re not yet gods … that they’re still sols and students of this academy, subject to the power of those employed by the academy.”
I fell silent then. Arguing with crazy got you nowhere—even though she was very wrong about the Abcurse sols. They were as close to gods as one could get on Minatsol, before actual death turned them into full gods. They would destroy Elowin when they got their hands on her, and then they would come for me. I knew it. They would tear this academy to the ground, because I had accidently forced myself into their group, and they protected their own.
Hope … it was scary to let myself have any, especially when things looked grim, but if I didn’t have something to hold on to, I would lose my mind. Or … more. I’d lose it even more.
Elowin, Henchman Number One, and Henchman Number Two stepped back, each of them bestowing one last look on me before the door slammed shut behind them. I ran at it, fast as I could through all the pain my body was currently in, and wrenched the handle. No movement, nothing at all to indicate that there was even a door there. It felt as solid as the stone wall surrounding it. There was no opening for me to look out of, and something told me that screaming would not help. Everything would be deadened by the acoustics of this place.
I slammed my hand against the stone and fought back another sob. “Don’t leave me here alone!” My yells echoed around, just as I had predicted. Doing nothing but tormenting me with my current situation.
Turning around, I sank against the wall, my arms wrapping across my ribs as I attempted to keep it together. I was not someone who dealt well with being alone, just my own company, no distractions. I think it was half the reason I was always causing trouble in the village.
The ache in my chest intensified. The Abcurses were moving further away from me. I wondered how much distance it would take before I died, because I could feel that possibility sawing away at my insides. I was beginning to gag, and my vision was becoming blurry, my breath rasping with each dry heave. I was right now teetering on the edge of death. I hadn’t told Elowin that her plan had one very real flaw: I was connected to the Abcurses, and I couldn’t be separated from them, which meant that they were either going to find me soon, or I was going to die. Both of which would not be good for her.
It didn’t take long for my legs to give out beneath me, and I slumped to the stone floor, my head falling into my hands.
“Come on, Soldier,” I muttered to myself, the words getting stuck in my throat. “You’ve been in trouble before. It’s no big deal. You can find a way out of this …”
Except … no. I really couldn’t. The room was completely sealed-up. No windows. No rat-holes. There wasn’t even a crack in the wall where the door frame should have been, as though it had been sealed right to the wall with magic. I screamed, slamming my fists against the door again, and then I drew away.
I had to do something. The Abcurses should have found me by now. There had to be a reason they were staying away. Someone had to be keeping them away.
What if they’re in danger? Why can’t they hear me?
I paced around the edges of the room, the pain tearing at me a little more with each step, my heart thudding painfully hard. It was working overtime, it seemed. Beating so fast, so heavily, that I couldn’t help but feel like I was starting the dying process already. My skin was feverish and my pulse fluttered weakly. It was a familiar feeling, because I had almost died from a sickness that ate away at me from the inside when I was nine life-cycles old.
Back then, it had been caused by a cut on my leg. I’d torn my skin on a piece of metal sticking out of the metalworker’s stall, and three sun-cycles later, I could no longer walk. The heal
er had come to our home and covered my legs and arms in leeches, giving Emmy special brews of tea to keep me sustained, since nothing else would stay in my stomach.
Now …
Now, it seemed to be caused by another cut. More than one, even. The five slices through my soul that had separated me into pieces. They were slowly becoming infected, slowly poisoning my body, slowly trying to take me from the world of the living.
I had to do something.
The door handle kept catching my eye, since it was the only thing in the room that glinted silver, standing out against the bleak, stone backdrop. I moved back to it, slumping against the door, my eyes assessing every angle of it. There was a small mechanism attached to the base of the handle, almost like a tiny pin, popping out. I frowned, picking at it with my nail. It clicked out of place, and the handle moved, just a little bit. I grabbed it triumphantly, yanking it downwards, expecting the door to magically become a door again and swing open.
Instead, the handle snapped off.
“You guys are so freaking funny,” I cursed, directing my eyes heavenward, to the asshole gods who might have been watching …
But that wasn’t possible. Elowin had even admitted that the gods were keeping an eye on me, so why would she hide me within Blesswood? It must have had something to do with the stone room. It must have been under some kind of magical influence—that was already obvious, by the way the door seemed to have disappeared. It would also explain why the Abcurses couldn’t find me or hear me calling out to them. This forgotten wing of the castle must have been drowning in dangerous enchantments.
Unfortunately for Elowin, I had life-cycles upon life-cycles of half-lectures piled up in my head, all narrated by the voice of my best friend, Emmy The Sol-Lover. They were only half-lectures because I usually worked to tune her out pretty quickly, but half-lectures were enough. They were enough for me to know that physical materials put under the strain of magic for too long were always weakened by that magic.
I looked down at the broken door handle, turning it over, and then I kneeled, taking a moment to close my eyes and concentrate through the worsening agony. After a moment, I refocused, gripping the stem in my hand and scraping the handle part against the stone. It had the effect that scraping something partly metal against rough stone would have. Both showed signs of wear. I scraped harder, wearing the handle down on both sides until it was tapered off at the end, and sharp. It didn’t take as long as it normally would have, because both the handle and the stone had already been weakened by the heavy burden of magic. I moved back to the door, inserting the sharp point against the spot where the door should have met the stone, and stabbed.
A jarring clang reverberated right up to my shoulder, but I repositioned the handle, and slammed it down again, over and over, until a crack started to appear. When it was large enough, I wedged the battered point of the handle into it and used it as leverage to widen the crack. My hands were getting sore, blisters covering my palms, so I worked on getting the crack to spread all the way to the ground, and then I sat, wedging it in harder so that I could notch my foot against it and kick it toward the wall.
The sound of splintering wood was like music to my ears. I kicked again, my energy renewed, the adrenaline of a possible escape rushing right through me, making it so much easier to ignore the pain. Eventually, I managed to separate the door from its lock entirely, and then I was prying it open.
Take that, bitch-face, I growled internally, not even sure if I was aiming the curse at Elowin, or the door. I slipped through, turned around and flipped the room my middle finger, before sprinting off down the hallway. If anyone else had been stuck in there, I was sure that they never would have found their way out; the hallways all looked the same, and some of the stairways led to nowhere. The wing wanted to keep people locked up. That much was clear. But the wing couldn’t do shit against a soul-splintered dweller, with an in-built tracking device leading right back to her Abcurses.
I mean, not mine. The Abcurses.
I spilled out into a main corridor of the academy just as another girl passed by, colliding with me.
“Oh, gods, I’m so sorry—Willa?” Emmy screeched, before grabbing my shoulders and shaking me, far too violently for my protesting bones. “Do you have any idea—ugh, you know what. Never mind. Tell me what happened. I saw Elowin throw a bag over your head and drag you this way like three rotations ago, but then she disappeared and I couldn’t follow her. Your … sols were nowhere I could find so I’ve just been scouring these hallways …”
I pushed her hands away and pulled her into a hug. “Thank you,” I muttered, pressing my face into her shoulder.
It felt good to hold her. To celebrate the fact that I had battled not only a pain-gifted mega-sol, but also a magical room. A magical damn room! Hugging my almost-sister seemed like the best way to celebrate, and she didn’t seem to mind. Until she realised that I was crying.
“What did they do to you?” She jerked back, pressing a palm to my cheek, her murderous eyes flicking over my shoulder.
“Happy tears, that’s all,” I choked out, mostly lying. Her gaze narrowed, clearly disbelieving, but I started to move past her. “I need to find the Abcurses. This pain is killing me, and I don’t mean that in the way I usually mean it, because I’m pretty sure it’s actually killing me.”
I let my body drag me in the right direction, and Emmy trailed behind, occasionally tossing a glare to whomever dared to get in our way.
“Are you skipping some kind of cleaning duty or something right now?” I asked her, concerned. It wasn’t that I didn’t think she would drop everything if she thought I was in danger, but I didn’t want her to jeopardise her future just because I seemed to have a gift for trouble.
“No, I finished everything early, and then I came looking for … watch out!” she suddenly exclaimed, but it was too late.
I smacked into another body and the sounds of silver serving dishes and cutlery clattering against the stone made me wince.
“Willa?” a familiar voice questioned, before hands steadied me.
“Oh, hey, Atti.” I crouched down, helping him gather up his stuff … except that I wasn’t really helping, because he wasn’t doing anything. He was staring at Emmy with the weirdest look on his face.
“Thanks for coming to get me earlier,” Emmy said softly, returning his weird look with a weird look of her own.
What the hell? When did that happen?
“Did you get to the arena in time?” he asked, stepping around the fallen crap that I was still trying to gather, and looking down at her, the absolute picture of gentlemanly concern.
Maybe I should just leave all of his stuff and give them a bit of privacy, except … well, it was kind of hard to look away. Besides, I was right there. Right in front of him. So she obviously got to the arena on time. Seriously.
My chest throbbed again, distracting me from Emmy’s answer. I dropped the platter I had been holding, glancing at Emmy over Atti’s shoulder. Emmy and Atti. Hah. Even their names rhymed. That was so lame. And cute. I clearly had mixed feelings about it. Emmy wasn’t even looking at me. Her eyes were stuck on his, pink rising in her cheeks. I quickly turned, hurrying down the hall in the direction of the five idiots who had accidently stolen my life-force.
Fifteen
I stormed back through the castle like some kind of wild buckhorn, with the huge, cumbersome antlers that topped their deer-like heads. Except that my antlers were my arms, and they kept swinging out and accidently whacking all kinds of people and things. If I didn’t already know it to be impossible, I would have said that my clumsy-curse had suddenly gotten a whole lot worse, but that really was impossible, because it was already about as bad as clumsy-curses got.
After another run-in with a dweller, I found myself covered in some kind of sudsy water. I didn’t even want to know what they were using that water to clean. I just didn’t. I disentangled myself from the ground and the bucket and the girl, taking off at a run
again, barely sparing her an apology. It was lucky that night seemed to have fallen, and so all the sacred little sols were tucked up in their sacred little beds.
By the time I crashed into the circular common area that headed their dorm level, my chest was heaving, and the water had evaporated a little bit, leaving my fresh—albeit already ripped from Yael’s manhandling—shirt all uncomfortably squishy and soapy. The boys were all standing around the common area, the only sols still out-and-about on their floor. They didn’t turn when I clamoured into the room. They were all facing inward. Facing someone. I frowned, creeping around to the side, shock slowly dropping through me as the female became visible.
It was me.
Except it sure as hell wasn’t! Because I was standing right where I was standing, and not over there!
“What are you trying to say?” Rome growled, taking a threatening step toward the pretend-Willa, who was even wearing the same clothes as me, sans soap.
“I have to leave,” Fake Willa replied, her voice deeper than I had expected. Almost husky. I supposed I sounded different when I wasn’t hearing the words as I spoke them. “I want to leave,” she added.
“Like hell you’re leaving.” Coen’s scowl was dark, a shadow passing over his face.
Fake Willa swallowed, her hands trembling behind her back as she eased a few steps away from him. Those idiots! They should have known that the girl wasn’t me. When did I tremble? Okay, maybe when one of them touched me for too long, or when Rau turned up … or those few other times that I had almost died … but not the point. I rarely trembled like a scared child.
And fake Willa was looking a hell of a lot like a scared little girl, with that wild mop of curls surrounding a face that was dominated by the tawny pools of her eyes. I kind of wanted to punch her in the face.