7. Everett
Everett
SEVEN YEARS AGO
“Mama, he’s gonna find me. Please don’t let him take me. Please, Mama!”
I rolled onto my side, and sharp pebbles dug into me. The girl was crying in her sleep again, her mumbled words drifting through the little hole separating our cells.
When another whimper came, I groggily dragged myself up so I could peer through it. It was hard to see much—just what was directly in front of the hole. I caught the very top of a blonde head thrashing back and forth before she stopped and rolled into a ball.
“Hey,” I whispered, not sure what made me do it. Down here, it was every man for himself. The cries of the other prisoners were a steady backdrop to this life, so frequent it didn’t even faze me anymore. I had learned to ignore it or it would make me go mad.
Until her.
“Songbird,” I tried again, using the nickname I’d given her last night. At least, I thought it had been last night. The only way to track the passing of time was when the guards brought meals twice a day—if a handful of peanuts and a cup of brown water could be called a “meal.”
Her crying stopped. She sniffed, and her head stirred from the floor.
“So…are you still alive over there?” I asked, then closed my eyes and nearly smacked myself. Four years in this pit had made me forget how to talk to a living person.
“I think so,” she responded after a minute. There was a shuffling sound, and then her golden eye appeared at the hole. “How long has it been?”
I shrugged, then realized she couldn’t see me.
“A few hours, maybe. I think the guard rotation is happening soon. I counted the time between them once, and it was about thirty-six thousand seconds, give or take.” I bit down on my tongue.
I hadn’t spoken that many words in years.
It was like my lips were finally connecting to my brain and spewing random sentences.
“Who was that man?” she asked. “The one who stuck me with the needle. Malek something.”
Anger ignited at the sound of his name. “Malek Mortep,” I growled. “He’s Scarven’s head Alchemist. He hasn’t been here for very long. I think Scarven hired him recently.”
“Hired him for what?”
“To create new experiments. New ways to torture us.” I took a breath. “Sometimes I think this is what they do for fun, and sometimes I think…they’re looking for something.”
“Like what?”
“A way to control magic, maybe. I don’t know. They just keep trying potions and running tests to figure out how it all works. To try and make us do things.”
I’d seen Mortep mix strange serums straight into people’s veins, over and over until something happened, while he took notes the whole time.
They often ended in seizures, blood pouring from their eyes and mouths, or bodies going still on the floor.
He forced us to fight each other with and without the chemicals in our bodies, just to see if they made a difference.
One time, he locked me and others in a freezing cell for hours, then in a room of fire to measure how our magic reacted.
She made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat. “Our lives are just some twisted game to them, aren’t they? They think they can do whatever they want to us.”
The passion in her voice tugged my lips upward. She was younger than me, but still, she had the conviction of someone who had been fighting for a while. I wondered what her story was. I was about to ask, when she spoke again. “How long have you been down here?”
I looked at my feet, where rows and rows of tiny lines were carved into the ground. I always marked another line after “dinner” with a small rock I kept hidden. One line for every day I’d been here.
One thousand, five hundred and eighty one.
“A little over four years,” I said. I could still picture the streets of Iluze. The palm trees swaying in the ocean breeze, the sand stuck between my toes even when I was miles from the shore, the salt and humidity permanently crusted in my skin.
That scent had disappeared a long time ago. Now, it was just bitter stone and iron.
“What happened?” she asked, quieter this time. “If—if you want to talk about it. You don’t have to.”
“No, it’s fine.” I licked my lips. “My parents died from an epidemic in Iluze four years ago when I was thirteen. I had to live on the streets. Scarven’s men found me a little bit after that.”
I remembered being so young, so naive. His men had offered me food and a place to stay. They’d picked up several of us orphans, all survivors of the epidemic. They wanted to take us somewhere the sickness couldn’t reach us, where we could be healthy and strong.
I should’ve known. If something sounded too good to be true, it probably was.
Scarven’s idea of “strength” meant putting us through test after test. The experiments got more disturbing when Mortep entered the scene.
There was one older man who used to be in Songbird’s cell who Mortep cast a spell on that made his illusions come to life, but he lost control.
He conjured a bear, and it ate him alive in that very cell.
And then Mortep had blinded another girl to figure out how to make her illusions work without the power of sight.
Every time he came into my cell, every time he took me back to his laboratory, I wondered if it would be the last time.
“Iluze,” she repeated, drawing me back to the present. “So you’re an Illusionist, then.”
“Nothing gets past you,” I replied. “What about you? What’s your story?”
“Actually, I—I kind of grew up here.” There was a pause. “In Scarven’s mansion.”
“As in, one of his servants?”
She didn’t answer immediately. “Something like that.”
“How did you end up in a cell, then?”
“It’s a long story. I don’t want to talk about it.” She sounded tired, so much softer than the girl who tried to blast her way out of the cuffs a few hours ago.
“Okay, we don’t have to. We can talk about anything.” I wasn’t sure what made me say it, other than I just…I didn’t want her to stop. Her voice was nice to listen to, much better than the groans we could hear in the distance.
“Anything?” she asked.
I settled against the wall, staying as close to the hole as I could. “Anything. It’s not like we have anywhere to be.”
She was quiet for a minute, and then she said, “I’ve never left the manor. Will you tell me about Iluze?”
She had never even left this house? What kind of a servant was she? I shoved away my questions and instead asked, “What do you want to know?”
“What does it look like?” She cleared her throat, then the words poured from her. “What are the beaches like? Is it true that the ocean never ends and you can’t even see the bottom?”
A rare smile pulled on my lips. “It’s true.
When you stand on the beach and face the water, all you see is blue.
I like to roll the legs of my pants up and stand in the sand when the tide comes in.
” I paused. “Wait, do you know what sand is?” If she had only ever seen Drakorum, then the cold, jagged mountains and rocky dirt was all she knew.
“I’ve seen pictures.”
“Well, it’s…soft, kind of, and gritty. It gets everywhere.
Under your nails, in your hair, inside your clothes.
” I closed my eyes, almost able to imagine the wind fluttering around me.
“The best part is standing there when the water rushes over your ankles. It’s cold at first, but then it feels good.
The sun always warms it up. And then you just look out to the ocean.
The waves go on forever, straight into the sky. ”
“Isn’t that scary?” she asked. “What if you go out too far and can’t get back?”
“I mean, you have to be careful, but…no, it’s not scary. You take a deep breath, and it doesn’t feel like anything bad can happen. It’s the most peaceful feeling.” I hadn’t thought about that in years. I’d become so jaded and haunted that I’d forgotten the way things used to be.
She hummed softly. “I don’t think I’ve ever had that.”
“Had what?”
“Peace.”
Something uncomfortable dropped in my stomach, like a rock splashing into water. She was so young. We were all so young, but at least I remembered a time outside of this cell.
I swallowed the lump in my throat before I said, “Maybe one day, Songbird.”
“Maybe. And, Swift?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “About your parents. My dad died when I was a baby, so it’s not really the same because I never knew him. But my mama’s been with me the whole time. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost her.” Her breath hitched. “Well, I—I guess I kind of have now.”
“Don’t think like that. You’ll see her again,” I said, then instantly wished I hadn’t. Who was I, to try and give any semblance of hope when I’d lost my own a long time ago? The despair in her voice just made me want to say something that would take it away.
“Do you really believe that?” she asked.
What did I believe?
I believed in gray stone walls. I believed more pain would come tomorrow. I believed this cell was my grave and that I would’ve been better off if I’d died in Iluze with my parents, and I believed I’d never see the sun again.
But as I glanced through the hole to see her golden eye shining back, I realized that last part wasn’t true anymore.
“I believe we can’t give up,” I whispered.
“Hey, you two. Shut it,” a deep voice snarled from outside. A shadow of a burly figure appeared in the hallway. Something metal clanged into Songbird’s cell bars, followed by her sharp gasp.
I jumped to my feet and lunged as far as my shackles would let me. “Hey!” I shouted. “It wasn’t her fault. It was me.”
A guard in a silver lion’s mask slid in front of my bars, towering over me. His silhouette cast a menacing shadow over the ground. My heart bashed in my chest, my muscles clenching as if preparing for an attack.
But he simply huffed at me. “Don’t let it happen again.” He smacked the bars with his gloved hand.
I held my breath until he passed, then slowly sank back against the wall. “They’re just a bunch of brutes,” I whispered to her.
“Trust me, I’ve dealt with men like them my entire life,” she said back.
Another sound rang down the corridor, and my head snapped to attention, expecting the guard to be back. “We’ll stop, I sw—”
But a high-pitched, inhuman shriek echoed through the shadows.