1
Talia
I can always tell when they’ve come to steal my blood. It’s only those times that my captors arrive all together, the three hulking men-who-aren’t-men marching into the room that holds my cage.
When they enter on their own to shove food and water through the bars or to change my toilet bucket, they have a curt, preoccupied air as if paying me any attention bores them. The group effort gets them excited. They always come in chuckling and giving each other hearty smacks on the shoulders, congratulating themselves on a job well done before they’ve even done it.
Or maybe it’s mostly done already. I have no idea what they want my blood for or how large a part of those activities it is.
All I know is that while my entire existence here is awful, these days are the worst.
The second I hear their merry voices on the other side of the door, my fingers clench around the scratchy fabric of my wool blanket. Every nerve in my body clangs to propel myself away from the threat. But the farthest I can go is the corners of my cage, which isn’t anywhere at all.
It’ll be over faster the more cooperative I am. And my one chance at ever getting out of this awful existence depends on me tamping down on my dread enough to focus all my attention on listening.
As my captors walk in, my fingers keep clutching the blanket. It’s the only protection I have against their harsh gazes and sneers. They can’t be bothered to go to the trouble of clothing me, but they don’t want me coming down with a chill either. I’m valuable enough to be kept alive but not remotely comfortable.
The man at the head of the bunch gazes down at me where I’m crouched on the hard metal floor of the cage, his nose wrinkling in undisguised revulsion. It must stink in here—I must stink, considering I can’t remember the last time they bothered to even hose me off. I’ve lived in filth for so many years I can’t tell anymore.
As far as I’ve been able to tell, that man—the one with hair as brilliantly yellow as the petals of a sunflower and ears that rise to inhuman points—is the leader. Yellow doesn’t do much other than watch and order the others around. But he’s the one who unlocks my cage. I have to concentrate on him.
The second of my captors, the one with the rotund belly and heavy feet, goes to the plain cupboard that’s the room’s only other furnishing. I think of him as Cutter because of his role in this ritual. He gets out the little ivory-handled knife and a glass vial. My skin twitches in anxious anticipation.
The third of the men bends down beside the cage until he’s almost at my level. His lips curl into a grin that looks cut into his ruddy face. He isn’t burly like the other two but all sharp angles, from the tips of his ears to the toes of his narrow boots to the tufts of his blueish white hair that poke from his scalp like icicles.
I’m uncomfortably familiar with Ice’s angles. Occasionally he gets bored enough with whatever else his life consists of to saunter in here and “play” with me. He’ll poke and prod until he forces out a gasp of pain.
They have a rule about injuring me—I’ve heard them talk about it. Nothing that could jeopardize my life is allowed. Ice has made a hobby out of discovering all the ways he can torment my body without causing any tangible damage.
Not surprisingly, he’s always the one who volunteers to pin me down.
I could make it even easier for them. I could sprawl out on my belly the way they’ll want me positioned so he has no reason to shove me down. But he’ll push me around anyway, and whatever small fragment of pride I’ve somehow held onto balks at the thought of prostrating myself quite that willingly.
Yellow leans forward. Black tattoos in unfamiliar symbols mark all of their bodies, but he has the most, several on his arms and neck, one poking from his hairline at his temple. A twisting line from one stretches across his chin all the way to his lips.
He’s going to say the word—the word that spills from his mouth with a resonance that prickles down my spine. The word that opens the door.
The word I have to learn.
He rests his hand on the latch. His lips part, and the sounds slip out fast and sibilant, one blending into the next. “Fee-doom-ace-own.”
That’s what it sounds like to my pricked ears, anyway. That’s what it’s sounded like since I realized some kind of magic holds my cage closed and that the word is the key, although it took several attempts before I was sure of each of the syllables. I replay everything I’ve heard my captors say over and over in my head, searching for meanings beyond the obvious that might offer a helpful clue to ending my torment, but that word is the one I’ve returned to the most.
I’m still not really sure of it, or I’d be able to say it properly, wouldn’t I? Just how much does his voice lilt upwards with the “ice” bit? How long does he stretch out the “o” in “own”?
What am I missing?
I might be missing the capacity to work any kind of magic word at all, no matter how well I say it. In the back of my head, I know that, not any flaw in my concentration, could be the problem. Because these aren’t really men, and they have powers beyond anything I understood before they threw me in this cage. He says the word quietly and quickly, but I don’t think he’s all that worried about me overhearing it.
He doesn’t think I could use it. But it’s all I have.
He unhooks the latch. The hinges squeak as the door swings open.
The cage is barely big enough for me. When I’m sitting, I can touch the bars overhead without raising my arm completely. Standing is out of the question. But the doorway is large enough for Ice to squeeze through. There’s just enough space for him to grab me by the back of my neck and slam my face against the floor.
Pain radiates through my skull. He clambers on top of me with his pointy knees digging into my calves and the spikes of his elbows jabbing my ribs. His weight bears down on my back, squashing most of the air from my lungs until I’m on the verge of suffocating. He grinds one of those elbows into the tender spot just below my shoulder blade, and I catch my lower lip between my teeth.
I hate the whimper that slips out of me anyway. I hate his fingers burrowing into the hollow between my cheek and my jaw to press my face even harder against the grubby metal. I hate that he knows exactly how to take me from discomfort to agony in the space of a breath.
I hate the jagged snicker that tells me how much he loves it. There are easier ways they could position me, but this one is more fun for them.
A jolt of adrenaline shoots through my veins, more panic than anything else, and I have to clamp down hard to smother the urge to thrash against Ice’s hold. There is no escaping him. I know that. And the one time I tried, when I didn’t know very much yet, the man on top of me repaid me in spades for the one kick I landed to his gut. He grasped my foot and twisted his hands, and the bones snapped in an explosion of pain.
That pain has never quite gone away. They didn’t let the fractures heal right—a little extra security against me running away. I can’t really walk in this cage, but any time I put weight on that foot, a dull ache spreads through it. Extra security and a constant reminder of the consequences of fighting back.
I have other ways of defying them that they can’t see. I pull all the way back into my mind, into the depths where the pain is only a distant buzzing, into an imagined vision of the world they wrenched me from. It isn’t a part of that world I ever experienced in real life, but one I dreamed about traveling to someday back when I could have dreams that large.