Zuri had a plan. Escape was near enough impossible. She had resigned herself to the fact, though she owed it to every fibre of her being to try. Somewhere deep in the pit of her stomach, she knew she was seeking a dignified death just as much as her freedom. Perhaps she sought death more. There was no way she would voice this out loud. It even pained her to admit it internally. No – on the face of things, she was trying to escape, and death was just a possible, albeit likely, outcome. Shaking thoughts of despair, she focused on her plan. On the night of the Trials, there had been a skeleton crew of guards watching her. That was her chance. Just under three weeks. If she could survive that long, then she could give it a shot.
Three days had passed since the witch returned Zuri’s mother to her. It had taken most of that time for her to fully comprehend that she was alive, but that she was dead all the same.
On that first night, Arnero only re-emerged once, in company with the winner of the Trials. She handed him a large package wrapped in silver tape. He looked as though she had handed him a ticket out of the country, but as that didn’t exist, Zuri surmised it would be the eighth of Croc that Jude mentioned earlier.
The second day, she had cried for hours whilst she stared at her mother through the bars.
Now, early on day three, she was kneeling on the floor of her cell, watching her mother writhe and groan as she rocked back and forth. Each morning and night, a guard would arrive at their cells with a bowl of slop for Zuri and a dirty syringe loaded with golden brown liquid for her mother. It was her food, her water, her life.
Kady was at her best around this time – late morning to midday after her early fix. It was in that chasm of time, containing varying degrees of withdrawal, that she got progressively worse. By the midafternoon she was gone again, consumed by desperation and hunger for her late fix. Unable to think, speak, move, or do anything but writhe in agony.
“Mumma,” Zuri whispered. “Mumma, please look at me.”
Kady was curled in a ball on the floor of her cell, a trickle of bile spluttered from her mouth as she tried to raise her head to the sound of her daughter’s voice.
“Mumma!” Zuri shouted this time, disinterested in the growls of the prowling dogs. “You can do this. It’s your Zu...please, I’ve missed you so much.” Tears tracked their way through the days of dust and grime on her face.
Kady rolled to her back. Her tongue, dry and cracked, lolled out of the side of her mouth as her arm, scaled in black, reached for the plastic bottle in the corner of her cage. Zuri stretched her arm through the bars, the tips of her fingers just long enough to tap the bottle over, and she watched it roll towards her mother’s grasp. It took an age for her bony fingers, shaking uncontrollably, to remove the cap and raise the bottle to her peeled lips to pour the water into her mouth.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“Zu,” whispered Kady, her voice as cracked as the scales plaguing her body.
Zuri’s heart soared. For the first time since she almost smiled that first night, her mother acknowledged her.
“I’m so sorry, Zu.”
“Don’t be sorry, Mumma. None of this is your fault, none of it! I know it was Dad who put you here. He’ll pay for this, I swear!”
Kady managed to push herself into a seated position, leaning her side into the bars closest to Zuri. Her hair, crusty and mottled with sweat and blood, matted greedily to her cheeks. Zuri reached through and teased it free, brushing it behind her ears. She clasped her mother’s cheeks and wept as they locked eyes. Zuri’s smile pained her face, her salty tears stinging her dry lips. Kady smiled back, hers weak and half-masked by her pain.
“I’m going to get us out of here, Mumma. I’ve got a plan. It’s a shit plan, and the odds aren’t good, but I think it’s the only way.”
“Watch…your…mouth,” Kady replied through ragged breaths.
Zuri laughed through her sobs as her mother continued.
“No…hope…for me.” She drank deeply, her throat easing up with the help of the cooling water. “The door on my cage…just for show. I wouldn’t leave…if it was open. The Croc, I need it…it’s everything to me now. Save yourself. If there’s a chance, then you have…to try.”
Zuri closed her eyes and dropped her head. The vague plan she had formed, the plan that was almost certainly hopeless, hinged completely on her mother’s willpower. The willpower of an addict. That, and a massive slice of luck, which she knew better than to hope for.
“I need you. I can’t escape on my own,” she whispered.
“What…good…can I do you now, my child?”
“The Croc. I need one pin. I need you to give me one pin, so I can attack the guard who brings the food. In three weeks, on Trials night. Can you do that?”
Kady stared deep into her daughter’s eyes, the amber reflecting back identical to her own. She laughed through ragged breaths until she began to sob.
“Mumma...you can do that, can’t you? Mumma?”
Kady retreated to a ball on the cell floor and rocked back and forth as her sobs turned to beastly howls of anguish.