Reality was a strange thing. Filtered through individual perception, sensation, experience and beliefs. How often does a dream seem like reality and reality seem like a dream?

The cutting, burning pain in her wrists was the only reason Caroline could be sure this was not a dream.

This is not possible. Please god, please don't let it be true!

It didn't help. No matter how many times she squeezed her eyes shut in despair and tore them open again in hope, her wrists remained tightly bound together with thin ropes and her right ankle fixed to the metallic wall with a chain. The icy cold had penetrated to her bones and not only numbed the pain but also seemed to paralyse her thoughts. Like viscous mush, they flowed through her cerebral convolutions where flashes of inspiration normally twitched.

There were seven other people in the room with her, in similar or worse condition. Her gaze wandered over the bodies of the prisoners and lingered on her friend Isy. She looked at the petite body of the eighteen-year-old girl and warmth flooded through her.

"Isy! Hey, Isy!" she whispered, "are you awake?"

The girl didn't respond and Caroline watched the steady breaths for a moment. Good, at least a short time out she didn't have to spend in fear.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

The roar around her swelled on and off and the metallic walls groaned depending on how much her vehicle swayed. When she had woken up tied up, she had assumed it must be a ship. As she had learned from a fellow prisoner, the situation was far more frightening. He claimed they were in a submarine! Her reaction had been one of incredulous laughter, but his account of how he had been ambushed and taken away in the dark sounded credible and similar to her experience. Unlike everyone else, however, he had woken up before being loaded onto the transport and had witnessed them taking him through the black hole and down the ladder.

From his loss of hair and the wrinkles on his forehead and around his eyes, she guessed him to be in his mid or late forties. That he was here filled Caroline with some hope. It mitigated the suspicion that her abductors were traffickers who sold young girls into forced prostitution. Besides Isy, herself and him, two slightly younger men and three very young women, presumably in their teens, had been kidnapped. What the hell did they have in common?

Everything inside her convulsed at the memory of her own encounter with the hijackers. A sob rose up her throat and she clenched her bound hands tightly in front of her mouth to stifle any sound. No, these were not human traffickers as they were known from the news. She thought of the large hand that had wrapped around her throat, the hard grip and how impenetrable the skin had felt under her fingernails.

She tried to stop the spiral of thoughts. Surely there would be a logical explanation for everything. But did logical or absurd even matter? Bound and chained, they were, one way or another, completely at their mercy.

Still, when Caroline listened to herself, despite the fear of death and pain, she did not manage to regret the decisions that had brought her here.