Dinner was a thin, watery soup that smelled as wet and rancid as the damp cave it was made in. A few strands of meat clung desperately to the pieces of bones bobbing in the broth, like drowning men desperate to stay afloat. The children lined up in front of a creaky metal pot, holding out their bowls when they reached the front of the line for a short, stern-looking man to fill it. It was the same man who had stopped Ru Meng from running away earlier.
Ru Meng’s hands were blistering from all the labor he had done. The palm of his left hand, still healing from his burn wounds, was red and raw with pain. He hated waiting in line like this, like he was some sort of animal waiting to be fed, but his stomach was betraying him. It was painfully empty and not afraid to let everyone know it with loud growls and gurgles. He had to eat if he wanted to think, Ru Meng consoled himself.
He hobbled in line behind Lan and noticed several of the boys in line murmuring amongst themselves and giving them the side-eye. He looked at Lan and said nothing.
When Lan reached the front of the line, the stout man glanced at him and ran the ladle against the bottom of the pot. He fished up a particularly large, (though not very meaty) bone and dropped it into Lan’s bowl. The skinny boy held the bowl close to his chest, bending over as if to protect it, and quickly scurried away.
It was Ru Meng’s turn. He had just held out his bowl when he heard a thud and a clatter. He turned around and saw that Lan had tripped and fallen to the ground. He had spilled the soup and the meat inside in his bowl, but he said nothing as he put the meat back into the bowl and retreated into a shadowy corner of the cave they were resting in.
The man scowled and glared menacingly at the boys behind Ru Meng. The boys got the message and stood back in line obediently, stiff as boards. The man went back to serving soup. Ru Meng tried to follow after Lan once he had gotten his dinner, but someone slung an arm over his shoulder as he was walking and quite firmly, though not forcefully, turned him in another direction.
“You should stay away from him. For your own good,” said the boy who was walking beside him now. The boy was a good deal taller than him, so Ru Meng decided to just walk along with him.
He brought Ru Meng towards two boys who were sat down and eating already. A few more boys joined them shortly.
“You can call me Han Yang,” the boy said, before introducing the other boys in the group, “this is Arjun, Hafiz, Chu Wen, Peng Nan and Wu Qing.”
They each nodded at Ru Meng in succession; a small dark-skinned boy, a wide-nosed teenager, a pasty kid with a round face, a boy with a shaved head and a short but fierce-looking boy.
Ru Meng nodded back at them and quietly started eating his soup. He was two bites in when he realized everyone was staring at him. It took him another mouthful of soup to realize that they were waiting for him to introduce himself.
Spluttering and choking on soup, he said, “I-I’m Ru Meng.”
“Nice to meet you, Ru Meng,” the tall boy called Han Yang gave him a reassuring pat on the back.
The boys in the group talked amongst themselves as they ate, mostly complaining about who had blisters in the most unusual spots and cracking horrible jokes, oftentimes switching between languages as they talked. They seemed used to it: the labor, the fatigue, the darkness, and well, being a slave. Ru Meng was a little jealous of that; he knew there were other people out there who spoke different languages, but his father had never taught him anything other than Mandarin.
Ru Meng kept quiet even after he had finished his meal, not quite sure what he was doing with this group of strangers and why they had even invited him in the first place. Well, he had some ideas.
“What’s wrong with Lan? Why don’t you want me to sit with him?”
All the boys suddenly turned to look at him; Arjun dropped his spoon.
Han Yang raised an eyebrow and started, “Well—”
Just then, loud abusive shouting and the sounds of beating drew everyone’s attention to the entrance of the cave. A tall teenager whose handsome features could not be concealed by the myriad of bruises and lacerations on his face stumbled into view, followed closely by the horrid and violent man who had harassed Ru Meng earlier.
There was some slight murmuring. The boys he was sitting with seemed particularly troubled to see this. Han Yang leaned down by Ru Meng’s ears and said grimly, “That’s why.”
“Dinner’s over, boys. Put the plates away and get to work,” the stout man who served them dinner banged the pot with a ladle. Everyone hastily scrambled onto their feet.
“I’ll explain later. Let’s go,” said Han Yang.
Ru Meng quickly washed his bowl and spoon in a muddy barrel like the other boys. He followed them as they went over to the wardens and picked up a box full of rocks they had mined earlier in the day, along with a hammer and chisel. They sat down in little circles and started chipping away to unearth the precious magical stones within.
Ru Meng watched as the beat-up teenager from earlier was marched to a corner of the room and made to do the same task without dinner.
There was very little talking involved, as the short man paced about the room. The violent man sat down on a chair and was picking his fingernails. Ru Meng sat right beside Han Yang, but the older boy did not seem eager to break the rules in any way. He was focused on his work.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
It wasn’t until a few hours in when Rayyan, the man who had spoken softly to Ru Meng and who terrified him to no end, arrived at the cave. The stout man nodded at him and tapped a few boys on the shoulders, including Hakimi, the boy who had been supposed to show Ru Meng around. The boys got up from their work and left the cave with Rayyan.
Han Yang leaned in and whispered softly while nobody was looking, “Islamic night prayers. Rayyan is supposedly a man of faith.”
Disdain was dripping out of his words. It was lucky that nobody caught him talking like that or he would most certainly have been punished.
The boys returned roughly half an hour later and went back to work. Things proceeded in silence for several long hours. Ru Meng hammered the rocks mindlessly, trying not to be consumed by his tide of welling emotions. Silence and time were the best fertilizer for stray thoughts and unwanted fears. How long had it been since he had left his father? How was he doing? Was he still alive? What happened to the old woman and girl from before? What exactly happened to him? A thousand questions bounced around inside his head, screaming for attention. Ru Meng shelved all of it away and drove the hammer into the chisel.
At last, the stout man told them to turn in their tools, along with whatever gemstones they had managed to free from the rocks. He examined everyone’s results and issued stern warnings to a few boys who had missed their quotas. Ru Meng watched as Chu Wen’s pasty round face turned a bright shade of red when the stout man caned him firmly across the buttocks for turning in a measly sum of three stones; one of which Ru Meng was quite sure was just a pebble.
“Sleep,” the man said, in a tone that suggested he wasn’t asking. He extinguished all the lights but the lantern in his lamp and walked to the narrow entrance of the cave, where he sat beside the other man. He dragged the abused teenager with him, clearly trying to keep him away from the other boys.
The boys huddled together, wrapping themselves in the thin blankets given to them. There were soft whisperings all over the cave, just light enough that it wouldn’t reach the entrance.
“Did everyone see Chu Wen’s face just now?” Peng Nan started the conversation with a subdued snicker.
The rest of the boys joined in as Chu Wen moaned, “I got unlucky, that’s all.”
“That’s the fourth time in a week you’ve been unlucky,” Wu Qing said nonchalantly.
Arjun almost burst out laughing, but Han Yang gave him a well-timed blow to the stomach.
“Keep it down, all of you. I was about to tell Ru Meng about Vardan.”
Everyone fell oddly quiet after he said that.
Han Yang sighed and pulled Ru Meng closer to him.
“That guy they’ve been beating up and that they’re keeping an eye on? That’s Vardan. He’s our big brother; used to take care of all of us, helped people dig when they got tired, gave them his food when they were sick. No one had a problem with him. Even Hakimi’s bunch—” he raised his eyebrow in the direction of the other large group of boys and rolled his eyes, “—liked him, even though they treat the rest of us like they are better than us.”
“Then, a few months ago, Chen Jin—” he paused for a moment as he remembered Ru Meng was new to the place, “the short, mean-looking old man with the cane— finds a well-hidden secret tunnel in one of the mine shafts that lead elsewhere. They round up all of us and tell the culprit to confess. Nobody talks and they threaten us with lashings. They pull a few boys out and let that bastard Liao Hua beat them up. (He’s the asshole that likes to beat people up.) Still, nobody talks. Then, Rayyan threatens to keep us all hungry until someone talks and that spineless coward Lan stands up and accuses Vardan of digging the tunnel. We protested and got slapped for our troubles. And what do you know? Our big brother is too nice to let everyone be punished for someone else’s mistakes, so he confesses to doing it.”
Han Yang seemed to get angrier as he talked, “That damned Lan! Vardan was the one to take him in when he was always messing up and getting beat and never had enough to eat. We all helped him in some way or another, fixing the tools he broke, sharing our food, and doing his share of the work. Even Chu Wen passed him one of the gemstones he found in the rocks.”
It was too dark to see, but somehow Ru Meng was sure Chu Wen had blushed a bright shade of pink.
“And what does he do to repay our kindness? He blames our big brother for something he did!”
“Well…we don’t know if he’s the one who dug the tunnel,” Hafiz’s low and hesitant voice chimed in.
“He probably is! Who else would try to run away on their own? Why else would he come forward and pin the blame on Vardan?”
The sheets rustled but no one said anything.
Han Yang let out another deep sigh.
“Well, anyway, that’s why they’ve been beating up Vardan and why you should stay away from Lan if you don’t want trouble. You might be his next victim if you aren’t careful. You wouldn’t want to be friends with human garbage like that anyway. Who knows what he’s going to try to do next? You’ve seen how Rayyan treats him— gives him all the extra benefits and none of the work, all for his obedient little snitch.”
“Good thing everyone else hates him. Even Hakimi and his boys push him around when they get the chance. Those idiots buy the complete nonsense from Rayyan about him taking care of us; they’re desperate for his approval and they hate Lan’s guts for being Rayyan’s golden little boy.”
Was he really? Ru Meng wondered to himself as he remembered how miserable Lan seemed to be. He recalled that sinister man’s pitch-black eyes and empty smile. Did a man like that really believe that Vardan was the one who dug the escape tunnel? He made Lan show the new guy around, but was that really an excuse to reward him? Or was it something else…
The boys talked for a good while longer. Several times they asked Ru Meng about his story; where he had come from, what happened to him, that sort of thing. Ru Meng feigned shyness (though he was indeed not good at talking to other people) and kept all his answers vague. He had learned his lesson with the old woman. Keep your cards close to your chest. The less they know about you, the less they can hurt you with. The more you know about them, the better you can plan.
He learned a lot about the other boys; Han Yang’s father sold him off because of a drinking debt, Arjun’s parents died and left him to fend for himself and Hafiz had been a slave ever since they were forced into these caves. These were sad and tragic stories, but the person in question never seemed too bothered by their circumstances and even sometimes cracked jokes about it. Only Chu Wen sounded weepy when he recounted how his mother died of an illness.
Ru Meng felt a strange sense of relief and comfort as he heard everyone’s stories. He felt a warmth in his heart, as if everything would turn out alright, even as bleak as things seemed to be. He had never had companions like these before and for a brief moment, all his worries seemed to be as small and insignificant as specks of dust in the air.
Yet, even as he fell asleep, something ominous and unsettling turned slowly in the back of his head, like the little spiders that skittered in and out of crevices in the walls. Nightmares are spun out of fragments of our worst fears and that which we hold most dear. As the webs of slumber closed in on him, the last image that haunted Ru Meng’s mind was that of a frail and terrified boy sobbing quietly into his sleeve in the darkness.