Chapter 2 - A New Arrival

Northern Facility, Vanstead Dukedom of Augustein, Year 985

The girl was a little taller than Amara and had short, silky dark hair that bounced whenever she moved her head. It gleamed in the torchlight with a blue-ish tint. Her dark eyes stood out against her pale skin, and when those eyes scanned across the cell, taking in its interior, Amara was struck by how lively they looked.

After the guards had left and the cell door swung shut again, the girl had stepped forward and spoken in a voice louder than Amara had heard in a long time.

Her name, she announced, was Edith.

—

“How old’re you?”

Amara slowly turned her head to face the girl. Edith stood right in front of her with her arms crossed, staring down at Amara. She blinked owlishly.

“I don’t know,” she said. Her voice came out raspy and hoarse, like she’d forgotten how to make words.

Edith frowned. “Well, I think I’m older than you,” she said with a huff. She jabbed a thumb at herself. “That means I’m in charge!”

Amara just stared at her. Edith stayed silent, perhaps waiting for a response. When none came, she sighed and plopped down right next to Amara, shivering slightly when she touched the cold stone floor. Amara flinched away on instinct, not liking this strange girl invading her space. Edith, however, didn’t seem to notice, because she just kept talking.

“Susie says you’ve been here the longest. That true?”

Amara thought briefly of James, his curled form that had once been a constant in the corner of the cell. Other faces flashed in her mind, faces that had quickly grown blurred with time. Their features blended together into a strange amalgamation that didn’t look quite human. She nodded slowly, and her own hair, limp and not at all like Edith’s, fell across her face.

“Yeah.”

“Which means you’ve had a lot of sessions.”

“I guess.”

“So you know the most about the experiments,” Edith persisted.

“Not that much.”

Edith rolled her eyes and huffed. “Susie was right, you’re hard to talk to,” she muttered.

The cold feeling rose sharply, and she shoved it down. She swallowed. She knew she didn’t really speak to the other kids, but she never thought that they might talk about her. That Susie, with her pretty bright hair, would find her hard to approach. Amara scanned her mind, but she couldn’t recall Susie ever speaking with her before. Had she tried, and Amara just hadn’t noticed it?

Edith was quiet for a few moments, those expressive eyes silently studying Amara. Finally, she coughed.

“Uh, people used to say that about me, too, except they called me bossy,” she said with a scowl. She shifted, adjusting her position on the floor.

Amara vaguely realized that Edith, this strange girl who’d started talking to her out of the blue, was trying to comfort her. She didn’t know how to respond to that, so she just said, “Oh.”

Edith nodded vigorously. “Yeah, there’s this one boy, he thinks he’s all that just ‘cause his great uncle used to be a Raymoth guard, and he’s always acting like he’s so much better than us. But he kept saying it was my fault, acting like he wasn’t the real problem, and—”

Edith continued speaking, gesturing with increasingly wild movements. Throughout her story, which spiraled longer and longer and quickly jumped between various unrelated topics, Amara listened silently.

—

The other kids loved Edith. That didn’t really surprise Amara, but she was surprised at just how quickly they grew attached to the girl.

Susie had found a new “Ellie” in her. The younger kids all crowded around her, following Edith around like little ducklings. Ben, who’d gone nearly entirely silent after those first few months of crying, finally started speaking again.

It was as if the entire cell woke up from a long, deep slumber. Amara had never seen so many people moving around before, and never had it been so loud with chatter. She’d often glance outside the cell doors, but the guards never said anything about the noise. That didn’t stop her from watching them just in case.

Edith liked to talk about herself, and as a result Amara found herself learning more about the girl’s life than she knew about her own. She was from Vanstead, she said, and her mother was a “super cool watchman” who she emphasized would definitely come and save them all. She was planning on moving to Helisturn, the capital, one day, where she’d join the Academy and become an officer, join a duke’s personal guard, or maybe become a Rose. She hesitated a bit on the latter section and ended up backtracking, amending her earlier statement and saying she’d rather not serve the Raymoths. Not when the Sovereign was the reason they were there.

She claimed to know all about the world outside because she’d traveled a lot with her mother. She even made guesses about which dukedom all the kids had come from, which was an especially popular subject for the majority of the cell who didn’t remember their birthplaces. For Amara, she suggested Chaunton, a word that had no meaning to her.

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It was easy to get swept up in Edith’s energy. Even though Amara was sure they all knew her stories were probably as much fantasy as truth, it was nice to hear someone talk so openly and with so much passion. It was even fun to play along, sometimes. For reasons unknown to Amara, Edith often spoke to her, even encouraging her to join in on her stories. Maybe it was because they were the closest in age, or maybe the girl had made it a personal challenge to get Amara to talk more. That seemed like something she would do. Amara found she didn’t mind it as much as she thought she would.

Still, even as Amara watched Edith talk, the sway of her hair that somehow still retained its shine, she couldn’t help but dread the day that energy inevitably fizzled out. She scanned the other kids, enraptured by a tale of Edith’s mother fighting a rank C Aberration all by herself, eyes shining in a way she hadn’t seen in years, and hoped that day was far away.

—

“Hey, Amara?”

Amara looked up at Edith from where she’d been inspecting her latest array of bandages. She quickly realized that the girl was staring at her arm as well, dark eyes fixed on the stark white bandages layered and wrapped so thoroughly that they hid almost all of her skin. Edith swallowed and shifted her weight.

“Um, what really…happens during sessions?”

Amara frowned, and she sat up fully. “You have one soon?”

Edith shrugged. “I mean, probably? I’ve already been here a week, so it’s bound to be coming, right?” She shuddered and scooted a little closer. Amara let her. “I just… I just want to be prepared, is all.”

“It’s gonna hurt a lot,” Amara said bluntly.

Edith scowled. “Not helpful.”

Amara stared at the ground again, tracing some of the cracks in the floor with her finger. The amount of them had grown slowly but surely, creating a chained network of lines along the ground that Amara had always thought was an improvement from the unbroken, unending grey.

“They’ll probably take blood samples and do some basic tests. I think they do different things with every kid though.”

Edith was quiet. A brief silence engulfed the two of them, and Amara shifted uncomfortably. After the liveliness of the past week, it felt especially wrong.

“How many people don’t come back from the first session?” Edith suddenly asked. Her voice was tight, and she didn’t look up as she spoke. Amara noted the way her hands tightened their grip around her arms, trembling barely perceptibly.

Amara closed her eyes, thinking back through the years. Earlier on, when she’d first been taken in, more kids were brought in at once, which made the disappearances stick out all the more. The number of new arrivals had trickled down with time, but the percentage who made it out of the first session hadn’t really changed that much.

“A lot of people don’t,” she said truthfully. It didn’t feel right to lie. She opened her eyes. “I think maybe half never come back, and then out of the ones who do, another half end up dying overnight.”

Dying. It felt odd to say it out loud. All of them knew that’s what happened, but it had become customary to call them “disappearances” instead. Maybe at first it was not to scare the youngest kids, but it had soon grown into a way to help them deal with the truth. Saying it again felt like she was breaking an unspoken agreement, shifting a delicate balance, and so Amara kept talking to avoid thinking about it.

She spoke about the people she’d seen, about the different types of scars and wounds and how she could tell when someone would make it and when someone wouldn’t. The longer she talked, the more surprised she was at how much she remembered, and the more she started to wish that she didn’t.

Throughout it all, Edith stayed silent, more quiet than Amara had ever seen her, and listened with eyes glued to Amara. By the time Amara was finished, her throat felt like it was on fire. She swallowed, attempting to fix the dryness, and her shoulders slumped back down.

“That’s all I know,” she said, barely above a whisper. Edith kept staring at her, and Amara wished she would say something, anything, to break the silence.

Finally, the girl leaned closer, and Amara couldn’t recognize the mix of emotions in the girl’s features as she spoke in a surprisingly steady voice.

“Do you think I’ll make it?”

And Amara stared at her, those gleaming eyes and the proud tilt of her head, and spoke truthfully.

“Yeah. I think you will.”

—

People reacted to pain in different ways. That was a fact Amara suspected was true everywhere, but it was different to see it so easily laid out within the confines of the facility.

Some sobbed uncontrollably. They became inconsolable, often shrinking in on themselves, gripping their skin tightly as if that pressure could ease the wounds. Those ones usually didn’t last long in the facility. The worst case Amara had seen was a young boy—she hadn’t even known his name—who kept hitting his head against the wall when he’d been thrown back into the cell. Some of the older kids had tried to pull him away, but he scratched and fought them off with a ferocity that their tired bodies couldn’t match. Eventually one of the guards had dragged him, kicking and screaming, away. He never returned.

Others shut in on themselves. Some did it completely, refusing to communicate or acknowledge their surroundings at all while they struggled to process. They became little more than limp dolls, trapped in a prison of their own mind until they either broke out of it or died there.

Others only shut down part way, still gaining that distant look in their eyes, but managing to respond and react to things. That was the category Edith fell into.

The moment she stumbled back into the cell, the girl retreated to the back. She hugged her knees and stared at the wall, lowering her head and refusing to talk to anyone even as her whole body shook. Amara could see fresh bandages covering her arms and lingering violet markings that were quickly fading. Susie got up and tried to talk to her, but Edith snapped for her to go away. No matter how many times someone approached her, she refused to move or look them in the eye, adamantly staying where she was even when night fell.

Amara stayed awake, watching Edith’s trembling form even as the other kids fell asleep. The constant cold feeling in her gut rose, barely pulled back from boiling. Finally, once the sounds of breathing had evened around her and only Edith’s sharp gasps and occasional whimpers punctuated the darkness, she quietly got up and moved to where Edith was.

The other girl froze slightly as she approached, muscles tensing, but Amara didn’t say anything. She simply sat down next to Edith, not saying a word, and stayed there.

At some point, the tension drained away and the shaking began to slow down as exhaustion overtook all other emotions. Amara understood the feeling well. Still, even when Edith began to tip forward slightly, head drooping with sleep, Amara stayed awake throughout the night.

When morning finally came, Edith slowly raised her head and finally looked over at Amara. Her eyes were puffy and red, making her large irises stand out even more. Her arms still shook slightly, and her hair had lost its shine. She smiled tiredly.

“I’m still here,” she said, voice raspy and hoarse.

Amara smiled back. “You’re still here.”