Before She Ignites (Fallen Isles Trilogy #1)(16)

Gerel didn’t say anything else to me, just glanced up every so often to see if I was still copying her. I couldn’t tell if she approved or not. Probably not. Even so, it felt good to move around again, to force my muscles to flex and bend. If I wanted to survive, I needed to be strong.

I was a Drakontos mimikus. I was not like the others here, but I could blend in long enough for my family to secure my release.

After two hundred squats, seven stretches, and twenty push-ups, my face felt flushed and my muscles trembled. Gerel wasn’t tired, though. She went back to lifting herself on the edge of the door. With her fingertips.

Well, of course she could do that. She was a warrior and she was on Khulan. She’d just told me that she’d been training harder than this her entire life. Top of her class, at least until she’d done something no one else liked.

But in the back of my head, I could hear Mother’s disappointed sigh. Not smart enough. Not strong enough. “Thank Damina you’re beautiful.”

I touched the blemish on my chin and cringed.

Finally, it was Gerel’s turn for the bath. And mine. But Altan approached my cell and didn’t open it.

He tilted his head. “You just got here. What makes you think you earned a bath?”

Gerel caught my eye as she stepped out of her cell, but I couldn’t decipher her look.

“As for this”—Altan hefted a sack of food—“you haven’t earned it, either.”

“But—” I pressed my mouth into a line. Everyone else got theirs—I assumed—so why shouldn’t I get mine? And a bath? I’d cleaned my cell, same as the other prisoners.

Altan tossed the sack through the open door of Gerel’s cell; it landed on her bed. “Get some rest, Fancy. You have a big day tomorrow.”

My stomach growled and ached, and I thought bitterly of the rotten apple and stale bread I’d tossed down the sewage hole. Maybe I should have eaten it after all. I pressed my palms to my belly and curled over myself, but it didn’t help. Maybe a distraction.

“Aaru?” I peered under my bed, toward the hole. “Are you there?”

Two taps answered. “No.”

I sat on my bed, blanket pulled around my shoulders, and counted the cracks in the walls (three hundred and twelve) until Gerel returned. Then I watched her eat my food (three chews per bite, no matter what she ate, like she was afraid it might be taken from her).

She looked over. “Stop watching me. It’s weird.”

I dropped my gaze to my knees. She knew I hadn’t been allowed to bathe, but she couldn’t know I’d been denied dinner, too. For the moment, that made me both the hungriest and the dirtiest person in the cellblock.

Later, when the lights went out and the screaming started, I began to understand. This was day and night in the Pit. Faint light, and no light. No light meant whoever was so afraid of the dark screamed until he fell asleep.

This wasn’t fair. I was being punished for trying to do the right thing. I should have been rewarded.

But life didn’t always work like that.

I SPENT THE night under the bed. It seemed safer than on top.

I tried to sleep the normal way. When the screaming stopped, I peeled myself off the floor and felt through the black space until my fingers scraped the edge of the bed. But the moment I stood, this awful sensation of being lost—or somewhere else—came over me. Like if I took one wrong step, I’d fall off the edge of a mountain, or into another world.

By the time I made it into bed, my pillow and blanket in their proper places, I was trembling with the unknown. Like this thin wooden cot was a raft and I was drifting in the middle of the sea, no land in sight. All I could feel was the dark and the pressure and the lurking terror of something unnameable, like a beast lived in the blackness and if I moved wrongly, it would devour me.

So in a fit of bravery, I jumped off the bed and scrambled back under, protected on five sides. But it wasn’t enough.

My head spun and my throat closed. I was choking on the darkness, and on fear that the dim crystals in the hall might never illuminate again.

I could be trapped in this darkness forever.

A high-pitched whine squeezed from my throat as I pressed my spine to the floor and my palms to the underside of the bed, like anchoring myself here. Like reminding myself there were physical things surrounding me. But every time I opened my eyes, there was only void. Darkness.

I needed my calming pills. I needed Doctor Chilikoba, who always assured me I wasn’t dying when I felt like this.

“Breathe,” she would say. “Start with breathing.”

I gasped. Not a long breath, but enough that the muscles in my throat opened a fraction. Another inhale, this one more substantial. That could count as the first breath.

One. Two. Three. I breathed in, held the air in my lungs, and exhaled as long and slow as I could stand. Gradually, my racing heart eased.

As long as I didn’t open my eyes. As long as I didn’t move my hands from the underside of the bed.

And I listened to the whimper of someone in the throes of nightmares, to a whistling snore from a man down the hall, and to heavy silence. Like everyone was just waiting for something terrible to happen.

But what could be worse than this?





CHAPTER SIX




THE NEXT MORNING, ALTAN STOPPED IN FRONT OF my door, his eyes hooded and his mouth turned downward. A fresh cut ran the length of his cheek, not deep enough to need stitches or a bandage, but the brown skin around it had turned ruddy and ragged. It probably hurt. Good.