Shadowed

XVI. On the Cell Walls

I'm falling.

My stomach writhes like it's been pulled out of me. The air is cold, and I fly through it, down, down, for what feels like hours. Miles and miles of falling. 

I never slow. Sometimes I hear voices in the dark. 

A girl, her voice gritty. "We'll be back soon, Kara. We've done exactly what you asked." 

A boy, low and eager. "Do you think we'll get a reward for this job? Think we'll get to kill someone next time?"

A different girl's voice, punctured with sighs and exasperated groans. "Wish they'd let us kill this time. But no, we've got to bring them alive. Even that little traitor Angella."

"Not that we could have killed that one," says the first girl. "Hey, Delia, put him out again, will you? He's waking up."

A stinging pain in my neck. I'm falling faster. The voices are gone.

Somewhere along the line, the air turns colder. I shiver.

Tingles run up my spine. Have I stopped falling?

There are screams piercing the air, long, tortured, faraway.

My back is against something hard. I'm not falling anymore.

I gasp, clapping a hand to my throbbing neck. It comes away covered in flakes of dried blood. Whoever injected that needle into me did a sloppy job.

Or maybe they just didn't care.

I've been laying on some kind of hard slab, and it's making me stiff and sore. Drawing in a shuddering breath, I pull myself to sitting. My entire body is achy and sluggish, and there's a bruise forming at the back of my head from the cold rock.

I almost don't want to look, don't want to see the situation I've ended up in, but I force my eyes up.

The first thing I see is grey. Jagged, rough, grey walls, on every side.

My head jerks back and forth, not wanting to believe it. There's no door. No windows. Only a tiny, flickering light bulb in the corner, a tin bucket lying face down on the floor, and the hard slab of rock I'd been lying on.

I'm in some kind of cell. But how did I get in here?

My head is still spinning from the aftereffects of whatever knocked me out. I sink back down onto the slab and bury my face in my hands. 

The Hunters have me. That's all I know. Is Abby alive? Is Angella? Is Drew?

They're dead, whispers the cynic in me. They're dead and you know it, because the Hunters need to kill like an addict needs their drug, and because death is the fate of every person on this earth, except for you.

That Hunter, argues the feeble voice of optimism, that Hunter, while you were unconscious, said they had to bring them in alive. Angella and Drew are still alive. They've got to be.

It's an argument with myself, and one I'll never win, so I shut down the two warring voices in my head before they drive me mad with worry.

Suddenly, a scream slashes the taut, silent air. It's bottled terror, high and eerie. It chills me to my core.

I know I won't find anything, but I follow the haunting noise anyway. It came from up, from somewhere above me.

The ceiling of my cell is high, and made of the same coarse rock that surrounds me on all sides. My eyes wander aimlessly along the line where the walls meet the ceiling, searching for something, anything.