M-13

The Warehouse

Silas' POV:

When I wake up, my head is pounding like a fucking mac truck hit me, and I can't see straight. Everything that happened in the filing building is living in my mind, so I am terrified.

My vision is blurred, but I can tell from the gentle whispers and how spacious this place is that I'm not alone.

"Hey, buddy," I hear a familiar voice say, and a face moves above me. "Welcome back to the real world."

My vision focuses a little more and I see Jared above me, Aviana right beside him. There are more people in my peripheral, but I can't pick out their faces.

"My head hurts," I mumble, Jared helping me to sit up, and it only increases the pain to my poor brain. "Where are we."

Aviana and Jared both shrug, which is not reassuring whatsoever.

"Some kind of warehouse, I assume," Aviana whispers. "We've only just woken up."

There's fifteen other people in here, and I notice that we're all chained together, our ankles held by cuffs and the chains attached to the wall so there's no way to have everyone work together to walk out of here. Along with the leg cuffs, there's a fat cuff around my neck, and neither Jared or Aviana have it.

"Why did I get the ugly necklace and you two didn't?" I ask bitterly, tugging at it.

"Because they don't have Mistacesemia," someone says, and I see a boy who must be around my age sitting a few feet from us, and he too has a cuffed neck. "They keep us from using our powers, or we'd have been out of here months ago."

Well, that makes a lot more sense.

"Did you say months?" Aviana asks, and she looks horrified.

The boy nods. "I've been here for five months, sixteen days," he tells us, raising one of his hands to scratch at the raw, infected looking skin around his neck. "You're the first ones we've had since I was brought here."

"How long have the others been here, then?" I ask him, because if he's been here for five months and he was the newest... how long have the others been here?!

"Longest is the first one on the chain, in the back," he says, pointing to a woman in her thirties. "She's been here for three years I believe. Not just here, though. She's been transported before, but she's been kidnapped for that long."

Jared sighs. "Well, we won't be here that long. We're going to break out," he says in a plain voice, as if it's the most obvious thing ever.

The boy laughs. "Listen, I don't know if you heard me right, but these things on our necks stop our powers. Girl in the back? Been here three years. No one has ever escaped, and from what I have been told, the last person who tried was beaten and brutally killed before they moved and captured me. Then, we moved again. We have no information, no updates, nothing. We don't even know what state we're in."

"Oregon," I tell him. "The three of us are from Oregon and the furthest they could have moved us in the time we were knocked out it probably Washington. Unless we were out for much longer than I think we were."

He hums. "That's smart. I was born in Maine, so it makes sense that they'd move across the country, just for safety measure. Not that it matters, because no one is looking for us, anyway."

"I'm sure that's not true," Jared tried to sympathize, but the boy shakes his head.

"No, like, there's literally no one looking for us. The people kept in here have no one they care about, no one they love, because if they let us do their dirty work, we'd definitely betray them and get help for the other people in here. The ones that have someone they care about... they're the ones carrying out missions, because the lives of their people will be threatened."