They swung open the cage door, cattle prods at full power, humming with electricity. The man lazily lifted his hands in surrender. "Now, now." He said softly. His voice was like velvet. "No need. I'll do as you please." The man in the cage said, his...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The headache was back, pounding away at her skull like a hammer on a nail. The burn that had once been isolated to her ruined lower leg had spread over the course of the last few weeks. Her whole left side up to her ribs now burned consistently, even when she wasn't straining away, trying to become stronger.
Ivan had pushed her to exhaustion, and then Kiril had pushed her past it. They were two sides of completely different coins. Ivan worried, he was soft, and for all his humor, he seemed to care about strengthening her chances of survival.
Kiril was the opposite. He was as cold with her as he was with every other aspect of his life that she'd seen. When her legs folded in on themselves, too tired to go on, he didn't help her up and tell her to rest- he forced her to crawl onwards with a disappointed anger that made his gray eyes even harder than normal.
For the past few weeks, they'd been a constant force in her life. She was certain that they had been sleeping as much as she had, which was to say, not much. Ivan had been living off of gallons of coffee every time he came over, using it to cover up the suspicious smell of iron he always carried. Kiril blatantly carried packages of raw meat, snacking off the bloody slabs as he forced her to keep working.
Their help was a perplexing force. Some part of her thought that they were only pushing her so intensely because she couldn't think of a way out when she was so thoroughly exhausted. But another, more conflicted part thought that they might care, which was even worse. They were her captors, and they had mutilated her flesh.
Turned her into a monster.
She needed to hate them if she was ever going to get out of Ilaross.
"Miss? Would you like me to help you?" Clara's voice sounded through the crack in the bathroom door. Startled from her thoughts, she turned the shower knob off and held tightly to the bar attached to the wall, shifting her weight off of her leg. Blood, pus, and sweat ran down the drain with the water.
"No, I'm ok. I'll be out soon," Theo called out, easing open the glass door and reaching with her free hand for a towel.
Clara was a completely different, more comforting matter. From the moment she woke, to every moment Ivan and Kiril left, Clara was around. Theo knew that she was only there to make sure her physical needs were met, and that she was healing fine. It had been the young woman, she discovered, that had taken care of her in the unconscious days after the bite.
Despite Theo's growing independence, Clara remained attentive to her every need. She valued more than what the girl could do for her though; she valued everything the girl embodied. After all, Clara was innocently human, harboring only a faint suspicion about the existence of something foul in Ilaross, and a healthy enough fear to avoid any mention of it.
She toweled off and struggled into a set of Dime's large clothes. They were the only things she wasn't too stiff to maneuver into. Hot steam billowed out behind her as she opened the bathroom door.
