{WATTYS 2023 WINNER}
• Book 1 of the Daegelus series •
While hunting for his missing friend, Elijah stumbles upon a fiery journalist, who so happens to be looking for the same people as him: the doctors who experimented on him when he was a child. B...
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"Do you remember what it was like outside?"
Elijah stopped glaring at the camera in the top right corner of the white room and turned his head to look at Haru. "What?"
"Outside," he repeated, picking at his food. "Do you remember it?"
With a quiet sigh, Elijah looked down at his plate. A few miserable potatoes, a slice of ham, and three small carrots. He hated food, but if he only finished the cup of blood he'd been given, the guards would hurt him. So he tossed one of the carrots into his mouth and replied, "No."
"Really?" the black-haired kid questioned. "Come on."
He shrugged. "I don't know. Grass, trees, sky. What else is there?" he grumbled, trying to dismiss the conversation. He remembered more than that—of course he did—but thinking about it filled him with a drowning sense of despair. He didn't want to talk about it.
Haru slowly eased his fork into one of Elijah's potatoes and took it from his plate. "Do you think we'll ever see it again? The outside." He gave the demon his slice of ham, the only thing that Elijah could stomach.
"No," he answered and started cutting both slices while Haru took the rest of his potatoes. "They're going to keep us down here for the rest of our lives."
The Samayōnese kid adorned a hopeless stare and stared down at his plate.
Elijah knew that it was the truth, but seeing Haru upset hurt him more than knowing that this place would be where they died. "But you never know," he added. "Maybe someone will find us someday."
Haru glanced at him as a small but despair-ridden smile flickered across his face. "Yeah. Someday."
Elijah opened his eyes and watched the road pass by outside. Dismay had him in a tight grasp, pulling him deeper with every disappearing moment. He hated that he was free and that Haru was probably locked up in another lightless facility. He hated that he couldn't keep his promise that they'd see the outside again together. And he hated that it was taking him so long to find him.
What if he never found him? What if he was taking too long? What if Haru had been turned into one of those...things? A chimaera. A hybrid. Or...what if he was dead? A failed experiment? The loser in a battle to the death?
What if he was too late?
"Oh, hey," came Zoe's voice.
He didn't bother glancing at her.
"You okay?" she asked. "You've been sleeping most of the afternoon. We're almost at Pristead."
Elijah glanced up at the sky. It was getting dark again. Had he really been asleep twelve hours? He wasn't entirely surprised, though; he hadn't gotten a decent amount of sleep in weeks, and it had evidently finally caught up with him.
