Running With the Stars

Part 1

Chapter 1

It was nine hours since her capture and Savannah was retching loudly into the metal sink in her cell. She brought up the slops from her dinner and spat bitterly, noting that they both looked and tasted much like they had when she had been served them hours before. She heaved again and felt something at the back of her throat. Carefully, carefully, she reached into her mouth and retrieved a small stone pebble covered in stringy saliva.

It was no larger than her knuckle, and though it appeared smooth at first, a closer inspection would reveal faint etchings covering its entire surface. They were like hieroglyphics, but different. For one, they were impossible to remember. Savannah had stared at the pebble for hours on end, noting the sharp points and twisting turns of each individual sign, committing them to memory using every trick she knew. But then, the minute she had looked away...they were gone from her mind. Like the details of a dream upon waking.

Were they random scribbles? Instructions? Or were they a language? Savannah didn't truly know, and neither did anyone else. Whoever – or whatever - had made them was long dead, and they had taken the secret with them.

But Savannah did know one thing: she knew what the pebble could do.

She stowed it beneath her grey prison clothing, resolving to exhaust every other option before she used it. For though the small, innocuous rock might get her out of her present situation, it would do so at a price.

The matron who delivered her food now did so by standing back and kicking the tray through the grate at the foot of her door. This was because she hadn't been so careful the first time and had passed it through by hand, allowing Savannah to reach through the grate, grab the woman by the neck and bash her head repeatedly off the door until help had arrived and disentangled the pair of them.

In hindsight that had probably been a mistake.

The room was spartan, with a sleeping pallet, a tin toilet bucket in one corner, and a rusty old sink that belched forth brown, brackish water that she had to hold down every time she tried to drink it. High above there was a small, barred window that let in a bare minimum of jaded light and offered a tantalising sliver of sky outside. The floor space was tight and claustrophobic: a few square metres of featureless, poured concrete that numbed her feet every time she touched them to the cold surface.

The walls pressed close whenever she stopped to think about them. It seemed impossible to her that a human life could be contained in such a small space. She imagined her upcoming days were carbon copies of one another, lined up end to end like giant blank dominoes that fell all too slowly. She could see them stretching off into the future, and as night fell and the darkness scuttled into her cell she fancied that they marched on forever.

On the second day she awoke clear-headed and ripped the sheets from her sleeping pallet so she could get a better look at it. It was made of a sturdy metal that had been driven into the ground with thick rivets. She calculated for a moment, before moving to her toilet bin, picking it up, and bashing it repeatedly off the wall until it was bent completely out-of-shape and tapered to a sharp point at one end.

Then she began to work.

Three hours later and she had used the tin to wrench the rivets free of the ground. The pallet squealed as she heaved it across the floor, but nobody came to her door so she assumed that no one was listening in on her activities. Reaching the wall, she hopped onto the mattress and scrambled upwards until she could grab onto the sill of the window. She peered out and felt her heart sink at the sight before her.

A weak sun hovered far above, while a generous smattering of stars draped across the sky like a sheet poked through with holes. But between them there was no blackness. Instead there were pink supernova, and brown-white clouds of distant galaxies cluttering it up, lending the whole picture a mad, Van Gough-esque beauty and offering enough light to make up for the sluggishness of the sun itself.