Dorothy

Chapter 5

Dorothy started to scream. She did all that she could to stop it, but she was seriously scared now. The hold on her mind had stopped, and Auden was dragging her contorting body along an abandoned road. "Be quiet!" he hissed to her. Slowly, she calmed down to simply hyperventilating.

"You have to be quiet," Rosie said. "Otherwise they'll find us." Dorothy slowed her breathing. She glanced up at Auden at her heart sank. He was stumbling along, arms straining under her weight. Every muscle in his body was shaking with strain; legs, arms. His body was covered in sweat. He looked like he was going to collapse.

He yanked her into an out-of-the-way alley, and dropped to the pavement next to her, breathing hard. "Th-Thank you," Dorothy managed.

"No problem," he gasped.

"OH! You guys are so cute!" Rosie exclaimed. They both turned to stare at her. "I mean, you're just like the net dramas. SO CUTE!"

"Rosie," Dorothy began, "we're not, you know..."

"But you're such a cute couple. I mean, did you see how he saved you in there. You were like, 'ah!' and he was like 'oh' and," she was about to go on but Auden cut her off. Dorothy was glad; she wasn't sure that she liked how helpless she sounded in Rosie's retelling.

"I did what any friend would do. "

Dorothy and Rosie both swiveled their heads in surprise. "What?" Dorothy asked.

"I said I did what any friend would do. You two are obviously alone. I know what that's like. Everyone needs someone to be there for them. Trust me. I know."

A sort of awkward silence filled the air around the trio. "Shouldn't we get moving?" Dorothy said at last.

"I can't," Auden said. "I don't think I'll be able to for awhile."

"No offense, but we kinda need to. Like, some crazy dude is going to come and kill us, kind of need to," Dorothy's hand went to her cheek as she said it, where she could feel a nasty bruise forming.

"Then you two go. But I can't."

"We won't leave you, will we Dorothy?" Rosie chimed in. Dorothy could tell it wasn't really a question. Rosie was staying with Auden, and she wasn't walking around Luna alone.

"Alright."

They laid there awhile, until Auden filled the silence. "Tell me how you came here. Where you're from. What the universe looks like nowadays."

Dorothy was a little confused at his question, but she answered him. She talked and talked about how she had gotten on the podship, why she had gone, the crash, everything. When she was done talking they were laying on the now cool pavement looking up at stars. More stars than she had ever seen. And still they had seen no one.

"So tell us about yourself Auden. Why were you in that place? What is that place? Why couldn't the thaumaturge control you?"

Auden sighed and began his story. "I'm a shell. That's why the thaumaturge couldn't control me. That's why I was in there. They think we're dangerous. You just saw the reason. Two of our recent monarchs were killed by a shell, though probably not so recent now."

"Excuse me, but what is a shell?" Dorothy asked.

"An ungifted Lunar. A Lunar born without the gift and without the ability to be controlled. After the murder of our monarchs, Channary instituted the shell infanticide. Except that they don't really kill the children that they take. No, the fate they get is much worse. Taken from their parents as infants, raised in a suspended animation tank, raised in a group home, and when they become too old, their put back in the tanks. Their only purpose is blood. They take our blood for something. From teenager on you sit in that tank, unconscious, worse than dead. All the while life is slowly let from you.

"They take too much you see. We learned it somehow in the group caves. The demand for the blood is growing, and fewer shells are being born. So they take more blood. Slowly dying. That's why I'm too weak to walk," Auden sounded ashamed. "My muscles have deteriorated over years of being unused. I doubt I'll even live long without the support of the tank. I don't have enough blood," by the time he finished, Auden wasn't talking to them anymore. More to himself and the stars. A bitter conversation it was to listen to. And Dorothy got a keen sense that she was intruding on a deeply personal conversation.

"All those years without a friend," was all she could say. He was silent. They all new the answer. "Well, you have us now. And you're not going to die. But just now, I'm exhausted, and we need to sleep. Good night Auden. Good night Rosie."

It took no more prompting than that for Auden to close his eyes and lay his hands beneath his head.