Shilan

Seven

If I excelled at anything, it apparently wasn't concealment.

I was studied by my inmates as if all my internal thoughts had been openly scrawled upon my skin. My distraught, my ever-rising anxiety, had been sensed by many of them before I'd even registered it entirely myself--Adam occasionally treading over and grasping my hands in his, stilling their trembling I hadn't taken notice of.

In this ill-lit basement, however, what I'd recently discovered I had a rather good hand in was misleading others.

Everyone here thought I couldn't move from my spot in the far corner of the room, couldn't look a single one of them in the eye, was because I was terror-stricken at our coming fate. At our finalised death.

But that wasn't what scared me. Not anymore, that is.

What had my blood chilled beneath my skin was the thought of the four murders that might just take place in this basement.

I truly couldn't say what had lead me to this realisation, but I knew I'd have to be the one to carry them out. These murders. I was the only one who could see these four . . . figments of my imagination.

Was I not?

It made sense to try to discover who among my inmates were real now of all times, for this place would end up with a few corpses anyway. And besides, it was not real people I'd be "killing", exactly. They were people I'd formed in my head. They'd merely be destroyed.

"Shilan," I heard someone address. Lifting my head off the crook of my arm with reluctance, I found Adam's form looming over me. He crouched down, assessing eyes boring into my heavy-lidded ones. "We found water."

Water. I blinked, my gaze instantly shifting to Lena and Russ huddled before a cardboard box in front of us. It'd been close to two days since we'd consumed anything. "Really?" I rasped.

"Yeah, a lot of it, too." He raised the plastic bottle in hand, inspecting the faded label. "It's probably a year old, but it's water nonetheless."

The cap on the dusty bottle had been unscrewed, but it was easily deducible that not a sip had been taken from it. Adam was offering me this water before he'd even drunk any of it himself.

I nodded to him and the bottle, silently asking him to have it first. But he shook his head.

"It's alright, I'll have it after you." He helped me sit up, a hand at my waist, and gently added, "You need it more than any of us at the moment."

I thanked him once I'd straightened on the floor, eagerly bringing the bottle to my flaking lips. The water was so warm and soothing as it travelled down my parchment-dry throat that I almost moaned, feeling my thirst slowly dispel.

Adam watched me carefully, his expression unreadable. A hand resting on my knee, he released a breath, long and audible. "I'm going to remind you again, 'lan, you aren't going to die here. None of us will." He palmed my other knee, grasping it lightly. "We're getting out of this building. I promise. "

Gazing into his bloodshot yet strikingly hopeful eyes, I truly wished I could believe him. But just how would he be able to keep his word. This basement had not a single window; Adam had mistaken a frame of fogged glass for one before Pauline had fired up the electroshock machine the last time he was here.

The attendants had stopped trying to break their way into this place only several hours after we'd locked ourselves in. Perhaps they'd let us be only because they were sure this place was inescapable, and that we'd all starve to death if we decided to stay and would eventually give in.