The Necklace: The Trial Realm

Chapter Thirty One: This Is Worse

Forty two total missing.

The number was growing every couple of hours as other outposts across the realm were checked.

Ten confirmed dead.

Three whole teams unaccounted for.

The news the first night was impossible to swallow. After leaving the meeting and sneaking back to the medical wing we waited for hours only to get an announcement that the lockdown would continue into the night and likely most of the next day.

They were right.

It took almost an entire forty eight hours for the entire Hub to be searched, cleared, and then counted. We got little tidbits of info throughout the day and night by messengers, but most of it was old within another hour or so.

Things were getting tense, even just in our little medical wing of seclusion. I could sense it in everyone else. They were worried. Likely, out in the rest of The Hub, feelings were the same.

After the first forty hours of lockdown without new incident we were all released to our rooms. I hadn't wanted to leave Tawny and Mags, but they were in a safe spot and I needed to get out and find out what was happening. Yael and Bob took Raven to his new room, both of them jealous he didn't have to have a roommate since everyone else was already paired up and Noah and I went our way to our floor.

The whole place had been a ghost town. Not a soul was moving around like the usual bustle of Newbs and teams here and there. It was weird and I hadn't liked it at all. The only thing that made it worse was when meal times came. We had to eat in our rooms, food delivered to us like we were all prisoners. That night in the bathroom had been the first time I'd heard what I'd been beginning to fear.

"I want to go home." A girl whispered to her friend at the sinks. "I don't like this."

"Me either." Her friend agreed. "Did you hear someone is trying to kill us from the inside? That's not what I signed up for. I want to go back to my own realm too."

That had been the first time, but it wasn't the last.

Over the next two days I overheard more and more conversations of similar nature. No one wanted to stay around here when things were like this, and understandably, people were afraid for their own lives. I was worried too, and maybe if I had a nice home and family to go back to I'd be feeling the same, but instead I was afraid for this realm.

"It's not good." Noah says, scribbling in her notebook. That had become her catchphrase lately. "Every day it's getting worse and that's only what they're telling us. Imagine what all they aren't sharing with the open public."

I knew she was right, laying on my back on my bed just staring up at nothing. "This whole realm is in trouble." I agree.

"I know." She sighs, rolling onto her side on her bed to face me. "What they said about Faes and Shifters fighting for territory, and that about the vampires," she started. "I've been thinking, with all of us locked down like this, those situations are only going to get worse."

"Yeah, I understand why they called back the teams but at the same time it's bad because if those issues continue to escalate then they could grow to be problems too big for us to fix even if we were ever allowed to leave again."

"Which is why so many people are starting to talk..."

I bit into my bottom lip. "I've heard them too."

"Do you think the meeting tonight will do any good?" She asks.

We were finally going to try to get some kind of normalcy started back up around here. We couldn't all hide in our rooms forever anyway, so tonight would be the first half day back into schedules. Dinner, training, and then on to a meeting. They promised we'd cover all of the latest developments as well as discuss how to protect ourselves from being targeted.