Embers & Ice

Chapter Five

The only downside to being woken from a cold slumber with a shot of B-12 was that, after the energy started to fade, things came back to Hunter worse than they were before. Fortunately she was so distracted by her surroundings that the aching grip of fear and loss was momentarily forgotten.

The inside of her prison was exactly how she expected it to be: still the same milky-gray walls, blinking fluorescent lights and claustrophobic feel, as if she were buried hundreds of feet below the earth.

The guards marched her down a corridor lined with cells just like her own – all empty with their blue blankets folded perfectly at the end of the mattress – and took a cement flight of stairs down to the floor beneath. There, they faced another corridor. The stairs took them down again and Hunter wondered how she’d ever find her way back to her cell without feeling as if she were in some sort of dream.

At the bottom of the stairs were two doors. The guard with the tattoo who led the way opened the right and stepped back to let Hunter inside. She had only a moment to catch her heart that leapt into her throat at the sounds of mumbled voices in an echoed room before she was shoved inside.

Dizziness overcame her for a moment as the giant space almost swallowed her whole. She blinked in the bright lights, the buzzing of voices and the clatter of plates on steel tables.

She was in a room bigger than the gymnasium at her old school. Like everything else, it was blindingly white. Tables spaced throughout the room were mostly occupied. On the left was a cafeteria where people were lining up to collect breakfast on little plastic trays. They, too, wore white jumpsuits.

Hunter peered around and caught some of them staring. They were all of different ages and race, some angry and some curious. What they had in common, however, was a look of sickness and defeat. It made Hunter want to retch.

The two guards that escorted her stalked off after the tattooed guard clicked his fingers and shoved her towards the cafeteria line. Hunter noticed other guards in the same tight suits stationed like palace soldiers around the room, their feet parted and their hands firmly clasped together.

“I’m not hungry,” Hunter said to the tattooed man. She lined up behind a girl who could be no older than eight or nine with ratted blond hair.

The guard chuckled. “You’ll need it. There’ll be no more of those energy shots for you, so how else will you get out of bed in the morning?”

“I won’t,” she hissed through her teeth. They were clenched tighter than her fists at her side.

“You will,” he said back just as harshly and left her in the line.

Hunter stared at the crowded room and wished she could shut her eyes and make it go away. Suddenly, her cell didn’t seem so bad anymore compared to the looks she was getting from almost every other child in the room. She should be used to it after years of torment from her peers at school. But this time was different. She was the new girl now. She had no powers and no charisma. She probably looked like she’d been left out to dry in the desert. Not to mention her detached emotional stability.

She couldn’t hide. She could only keep her head down and get it over with.

The line moved forward and Hunter gripped the thin, silver bracelet attached to her wrist, trying desperately to burn it off. Something about the bracelet stopped her powers from escaping. Blue ice dug into her skin and faded into her blood. The most frustrating thing was that the fire raged inside her, but could not get out. It was worse than no fire at all.

Hunter stared ahead as the line moved silently. Her stomach rolled over at the sight of what bubbled in the hot trays. This was certainly not a luxury resort. This was a prison, where the food looked like the worms that birds cough up to feed their young.