"David! Come here right now! She's waking up!" I yell into the quiet house. I hear his footsteps pounding through the house, and then the door comes flying open.
"She is?" he asks me excitedly. Cinda answers that question for me by groaning and twitching her closed eyes. David holds one of her hands and I hold the other. After a few seconds of silence, her eyelids flutter open.
"Ooh... My head..." Cinda says and lets out a little groan.
"Cinda!" David cries out ecstatically. He wraps his arms around her little frame and envelopes her in a hug.
She smiles slightly. "hi, David," She whispers. He lets go of her and smiles.
"How are you feeling?" he asks.
"Well, my head feels like it's being pounded in with a sledgehammer, and I'm pretty sore, but other than that I think I'm okay."
Cinda is definitely one tough girl, mentally and physically. Most other people wouldn't make it out of that prison, and if they did, they would be badly injured. I marvel at how well she has recovered.
The next thing I know is that I'm hugging her. She's hugging me too, I think. "Oh, Cinda. I'm glad you're okay," I whisper into her ear.
"I'm glad that you made it out alive. When you escaped that night, I thought that they would catch you and kill you. I thought you and David were dead for the longest time. And... I wanted to live because of that. I wanted to make sure that they paid the price for killing my friends. I wanted to live for you."
My eyes fill with tears. I look at David, and I can see that he's silently crying, too. Part of me is glad that I was the reason she fought to live, but part of me is filled with overwhelming guilt for leaving her alone the night I escaped.
I regain enough composure to talk. "Well, we're alive. You're alive. But hundreds of other people aren't because of them. Hundreds more will die if they aren't stopped. We have to stop them."
"How? In case you haven't noticed, there's three of us, and hundreds- maybe thousands- of them. There's no way we can fight a war!" David says, shaking his head.
"He's right," Cinda agrees. "we would need an army."
"Then we'll build one. The prisoners had to have had some relatives before they were taken. We'll find people like that," I tell them, refusing to give up.
"no one is going to listen to us! And besides, even if we could build an army, who would we tell them they're fighting? We don't have a name for our enemy," David replies. He sounds tired.
I smile. It's not a kind smile. It is cruel, sly, and small. "Oh, yes we do. They're rubies."
YOU ARE READING
Ruby
Teen Fictionin a futuristic world, sixteen-year-old Veronica has been abducted, had her memory of her old life taken from her, and she's been tortured, all by an evil group with rubies for pupils. when she manages to escape, she must learn who she is and what s...
