They're Watching You

Chapter 2

Ten years later...

Brielle roamed the damp halls she had grown up in and knew better than she probably should.

The walls were built with 38 layers of stone bricks except from the walls in the library which were taller for unknown reasons but Brielle thought that it made the room look grander. She knew the precise number because whenever she was bored, which was often, or anxious, she would count them. She also had a habit of mindlessly traversing the same corridors over and over and over again until each crack was as familiar to her as the lines on her palm. Other times she would sit on the cold floor and rest her head against the cool stone.

This was an underground sanctuary set up by the organisation made up of the endowed who managed to escape. They prioritised comfortable and furnished rooms over decorating pathways that served no purpose other than providing a passage between rooms, and so the bricks were exposed. They were as exposed as she felt every time someone would pass her and give her a funny look whenever she was lingering in the corridors.

Even though she had been in the sanctuary since she was a newborn baby and everyone knew who she was and vice versa, they would still give her funny looks for... well, she didn't really know what for. She guessed that it was out of one of two things; they found it peculiar that she was staring at the walls, or they saw that she was the 'special' one yet was doing absolutely nothing at the moment to help the cause.

She was the unusual one. Yes, everyone here could be considered unusual but she was unusual even in a group of unusual people. It was as though Brielle was the bullseye on a dartboard the player was aiming for; the rings got smaller and smaller until there was only a small proportion of the board that the darts player was focusing on. She was unusual for one reason: she had pink eyes.

Everyone knew her, yet she was the loneliest person here.

It didn't help that they weren't allowed cell phones because they could easily be tracked, not that they would work down here anyway.

The voluntary search had just returned so the halls filled fairly quickly. At different times in the day as to not alert anyone to their routine, the group would gather and leave together then spread out and search for the endowed that the King had 'disposed' of.

No one knew what the wording entailed but the volunteers were clinging on to blind hope as many of them had lost family members and friends. It was their belief that they were being held captive somewhere but the consensus among pessimists was that they had been massacred.

It had been when Brielle was only a couple of years old that the searches had started but to no avail. Nothing has been found yet, not even a piece of clothing or a belonging to use as a trail or a starting point.

Brielle had been told many times how lucky she was to have been saved by that nurse in the hospital. Sarah, she had been told was her name, was a member of the organisation working undercover to covertly transport as many endowed babies to the sanctuary as possible.

Everyone was getting desperate. After so long, people were scared that things would stay the same, they would have to stay hidden and the same monotonous things would happen over and over again.

Brielle didn't really see the problem as everyone else did but didn't dare voice it. She found comfort in the routine underground; it consisted of getting up at eight, having breakfast, attending lessons, then it was lunch, more lessons, have dinner, indulge in one of her hobbies and go to bed. Rinse and repeat.

There was safety in monotony, in repetition, there were no surprises and she would never have to step out of her comfort zone. It also meant that she wouldn't have to make any big decisions for herself, which she also didn't mind.