Nourished by the food, educated by the story of Rapunzel and filled with a new zest for life from the medicine, Skye slowly made her way down to the main street in Coppelia. She grabbed onto all the little tree branches around her, making yet more little scratches in her palms. The straps of her rucksack balanced her nearly perfectly, the heavy books and empty bottles providing enough weight for Skye to feel safe leaning across further than she normally wound have. Once, and only once, did she make the mistake of looking down to Coppelia. The poor boy from last night was completely obscured by his grieving mother, who wrapped her arms tightly around her dead son. Her low wails echoed across the air to Skye. For an instant, only an instant, did Skye allow herself to think about what the woman was going through. Then she kept climbing down.
By the time Skye reached the bottom, the sun was high in the sky and the boy was getting moved towards the morticians house. Nobody stopped to look at her - they were all concerned about the mother and her dead child. Skye found she was glad for this anonymity, as she thought it right and proper that the villagers should grieve for the loss of another of their teenagers. She automatically reached up to pull off her cap, only to remember that she had lost it at the windmill in the woods. Instead, Skye respectfully bowed her head as they passed by.
After the teen had been taken away, Skye was aware more fully that there were no unearthly children about the place, for which she was glad - in her current state, Skye doubted whether she would be able to run away from those terrifying monsters. Suddenly, she heard a hiss coming from her left. Skye turned to look, not expecting to find anybody. And at first, there was nothing out of the ordinary to be seen. The sound had seemed to come from the direction of a giant burnt-up cactus. Skye paused for a second, weighing up the possibilities in front of her. If nothing was there, Skye was merely a fool, and had taken a few seconds out of her long journey. But if the hidden thing was malicious... Skye recalled with gravity the terms of her curse. No matter how hard she tried to scream, not only would there be no sound, but nobody to look and listen at the sounds of breaking bones and bursts of blood until they walked outside. Skye made her decision quickly.
Slowly, with bated breath, Skye made her way towards the cactus. There was seemingly nothing out of the ordinary, but Skye had learned long ago not to take things as they appeared. She pulled her backpack slightly higher up on her back, gripping the straps far more tightly than she would've liked to admit to. She was about a foot away from it, when Skye noticed a slight disturbance around the earth at the cactus's base. She knelt down, curious at this strange occurrence - none of the mothers, washed-out and heartbroken as they were, could possibly do this - they were too busy looking for their teenagers and any still-mortal pre-teens. The fathers, as far as Skye could see, were non-existent, and therefore couldn't be the source of this. The only logical explanation Skye could come up with were that there were still living teenagers.
Skye thought all of this through in the course of a few seconds before a leather-gloved hand clamped itself over her eyes and a strange mask of some sort was pinned over her mouth. As a sweet-tasting gas poured into her mouth, more leathery hands pinned Skye's arms to her side, until she eventually lost consciousness, kicking wildly at her invisible attackers.
***
When Skye eventually came to, she was still blinded - at least temporarily. For a minute or two, Skye also panicked that she was deaf, until her ears popped and the sound of whispered voices could be heard dimly. Stiff and sore yet again from whatever the people had done to her, Skye let out a groan of pain. She knew nobody could hear her, and that almost made it worse - her arm had a low, throbbing burning sensation, and she could smell rather than feel the blood on her face. Whether it was hers was another matter, and one that Skye didn't feel up to questioning.
Slowly, one sense at a time, Skye tried to pick up any information about her surroundings that didn't require too much noise - she couldn't forget that as soon as they looked at her, any noise she made would be heard at once. Skye was wrapped up tightly in a blanket, arms and legs tightly constricted from movement of any kind. As far as she could tell, she was still in her original outfit, with the exception of her eyes, which were covered snugly by a blindfold of some sort. Screwing up her face, Skye tried to silently kick her way out the blanket. Her foot connected with something, and with a crash that made Skye jump a good few centimetres down the bed, it shattered to the floor.
Silence. Real silence, not just Skye keeping her mouth shut tightly. Someone must have been looking at her the entire time she was asleep so she couldn't escape. The hushed whispers that had been the backdrop to Skye's escape attempt froze mid-sentence. Skye could feel her heart pounding away faster than it ever had before, and a horrible bottomless feeling settled in her stomach. She tried to keep her breathing to a minimum, when she heard slow, easy footsteps echoing towards her. Skye froze again, not even daring to breathe.
The footsteps stopped beside her bed, and Skye knew someone was looking down at her, inspecting her acutely. The blindfold was yanked off, and a bright light shone in Skye's eyes. It suddenly cut off, and in her short-term blindness metal hands grabbed her arms and lifted her high, balancing the small of Skye's back on its head. When Skye's vision came back to her three seconds later, she realised what had happened with a kind of slow-motion horror.
She had been captured by the robots
