Kingfisher

Homesixness is weakness

Ida awoke to soft amber light, and the warmth of a feather bed, its soft silken sheets delightfully smooth under heavy blankets. Her memory of the night before was hazy, but she knew that she had been captured by seditionists whilst speaking to Ives Blackwood. There was no need to repress her feelings in response to this realisation; none presented themselves. Ida wasn't sure why. Her best guess was that even her unconscious knew how important it was to avoid Errors here. She sat up, blinking her eyes to clear the sleep from her head, and tried to remember more. The wall was wood-panelled and gleamed with the dark mystery of polished mahogany. A wide window was adjacent to the door and had deep blue curtains drawn across it. The ceiling was grey, prison-esque concrete, in strange and unsettling contrast to the luxurious comfort of the bed, walls and floor.

Ida heard a gentle hiss of air as a door opened mechanically, granting another person access to her room. The two women were similar ages, but everything else that could be learnt about them from looking was in stark contrast. Ida had never seen clothes like her captor's and did not know the correct words for them. Something a farmer would wear, only, colourful? The lower half of an ancient gown, or possible some kind of flared, one-legged trousers? Ida's eyes drifted to the end of her bed, where she saw that similar clothes had been left. The clothes that had been left were in somewhat less extreme colours, closer to what Ida was comfortable with than what her captor was wearing.

Ida did not know the word 'kindness' and she was incapable of thinking about violent seditionists in terms of ideas like being considerate, and so the fact that the clothes left out were in slightly muted colours could do no more than bother her slightly as she wondered what the reasoning was.

She realised she had no idea what to ask. 'Where am I?' was the most obvious question, but she had no reason to believe that she would get a helpful answer, and anyway, it was probably wiser to pretend that she already had a sense of where she was. 'Who are you?' was subject to analogous conditions. 'What must I do to be set free?' was a possibility, but Ida knew that negotiations of that nature would proceed more smoothly if she already knew something of these irrational people and the ways in which they thought and communicated. Thus she lay there in silence, looking up at the strange woman and wondering what to say.

"You're skinnier than I expected," said Ida, finally.

"What?"

Ida spoke calmly, with none of her usual coldness. Coldness didn't feel appropriate, though she wasn't sure why. "I would expect someone who has devoted a significant portion of her life to rebellion against self-control and logic to be overweight," she said.

The unidentified seditionist closed her eyes, most likely in frustration, and after she had opened them again, sighed deeply. "Oh, of course you would," she said. "I forget that you lot all think food is evil. Fuck, I don't even know how to begin explaining to you why that's bullshit."

"Food is not evil, it is fuel, but thinking about food is dangerous because-" Ida stopped short as the woman turned around and left the room.

She lay back, still in a drug-induced stupor. The door had not been locked, she realised, as her captor had not done anything to release it before leaving the room. I can only assume that they expect me to get dressed and join them in the next room, Ida thought. This will, inevitably, be an exceptionally uncomfortable experience. She realised the choice between wearing the same clothes as yesterday, which had not been ironed or washed, or wearing the eccentric, irrational garments the seditionists had provided. Dressing quickly in the same black clothes she had been wearing the night before, ignoring those at the foot of the bed, Ida stepped out of the room to find herself on a short hallway, ending in a large, old-fashioned door. It took her a moment to realise it was a door at all; had it not been for its golden handle, the strange wooden panel would have seemed to have been part of the wall.