“MIRA.”
I gasped awake.
For a moment, I imagined I was at home, and the thirteen days since confronting the Luminary Council were a dream. But then the voice came again—“Mira”—and my mind finally registered that this was a stranger’s voice. The way it emphasized the syllables of my name was off. Meer-AH instead of MEER-ah.
The voice drew me into wakefulness, and at once, I remembered where I was.
In the Pit.
I startled and jumped, banging my head on the bottom of the bed. But before I scrambled out of the way, I remembered the darkness and the screaming. The latter had stopped, but the former was just as oppressive as before. I smothered a whimper and pressed myself deeper under the bed.
“Mira.” Wood scraped the floor near my head.
I held my breath. There was someone under the bed with me.
Fear sparked deep in my stomach. A stranger so close. A dark and unfamiliar place. The complete lack of protection.
But that spark died as I registered three facts.
1. The space under my bed was too narrow for anyone to have joined me.
2. The only heat came from the floor, not a body next to mine.
3. If that whisper had awakened me, the screech of my cell door sliding open surely would have jolted me conscious.
No one else was under the bed.
“Where are you?” Even my whisper trembled.
“Wall.”
In the wall? No, on the other side.
“Finish and give back.” The voice was soft. So soft it almost seemed like it could have come from my own thoughts, but my thoughts were never that enunciated. That careful.
A slight pressure change near my face alerted me to the object placed there. “What’s this?” I let my fingers crawl over the floor, cautious. I didn’t want to knock it over by moving too swiftly.
“Cup.” The voice was masculine, coming from close by. Coming from . . .
My fingers closed around the wooden cup. The weight indicated it was full, but I didn’t drink from it yet. Instead, I marked its place in my mind, and walked my fingers toward the wall.
There was a hole in the crumbling stone.
It was the size of my hand, fingers splayed out. Just big enough to pass a small cup through. I could have reached into the adjoining cell, but a faint current of air brushed my knuckles as I mapped the shape of the opening. His breath. He was close.
I pulled away, back to the cup. “What’s in it?”
“Water.”
Such an unexpected kindness. Maybe he was from Damina.
I scooted out from under the bed, into the vast darkness of my cell. The blanket slipped off my head and crumpled to the floor as I tipped the cup toward my lips—and suddenly thought better of it. He could have been a murderer. He could have poisoned someone to end up in the Pit.
But the cup held only water, sharp with minerals, but water nonetheless. It felt wonderful on my aching, sob-racked throat. Part of me wanted to splash it on my face and rinse the grime off my skin, but there wasn’t enough water to feel clean. And I was so, so thirsty.
The cup was empty too soon, and only as I crawled under the bed again did I realize I should have saved some for my neighbor. “Sorry,” I whispered as I pressed the cup into the hole. “I drank it all.”
He tapped on the floor in a quick pattern, and though a tap was just a tap, some gave the impression of length. Maybe he’d dragged his finger. One long, one short. A pause. One short, two long, one short. Then, like an afterthought, he said, “No problem.”
“I should have saved some for you.”
“Ceiling drips.” He drew the cup toward him, and I tried not to think too hard about having just drunk ceiling water. That couldn’t be sanitary. “Better?” he asked.
“Yes. Thank you.” My neighbor wasn’t much of a talker. “I don’t think I’ve ever been that thirsty in my life. I keep fantasizing about a bath, too. Even if I could just wash my face, I’d feel so much better.”
Three quick taps sounded through the little hole. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. You’re not the reason I ended up here.”
Two taps: long, short. “No.”
No, it wasn’t his fault, or no, he was disagreeing with me and he thought it was his fault? Daminan etiquette forced me to keep going—put him at ease by assuring him of his innocence.
“It was definitely my fault.” A sigh shuddered out of me. “I just wanted to help.”
On the other side of the wall, there was no sound but the faint rustle of fabric.
“I’m worried about my friends. Ilina and Hristo—” I shut my runaway mouth. Mother said one of my biggest flaws was that I didn’t think about all the things people could do with information before I let it spout out of me.
“Well, never mind. It isn’t particularly important.” Yes, it was. It was possibly the most important thing I’d ever come across in my life. It had consumed me so much that when Ilina’s mother asked me to leave Ilina out of my story, I hadn’t considered what that might mean.
That turned out to be the only blessing in the whole mess. By the time I’d realized the Luminary Council wouldn’t help, I’d known better than to say anything about my friends. If the council punished me for discovering their secrets, Ilina and Hristo would be in even worse trouble. Maybe killed.
I resisted the urge to touch the twists in my hair, no matter how close it made me feel to Ilina; too much fussing would ruin her work. “I trusted the wrong people.”
He didn’t respond, or acknowledge the invitation to tell me what he’d done.
Like I hadn’t said anything at all.
Suddenly, I wondered if he wasn’t real. Maybe he—and the drink of water—was just a sliver of my imagination and soon I wouldn’t care that I was in prison because I’d start to hallucinate my way out. What if—
No. That wasn’t what was happening. My neighbor was just very, very quiet.
Determined not to let the panic overtake me again, I reached into the darkness to pull my blanket under the bed with me.
“Do you have anything to cut with?” I hoped he was real, this person on the other side of the wall. Otherwise, everyone down the cellblock would hear me talking to myself.
“No.” Two taps: one long, and one short.
Oh, right. Of course he didn’t. Assuming he was real, he was a prisoner. Like me. No weapons. “It’s just, I always wrap my hair at night. I thought I could cut off a piece of my dress.”
Even as the words came out, I realized he didn’t care. Everyone here had it just as bad as me, and my hair was definitely not a concern. Neither was my name or face or status. We were all trying to survive.
But everything was out of my control, and if I could just do something normal, I might feel human again.
“Sorry,” he said. Another three fast taps. There was definitely a pattern, but I couldn’t figure it out.
“How long will it stay dark like this?”
No reply.
“How do you think they got the noorestones to go out? I’ve never heard of that happening before.” At home, we pulled curtains over wall-mounted noorestones and had thick cloths to place over the others. Well, the servants did it. Mother wouldn’t allow Zara or me to perform what she described as a “menial task” except in the privacy of our own bedrooms when we were preparing for sleep.
These noorestones hadn’t been covered, though. No one had come by; the light had just gone out.
What an alarming thought.
“Do you think they have some kind of device?” I asked. “Or special noorestones? I heard there are scholars who think—”
I bit off my words. I didn’t want to start a discussion about noorestones.
Most people liked talking about themselves. They loved to brag, especially if they could make it sound like they weren’t bragging. I had tons of practice encouraging these kinds of conversations. It kept people from noticing my shortcomings.
I started with something basic. “What’s your name?”
Silence.
“Are you a real person?” Did those words really come out of my mouth? “I—Sorry. I just meant I didn’t see you when I walked through.” Which probably gave credit to the imaginary-person theory.
I sounded like a dolt, but if I was talking, I wasn’t panicking.
“Real.” There, that sounded like faint annoyance. “Hidden.”
He was real, but he’d been hiding when I’d walked by his cell? That sounded like something a hallucination would say. “You’re awfully quiet.” Which meant he probably wasn’t from Damina.
He grunted.
At least he agreed.
Well, I’d have to take his word that he was real. I was still thirsty, but I did feel like I’d had a drink of water. And I’d felt his breath on my knuckles when I’d inspected the hole in the wall. Those two things would have to be proof enough.
“What did you do to get here?” Ilina might have laughed at this one-sided conversation, but Mother would have died of mortification.
He sighed.
That was probably rude to ask. I was doing such a wonderful job of making a fool of myself.
This was getting uncomfortable, like a pressure building in the hollow of darkness between us. And yet, the questions kept falling out of my mouth. “How long have you been here? When do they feed us? Do we really just sit here for the rest of our lives and wait to die?”
That was a terrible thing to ask, probably, but I needed the distraction. From the panic. From the fear.
My heart thudded. Five times. Ten times. Twenty. I shifted around, trying to ease the tightness in my chest. Nothing helped. And I hated that he wasn’t talking to me. The Book of Love told us to seek friends everywhere we went. It said we should form bonds, and that those bonds would strengthen us in our time of need.
I didn’t want to be this stranger’s friend, exactly, but I did want to learn about my neighbors. I wanted to be a Drakontos mimikus.
“What’s your name?” I asked, one more time.
A loud smack hit the wall. I jumped and scrambled to all fours as the pounding shifted to the floor on his side. Longs. Shorts. But even as my shock subsided and I counted the beats, I couldn’t make sense of the pattern.
I faced the hole in the wall, gripping the crumbling stone between us. “What does that mean?” A harsh note of fury edged the question. It was too much. I knew. I wanted to yank back the tone and smother it, but it was too late.
The words seemed to rip from him, louder than I’d expected. “Don’t know. About dark. About food. About doing anything.” He released a wordless cry, then dropped his voice and hissed, “You talk too much. Please stop.”
I jerked back from the hole between our cells. “Sorry.” Shock hit first, followed by shame. Mother always said I didn’t talk enough. I wasn’t charming enough. I wasn’t Daminan enough.
“It’s lucky you’re so pretty,” she always said. Not that my beauty helped me here. My neighbor couldn’t see me. And didn’t that just prove that my face was all I had? “It’s almost enough to make up for your interest in that dragon.”
I missed LaLa, too. My golden dragon flower. I couldn’t shake Ilina’s words to me—that LaLa and Crystal were gone. Had they flown away? Had they been taken? If Ilina had known, she’d have said.
The uncertainty pierced me. I loved that dragon. As much as I loved any human. And Mother had never understood.
At home, I was too quiet. Too strange. My only friends were a Drakontos raptus, an apprentice dragon trainer, and my personal guard.
Now, in the Pit, I was too loud. Too chatty. Mother might have been proud, except for the prison part. And the panic attack. And all the near-attacks since then. And the rude questions I’d asked my neighbor.
He was probably most definitely real, and now I’d alienated him.
I shouldn’t have told the truth.
Haltingly, I crawled out from under the bed and gathered my blanket around my shoulders. With my back against the edge of my bed and my knees pulled up, I lowered my face and prayed. Could Darina and Damyan even hear me from another island, though? I had to believe they could.
“Please,” I whispered to them. “Please help me get out of here. Please help Ilina and Hristo. Please return LaLa and Crystal. Cela, cela.”
When I prayed at home, sometimes I could feel warmth coming up from the ground. A radiating peace. A sense of love. But I wasn’t on Damina. The Isle of Lovers was so far away.
Here, there was only the permeating sense of abandonment. Darkness. And the only person who’d made an attempt to be nice to me—well, he hated everything about me. Everyone doted on me at home. They said how pretty I was. How nice I looked in a new dress.
But this boy couldn’t see me, only hear my ridiculous questions. I couldn’t believe I’d asked if he was real.
My chest ached with pressure, but I wouldn’t cry. Not again. I just let the hurt flake and float off me, shedding it with every exhale.
One.
Two.
Three.
Muffled noise signaled movement in the next cell. Wood scraped the floor, like he was putting the cup back in place. Then his voice came from the hole under my bed.
“My name is Aaru. From Idris. I wanted freedom.”