Queen Of The Great Underworld

11

Anabeln tenets—that with love, anything could be endured—and though the Luminary Council had betrayed me, my beliefs had deep roots. I made my voice soft. “Does that mean you’re going to help me?”

“No. It just means I hate you less than I hated the previous occupant of that cell. I was so glad when he died.”

Maybe I didn’t want to know this either, but . . . “What happened?”

“One day, his sores all burst open and he melted. It was one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in a long time.”

I eyed the cell warily. I’d touched the floor and now I desperately wanted to remove my hands.

“They cleaned after he died. Sort of.” She waved away my concern, like it was dumb to worry about all the gross things that might be left over. “My point is that you never know who your neighbors will be. You’re at least pretty.”

I was visually more appealing than the man before me. Well, I supposed that was my face working in my favor again. Mother would be proud.

Gerel went back to her exercises. This time, though, she stood with her legs apart and slowly bent at the knees, then straightened.

I copied her. I wasn’t as pathetic as she believed. I wasn’t. But she didn’t know I had the best self-defense trainer on Anabel. Or that I hunted with a Drakontos raptus. Or . . . Well. That was probably it.

Gerel didn’t say anything else to me, just glanced up every so often to see if I was still copying her. I couldn’t tell if she approved or not. Probably not. Even so, it felt good to move around again, to force my muscles to flex and bend. If I wanted to survive, I needed to be strong.

I was a Drakontos mimikus. I was not like the others here, but I could blend in long enough for my family to secure my release.

After two hundred squats, seven stretches, and twenty push-ups, my face felt flushed and my muscles trembled. Gerel wasn’t tired, though. She went back to lifting herself on the edge of the door. With her fingertips.

Well, of course she could do that. She was a warrior and she was on Kyhan. She’d just told me that she’d been training harder than this her entire life. Top of her class, at least until she’d done something no one else liked.

But in the back of my head, I could hear Mother’s disappointed sigh. Not smart enough. Not strong enough. “Thank Anabel you’re beautiful.”

I touched the blemish on my chin and cringed.

Finally, it was Gerel’s turn for the bath. And mine. But Yarrow approached my cell and didn’t open it.

He tilted his head. “You just got here. What makes you think you earned a bath?”

Gerel caught my eye as she stepped out of her cell, but I couldn’t decipher her look.

“As for this”—Yarrow hefted a sack of food—“you haven’t earned it, either.”

“But—” I pressed my mouth into a line. Everyone else got theirs—I assumed—so why shouldn’t I get mine? And a bath? I’d cleaned my cell, same as the other prisoners.

Yarrow tossed the sack through the open door of Gerel’s cell; it landed on her bed. “Get some rest, Fancy. You have a big day tomorrow.”

My stomach growled and ached, and I thought bitterly of the rotten apple and stale bread I’d tossed down the sewage hole. Maybe I should have eaten it after all. I pressed my palms to my belly and curled over myself, but it didn’t help. Maybe a distraction.

“Aaru?” I peered under my bed, toward the hole. “Are you there?”

Two taps answered. “No.”

I sat on my bed, blanket pulled around my shoulders, and counted the cracks in the walls (three hundred and twelve) until Gerel returned. Then I watched her eat my food (three chews per bite, no matter what she ate, like she was afraid it might be taken from her).

She looked over. “Stop watching me. It’s weird.”

I dropped my gaze to my knees. She knew I hadn’t been allowed to bathe, but she couldn’t know I’d been denied dinner, too. For the moment, that made me both the hungriest and the dirtiest person in the cellblock.

Later, when the lights went out and the screaming started, I began to understand. This was day and night in the Pit. Faint light, and no light. No light meant whoever was so afraid of the dark screamed until he fell asleep.

This wasn’t fair. I was being punished for trying to do the right thing. I should have been rewarded.

But life didn’t always work like that.

I SPENT THE night under the bed. It seemed safer than on top.

I tried to sleep the normal way. When the screaming stopped, I peeled myself off the floor and felt through the black space until my fingers scraped the edge of the bed. But the moment I stood, this awful sensation of being lost—or somewhere else—came over me. Like if I took one wrong step, I’d fall off the edge of a mountain, or into another world.

By the time I made it into bed, my pillow and blanket in their proper places, I was trembling with the unknown. Like this thin wooden cot was a raft and I was drifting in the middle of the sea, no land in sight. All I could feel was the dark and the pressure and the lurking terror of something unnameable, like a beast lived in the blackness and if I moved wrongly, it would devour me.

So in a fit of bravery, I jumped off the bed and scrambled back under, protected on five sides. But it wasn’t enough.