Chapter 8;-The Year of Waiting (continued)
650 Words
(Leyla’s POV)
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Some nights, I imagined that if I stopped breathing long enough, the world might forget I existed.
Not die.
Just… fade.
Slip between the seconds where no one was watching.
But the lights never went out, and the guards never forgot us.
So I kept breathing.
I learned the sounds of the facility the way people learn seasons.
The chipping of birds meant it was “morning.”
The shift change footsteps meant “evening.”
The screams those meant someone’s birthday had arrived.
We didn’t comfort each other anymore.
Comfort required energy.
And energy was dangerous to spend on people who might vanish by sunrise.
Warda still tried.
She always tried.
One night she whispered, “If we get out, I’ll never complain again. I’ll wash dishes, clean floors, anything.”
I smiled faintly. “You already complain about everything.”
She huffed. “That’s because I’m alive. I plan to stay that way.”
Her hand found mine in the dark.
We held on like anchors in a sea that had no shore.
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Sometimes they brought new girls.
Fresh faces.
Eyes still bright with denial.
They always asked the same questions:
“Where are we?”
“When do we leave?”
“Who are those people?”
We stopped answering.
Not because we were cruel.
Because every answer felt like carving truth into skin.
One girl, barely fourteen, asked me softly,
“Will I die here?”
I wanted to say no.
Instead, I said, “Not today.”
She nodded, relieved.
I felt like I had just betrayed her.
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There were moments when I felt something inside me stir.
Not hope.
Not courage.
Something deeper.
Quieter.
Like a presence.
Like I was being watched by something that wasn’t in the room.
Sometimes when a ritual happened, when a girl screamed and the symbols glowed, I felt heat crawl under my skin.
Not pain.
Recognition.
It terrified me more than anything else.
Because if something inside me was responding…
Then I wasn’t invisible.
I wasn’t safe.
I started pressing my palms against my chest at night, whispering to myself:
Stay small.
Stay quiet.
Stay wrong.
I didn’t want to be chosen.
I didn’t want to be found.
I wanted to disappear into the system until they forgot I existed.
But systems don’t forget.
They sort.
They test.
They harvest.
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Warda noticed me changing.
“You don’t cry anymore,” she said one night.
“I ran out,” I answered.
She watched me for a long time.
“You’re not empty,” she said. “You’re… holding something in.”
I looked away.
Because I didn’t want to tell her the truth.
That sometimes I felt like I was standing on the edge of something vast.
Like my body was a door I didn’t know how to open.
And I was terrified of what might walk through.
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The day a guard finally looked at me differently, I knew.
Not curiosity.
Evaluation.
His eyes lingered on me just a second too long.
He wrote something on his notebook.
I felt cold all over.
That night I whispered to Warda, “They saw me.”
She went still.
“Really saw you?”
I nodded.
For the first time since we were taken, she started crying silently.
I didn’t.
I just stared at the ceiling and thought:
So this is how it ends.
Not with rescue.
Not with escape.
But with being noticed.
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I began to count again.
Not heartbeats.
Not days.
But the space between footsteps.
Between checks.
Between rituals.
Waiting for the moment they would say my name.
Or my number.
Or whatever label I had become.
And in that waiting, something strange happened.
I stopped feeling afraid of death.
I started feeling afraid of surviving.
Because if I survived…
It meant I was the reason everyone else hadn’t.
- Writer
