I meet Alice’s gaze without flinching, and say “Only if you’re the one in the white hat. I don’t work with the bad guys.”
She smiles nastily. “You’ll find that isn’t as cut and dried in here as you might hope. But don’t worry, I’m a good person.” Despite that cynical expression, she feels sincere.
I nod, slowly. “Alright. We’ve got a deal.”
It’s only when she relaxes that I realise how tense she’s been. She slumps, and suddenly she looks exhausted sitting there. I slowly fight my way up to my feet, carefully not looking back at the window, and go and sit next to her.
I try to summon up a friendly smile, and hope it doesn’t just look ghastly. “So what happened that wasn’t your fault, Alice?”
She sighs. “I went wandering, with a friend. I think almost all of us explore from time to time. It gets so claustrophobic. Anyway, we took a bunch of food and drink from one of the canteens, and set out for a wander. I don’t really know what we expected. It’s not all rooms, right? Sometimes there are lounge areas, or rec rooms, or toilets. I suppose they could all be the same room found in different places. Who knows?”
I nod. Who knows, indeed.
“We came across a lounge room prepared for some sort of ceremony. All the tables and chairs were gone, and there were candles in a big circle around the room. There was a design on the floor in the middle, a complicated cross with extra bits, drawn in some sort of red dust or sand. It wasn’t until we’d gone in for a closer look that we realised we’d disturbed a bunch of dirt and salt that was laid all around the edge of the room. We left and got the hell out of there, but…”
“But?”
“But Eadida thought she heard some yelling as we hurried off. She told me a few times afterwards that she thought she’d seen people following her. Four days ago, I found her dead in her room. She looked like she’d died in her sleep, but there was a trickle of sand coming from her mouth, and when I asked Massinisa to have a look for me…” She trails off, shuddering, and I put a sympathetic arm around her shoulders. “He said her throat and lungs were full.”
I wince, and try not to imagine how hideous that would feel.
- "And you think they're after you, now?" (44%)
- "What did you do with the corpse?" (31%)
- "You'd think there'd be signs of a struggle. Did he get any idea how they did it?" (25%)
- "Oh, that's dreadful. You must be in a terrible state." (0%)
Voting Closes at: August 21, 2009 @ 1:00 pm
Loading ...today’s image: untitled by Behrooz Nobakht