Page 70 of Joy Guardian
I flinched, pushing myself into a sitting position.
“Like I’ve been buried alive in hot sand,” I croaked.
“Which likely isn’t far from the truth, judging by the condition they brought you in last night.” The young woman sighed, placing the soup bowl onto my lap. “There are still some pieces of…um,somethingleft in here. Meat and a root vegetable, I think? You should eat them, too, to help you regain your strength.”
I peered at the gray sludge left on the bottom of the bowl and a few pale pieces in it.
“It doesn’t look like much,” the woman admitted. “But it doesn’t taste too bad, aside from the lack of any salt or spices of course. Oh, and they don’t have any spoons or forks. From what I’ve seen, they only eat solid food. They cut it with a knife or a sword, then eat it by using their hands.”
Who were “they?” I had no idea. But the pieces on the bottom of the bowl smelled appetizing, despite their slimy appearance. I fished them out with my fingers and ate them all.
The meager amount of food didn’t satisfy me at all. It actually made me only more aware of how ravenously hungry I was.Kurai’s magic used to make the hunger much more manageable while we were connected…
The memory of him slammed into me, and the harrowing sensation of loss gutted me. I climbed to my knees, bending over, ready to retch.
“Ciana? What’s going on? Are you sick?” The kind woman caught my braids, holding them back, and gazed in my face with concern.
I swallowed, managing to keep the contents of my stomach in.
“Where am I?” I kept still, folded into myself and afraid to move.
“I…I’m not sure what exactly this place is,” the woman replied. “We’re in the desert somewhere. They keep bringing people in, then taking them elsewhere. They’ve given us food and water. I haven’t seen them hurting anyone, but they don’t let anyone out of the cages unsupervised.”
The cages?
I looked up. From my bent-over position, I saw the thick wooden sticks that served as the bars of the cage we were in. There was barely enough space for the other woman and me to sit or possibly to lay down on our sides with our legs bent, but not enough to stand up or stretch out. A sheet of metal served as the floor of the cage, with an old blanket tossed over it.
There were more cages around us. Some had people in them. Others seemed empty. Boards, rags, and sheets of metal had been thrown over the cages, creating some sort of a shelter with all of us inside. Outside of the shelter, a storm raged. Wind howled between the boards, tossing sand against the metal with a scraping sound.
“Gosh, I did not expect to see you here,” the woman gushed. “Though we figured out eventually that the shadows took you, just like they did us. You’re Ciana, aren’t you? Dawn’s cousin?”
“Do I know you?” I snapped my attention to her.
She seemed to be about my age, with round cheeks, wide gray eyes, and dark wavy hair pulled into a messy ponytail. She worriedabout my state, but she didn’t look much better herself. Her face was sunburned and smeared with dirt. Her lips were cracked too. And every time she pulled her gray fuzzy cardigan tighter around her shoulders, small clouds of dust emerged from it with sand raining down onto the blanket that covered the floor of our cage.
I wondered if we met me in thesaraiin Kalmena. Though, I certainly didn’t remember her.
“Oh…” She awkwardly slid a finger up the bridge of her nose as if fixing the glasses that she wasn’t wearing. “I’m Elaine, Dawn’s friend. Of course you wouldn’t recognize me. It’s been years since I saw you last. I was still a kid when you were taken. I hardly recognized you too. I’ve lost my glasses and can’t see people’s faces clearly without them. But your hair…” She smiled. “When they brought you in, I figured it’d be too much of a coincidence to have another human woman in this world with the exact hairdo you had back when…you know, when you were taken from our world.”
I tried to keep up with what she was saying. But a lot of it didn’t make any sense. How did she know what hairstyle I had when I was taken from my aunt’s house if she’d just admitted not having seen me for years? It’d been barely a couple of months since I arrived to Alveari. But she said she was just a kid when it happened.
And Dawn? My little cousin Dawn? How did this woman know her? I didn’t even remember if Dawn had any friends who weren’t her age.
Or was she talking about someone else? She must’ve confused me with another person.
“I’m sorry…I’m afraid I don’t understand. I?—”
“Oh, of course. Things have been rather crazy, haven’t they? You’ve only ever seen me as a twelve-year-old. But it doesn’t really matter. My point is that Dawn was looking for you. She thought you were…dead. We all thought so.”
“Dawn is looking for me? Here?” My insides chilled, despite the hot stuffy air under the makeshift shelter over the cages.
Did my baby cousin end up in this place too? But how?
Voices came from outside. Someone was coming to the cages.
“She was looking for you,” Elaine spoke in a hurried half-whisper. “But I’m not sure if she’s still here, in Alveari Kingdom. We were trying to get back to our world through the portal when these guys took me?—”
A fae flung the cover off from our cages, and Elaine stiffened. Some humans whimpered. Others crawled deeper into their cages.
