“Not morning people?” he laughed, repeating the motion to slide breakfast into my enclosure.
I examined him carefully, considering any weaknesses that I may be able to exploit. It was hard to find anything lacking on the eight-foot-tall beefcake with an extra set of limbs. He must’ve thought so too, given there was no obvious weapon on his person. Why would there be? We were trapped, a mere fraction of his size, and defenseless. More than ever, I felt like prey in a world of predators. They were literally using our bodies as fuel, without the decency of delivering a killing blow. Being eaten in the woods would have been more merciful.
I was relieved to see him making his exit without further antagonizing us. Two arms stretched above his head and the other two behind his back with a yawn, flaunting his neutrality. He stopped in the gateway and looked over his shoulder with a smile, one hand on the closing button.
“You’re looking much better today, Dia,” he praised with venom on his tongue.
Disgust washed over me at his weaponized pleasantry. I could only see one side of her face from where I sat, but he was right. Her scars were all but gone. The bare foot peeking out from under her thigh looked almost normal, her open wounds healed to thin white lines. She was running out of time. I was too. We were almost fully charged batteries again.
The gate thudded closed.
“How many sisters do we have?” I asked, hesitant to move towards the unappetizing tray of food resting on the ground.
“Lots.” Dia began shoveling food into her mouth as if her life depended on absorbing each calorie. Maybe it did, her muscles were nothing to scoff at. Her body was the closest thing to a weapon we had.
“And how many are in pods?”
“You don’t want to know.”
I tapped my finger against my thigh uncomfortably. Dia was my only company. My source of information. Mysister. I’d spent all night wanting nothing more than to talk through this with her instead of being alone with my thoughts, and was disappointed by the curt responses now that she was up. We could learn so much from each other. Not to mention, we were family. Wasn’t she interested in me atall?
“Alright. Tell me about you, then. I don’t have a past, so it might be nice to hear someone else’s.”
“You’re having a hard time finding pleasant topics,” she grumbled with her mouth full.
“Then throw me a bone,” I laughed in exasperation. “Give me something to work with here, sis.”
She stiffened at my affectionate nickname. “I don’t have anything for you.”
I huffed out a frustrated breath, moving to grab my tray and join her for breakfast. “They’re not going to let you stall your healing by breaking your fingers for long,” I mumbled over the plate of food I didn’t want to touch. It was mostly green leaves, beige cubes of unknown source, and supplements. No sauce, no seasoning, no variety—just nutrients. I missed Graysen’s cooking. He knew more ways to prepare an egg than I knew recipes in general.
“Excuse me?” Dia’s eyes shot back up.
“I thought about your plan. They aren’t going to like—” I swallowed. “—their productbeing damaged, even by itself. You’ll be put to sleep until you heal.” I popped a squishy cube into my mouth with disdain.
“They don’t like us healing doped up. It messes with the purity.”
“Fine, then they’ll restrain you. But you aren’t going to be allowed to cost them all that money.”
“So, what do you propose?” She seemed offended by my suggestion, as if she thought there wasn’t a single problem in the world she couldn’t solve with endurance and brute force.
“We add a little strategy to your brawn. I don’t think we have much longer, and your self-mutilation won’t do youanygood once they catch on.”
“If you have a better plan, I’m all ears.”
But I didn’t. I knew that we needed one, and there had to be something to work with, but my mind was scrambled with dead ends. Every time my thoughts tried to turn in a new direction, they were blocked, having to retrace their steps to the beginning of the cognitive maze. There were very few weak points in our captor’s security, and none of them met the criteria of the fatal flaw that we needed. I mulled over each hole in their system, pondering what could be done with it—if anything.
Back at the beginning of my mental labyrinth, I walked myself through another series of metaphorical twists and turns.
“Do they usually come in here without the tranquilizer guns for meals?” I assumed that had been what the guard was holding given our options had been"take the injection" or "get knocked out". A way to enforce compliance without opening the cages.
“Yeah, it’s not like they need our cooperation for breakfast. And we can’t exactly hurt them in our current situation.” I could feel the way it made her pride bleed to not be considered a formidable foe by her captors.
“So if one of us started damaging ourselves while they dropped off food, they wouldn’t have any way to stop us without opening our door…”
“They could go get a weapon,” she dismissed blandly.
“They could… but are youcertainthey would?”
