35. Lily

That night, I didn't sleep a wink.

How could I? It was the big day, the big finale, potentially one of the biggest days of my life — besides the one when I was abducted and brought here of course.

Still, there was one day that could never be overshadowed, and that was the day I had met and fallen in love with Ohara. That day reared like the tallest building in an otherwise unremarkable city and could never be toppled.

I tossed and turned all night despite not knowing a jot about what Ohara's plan actually was. There was no way for me to anticipate what the problems might be, how things could go wrong, and secretly, I supposed that was a good thing. If I was this nervous without knowing the plan, I'd be a total wreck if I did!

Instead, I had to put my full faith in him — a much, much easier proposition.

The only instruction he gave me was to be ready. I didn't exactly know what "ready" was, so I readied myself in every way I could think of. I set to packing my things the night before and soon realized there was precisely nothing I wanted to take with me.

No clothes or personal items. Zero.

It occurred to me then just how much of a waste my time at Ikmal had been. I had lived through some horrible experiences in the past but none compared to this. I didn't want mementos to remember this place. I would carry it with me, always.

Worse still was the fact I had been one of the lucky ones!

I had only ever had one Champion Claim me, and although our relationship was rocky at the beginning, after Ohara made his deal with Thillak, I had a much better deal than any other Prize could expect.

I peered over at the unmoving lumps beneath the other blankets. The Prizes who were my responsibility. My stomach twisted uncomfortably at the thought of leaving them.

Was I letting them down? Would they be in a worse position without me there to protect them?

At the end of each crucial stage of your life, you wanted to be able to look back and see that you had made a change, a difference to others.

Had I done that? Even in such a place as this?

I wasn't sure.

But I knew that I couldn't have made things worse and took refuge in that fact.

I'd climbed into bed and gotten comfortable beneath the itchy blanket that had been my sleep companion for the past five years. I listened to the females' soft breaths. A few from the outer rimmers made strange but beautiful whistling noises like wind chimes. I often let their unconscious tune push me over that last inch and into the abyss of deep sleep.

But tonight, even they couldn't help me.

I knew that no matter what happened tonight, whether we succeeded or failed, tonight would be the end of my time at Ikmal. Whether the release happened as an escape or at the end of a short rope was up to fate.

I heard someone shuffling into the room. I had no idea what time it was. It might have been the middle of the night or almost time to wake up.

A large shadow loomed over me. As my eyes had long since adjusted to the darkness, I could make out the details of the Lead Guard's uniform. Ohara gave me a nod and then turned to leave the room.

I climbed from the bed, already fully dressed from the night before, and sneaked across the room behind him. I paused only once at the door to peer back at my girls.

I might have been strict, maybe even harsh, but ultimately, it had been for their benefit. I had looked after them — and others beyond counting who had already come and gone from this place.

And yes, I was sure I had made a difference in their lives. I had made things better for them. But now it was my time to leave.

I thought about how they might cope without me and was convinced they would be successful. After all, they managed to survive one-on-one with powerful Champions each night. That was all them.

I turned to leave when my breath caught in my throat.

A single figure lay in her cot, eyes wide open and staring at me. She didn't make to get up but just stared openly at me with a perplexed expression on her face. It was Erishia.

Maybe she understood what was going on, maybe not. Still, I was glad someone had witnessed my leaving and that a small piece of the truth would remain.

I smiled at her and her look of confusion remained plastered to her face. I pressed a finger to my lips. I had taught her its meaning to try to get her to be less of a gossip, and her expression eased… a little.

I followed in Ohara's wake through the Prize Pool.

"Here," Ohara said, draping a cloak over my shoulders and arranging the hood so it covered my face, "wear this. Say nothing, do nothing that gives away who you are. I assigned the guards to a new rotating pattern. There are gaps that we will exploit. So long as we get our timing right, we never have to worry about bumping into them. Follow me and soon, we'll be as far from this place as it's possible to get."

He leaned down and stroked my cheek. I was too stiff to respond in kind.

As we passed through the endless prison hallways, I heard the loud snores of the inmates that made the bars of their cages rattle.

I had a good but not exhaustive knowledge of Ikmal's layout as it was one simple pattern duplicated over and over again. I'd had no cause to wander the hallways in a long time and felt more than a little anxious at leaving the only part of the prison I felt comfortable.

I focused on Ohara's muscular back. It was all the reassurance I needed.

Finally, we came to a door marked "AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY". Ohara ran his gauntlet over the scanner and it bleeped. It hissed as it slid open.

We were about to enter the restricted section, the underbelly of the prison where no inmate and certainly no Prize had ever been before.

I glanced up at the cameras, crouched like vultures, watching our every move.

"Don't worry about them," Ohara said. "They're disabled right now but the engineers will come to fix them soon. We need to hurry."

I noticed then that the usual blinking red light that signaled the cameras were active were now black and dead.

The door shut behind us and automatic lights illuminated the gangways. They consisted of the same metal grating throughout the rest of the prison. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't disguise my footfalls. They always seemed to crash and reverberate throughout the empty space.

Ohara didn't move quickly and took his time leading me through the gigantic maze we found ourselves in. Pipes and clutches of cables thicker than my leg ran like vines across the ceiling and floor below us. If I'd been there by myself, I would have been lost for months.

It was crazy to think that beneath the precision of the prison's systems there was nothing but this chaos to support it.

We came to a room at least ten times larger than all of the Prize Pool areas combined. Big metal crates as tall as Ohara and twice as wide formed stacks that stretched up into the impenetrable darkness overhead. They were dinged and dented from their time of use.

In the distance, bouncing and echoing off the walls, I could pick out heavily-accented voices.

"Okay," Ohara said, taking me to one side. "What happens next is going to require you to trust me completely."

Even with the electronic distortion of his voice, I could hear the anguish.

"You need to believe that I will get you out of here, that I would never want any harm to come to you, and that after this, our lives will completely and totally different."

The churning in my stomach made me feel sick. If I hadn't already shown him that I trusted him completely by following him into the dark like this, how bad was what came next going to be?

"What… What is it?" I asked with a voice as shaky as my nerves.

"You're going to stay in one of these crates." He watched my response carefully.

"For how long?"

"Twenty-four hours. Maybe thirty. It depends on how efficient the crew is at the barracks dock."

My eyes widened in disbelief. "Barracks? Where are you taking me? Where are we going? How can I survive a day in this thing?"

As I began to panic, Ohara held my hands and gently ran his fingers through my hair. "I realize this is a big ask but I need you to do this. It's the only way out without raising an army. And I don't know about you but I don't have many armies in my back pocket."

He might have tried to smile but the visor made seeing it impossible. I was still panicking and his words didn't soothe me.

"Hey, hey," Ohara said, lowering his visor so I could see his eyes. "You can do this. I know you can."

I wrapped my arms around him and lost myself in those gorgeous golden eyes of his. "I don't want to be away from you. Not again. We've been apart too long already."

He kissed my fingers. "In five years of searching, this is the only way I found to escape. If we don't take this chance now, we might as well turn around and head straight back to the Prize Pool." He leaned into me closer. "But I know that's not a place you want to be."

Neither was a claustrophobic box — one among millions that was too easy to get lost, I wanted to tell him, but the words didn't come out. Instead, I found hidden reserves of strength and pulled myself together. I looked over at the black box that would be my home for the next day or so.

"Are you ready?" he said.

I nodded. "I am."

"Good." He nodded from under his visor. "Then follow me."

He led me deeper into the giant cargo hold and toward the source of the deep voices I heard earlier. Shouts echoed up but the background noise was so loud I couldn't understand them. Heavy machinery groaned and thick metal chains clanked against the container boxes as they were shifted from one position to another.

Ohara turned down a narrow alleyway between a stack of container boxes. When he turned sideways, he could barely squeeze through.

I hesitated before entering the narrow space. I had more room but I just didn't like such cramped conditions. I took a deep breath, shut my eyes, and, using my hands to guide me, inched down the slim corridor.

The darkness behind my eyes was a whole lot more comforting than the true darkness before me. Behind my eyes there was nothing but me, and I knew I would never intentionally hurt myself. Unlike what might be in this darkness.

I bumped into something and stopped. I opened my eyes and peered up at Ohara, who motioned toward one of the crates. He held a small door open with his other hand.

"In here, quick," he said. "They'll be loading it soon."

I entered the box. It was pitch black, darker even than the pitch black behind my eyelids. My feet caught on something at my feet and I reached the far end before I'd taken more than four staggered steps.

Ohara reached an arm inside the doorway I'd squeezed through. There was no way he could fit through it. A light blared on his gauntlet and illuminated the container's space.

The thing I'd tripped on was a long cushion similar to what the Japanese back home used to sleep on the floor. Beside it was a series of small boxes. There was also a bucket. No prizes for what its purpose was (especially since I couldn't make out any toilet).

"I brought the cushion for you to sleep on and there are snacks in the boxes," Ohara said. "There's enough water to last for a week, although you won't be in here anywhere near that long. After you use the bucket, press the button on the side and it will break down the food waste into small packets and recycled water. You don't need to drink it. There are also some English-language magazines and books I managed to find and under the pillow, you will find a small torch. Use it sparingly as we don't want to attract anyone's attention. I know it's not much but it's the best I could do under the circumstances."

It wasn't how I was expected to live that bothered me. It was the horrific cube location. I might have been touched by his thoughtfulness if twenty-four hours wasn't such a long time. But now that I thought about it, sitting in the tin can of an airplane to fly halfway around the world could take just as long, if not longer. So really, what was the difference?

The difference is, I knew I would be getting off at the other end. I was a paying customer and had rights.

Ohara squeezed my shoulder and I gathered a large dose of confidence from it.

"Trust me, everything will work out," he said.

I smiled up at him, and for the first time since we began our little escape, I really felt it would work out for the best. I couldn't imagine all the hours and difficulty he must have gone through to make this happen.

I smiled up at him and kissed his gloves. "I would do anything so long as we could finally be together."

He cupped my face in his hand and gently stroked my cheek. "As would I."

The whirring of the machines outside ground loud and reverberated inside the container. I clamped my hands firmly over my ears but it was still deafening. I thought my head might split open.

"I have to go!" Ohara yelled. "I love you!"

He shut the hidden door and was gone. I was alone.

I pressed my hands harder over my ears and fell onto the makeshift mattress on the floor. My muscles shivered and my bones shook.

Shouts erupted outside and the thick bunches of chains rapped hard on the outside of my cube. It might have been rain… if it was made of solid chunks of iron.

The heavy machine whirred and the cube rose. I instinctively lay flat on my back, my hands grasping at the metal floor, my heels digging into the soft sponge of my bed as the cube rose and swung around. My stomach trailed two yards behind me.

That was when I realized another big difference between a long-haul flight and escaping in a cube — safety belts! They might have been useless when you were thousands of feet in the air but at least they gave the impression of safety!

I shut my eyes and tried to imagine the calmest, most peaceful thing I could — a gorgeous sandy beach somewhere, with cool water lapping at my feet. Ohara would lie beside me — no, I would be wrapped in his arms. He would clutch me close like a priceless heirloom. And right then, at that indistinct moment in the future, I would recall this moment in the cube and it would make the beach all the sweeter.

It was the rough times we went through in everyday life that made such moments beautiful and important.

I felt my shoulders relax even as my stomach swung back and forth like a pendulum on the arm of a grandfather clock. My entire body rattled when the cube was finally put down.

The chains were released and rasped as they slid off my cube and went off to fetch another container. After that, everything was relatively peaceful.

I peered around at my surroundings. My reading material was — bizarrely — pop music magazines from the 1990s and ragged secondhand books that had seen better days. There was a mixture of genres, from science fiction to adventure, thrillers, and even a couple of romances.

My heart soared at the thought of Ohara going out of his way to source these things for me. It was the little things that made all the difference.

There was a heavy thump as another cube was placed on top of mine. The metal groaned ominously and I lay there, staring up at it, concerned it might give way and crush me.

But what was the use in worrying? If it was going to crush me, it was going to crush me. There was precisely nothing I could do about it.

The loading process seemed to take forever, but once it was done, an eerie silence came over the entire cube. Pervading silence amplified every noise I made. It seemed cacophonous in my ears.

I wondered how I would know when we had taken off, and the moment the thought came to me, I felt the familiar movement of an airplane taking off — that inertia when my stomach lurched somewhere behind me. And then the soft yawn as the ship rose higher, presumably into the atmosphere.

It was only then that I realized Ohara's plan was working.

I had left Ikmal.

The prison was huge but even it could not cater to the upward movement the ship was now making. I had to be outside and that meant I had escaped.

Tears streamed unbidden down my cheeks. Compared to the past five years I'd spent incarcerated at Ikmal — as much a prisoner as all the other inmates — twenty-four hours suddenly seemed insignificant.

Were there any difficulties I wouldn't put up with if it meant freedom?

Even torture didn't seem so bad so long as freedom waited on the other side. And this was not torture. All I had to do was lay there and wait. Hopefully sleep would claim me and I could drift off into the abyss. By the time I awoke, I might have already arrived.

I felt giddy and excited, knowing that soon the sandy beach dream I had imagined would come true. I drifted off and floated away, dreaming of places so distant from Ikmal that it was like I existed in another galaxy.

But I had seen these fantasies before. They were the same ones I stamped down and refused to contemplate after he had left me.

Now, they came flooding back, only they were imbued with something else, something special — reality.

Fantasy would become real.

I tried to read by torchlight but none of the words sunk in. I laid back and for the first time that night, sleep came unimpeded.

* * *

I awokewhen I felt a sudden thump.

I peered at my surroundings and looked for what might have caused it. Maybe a box had toppled from its stack? Or another cube had made contact with mine?

Or maybe it was just a part of my dream. I lay back and got comfortable once again to sleep some more…. When I heard another solid thud.

This time, I wasn't left wondering where it came from.

The door at the back of the cube stood open.

Light spilled through it and formed a shaft that illuminated the space. I squinted and shied away from it. It wasn't particularly bright and I was certain it wasn't natural in origin but from artificial lamps. Still, compared to the total darkness I had gotten used to, I might have been staring directly into the sun.

Had we come to the end of the journey already? I wondered. Had I slept a full twenty-four hours?

I had awoken several times in fits and starts, before finding sleep once more. The cube gave zero indication of the time, so anything was possible.

No one came through the hidden doorway, which struck me as odd. If Ohara was out there, he would have put his head inside and waved me over. But maybe he couldn't for some reason.

I crept over and peered out through the hole, squinting even harder against the light. No sooner was my head through the hole than hands grabbed me and pulled me from the container.

I still couldn't see properly. My vision was blurry and obscured by the brightness.

I was placed on my feet and, as I blinked, the light began to fade. I peered around, trying to make out what was around me.

Then my hands were brought behind my back and metal bracelets were attached to my wrists.

Huh?

As the light faded and the scene came into view, my stomach took a one-way trip to the center of the planet.

Ohara wore handcuffs much like my own — futuristic in design with some kind of magnet tech to clasp them together. Half a dozen armed prison guards stood with their rifles pointed at him.

"Ohara?" I screamed. "What's going on?"

He could barely bring himself to look at me, and when he did, I saw the expression of someone who had just found themselves in hell.

My container cube sat by itself with no others in sight.

And the ship I had been on? There was no sign of it.

And the room we were in?

There was no question in my mind about our location.

We were at Ikmal.

Back on the prison moon.

Something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.