by Laynie Bynum
“Enjoy your stay,” the voice echoed as the floor beneath my feet dropped out and I free fell into nothing.
I landed abruptly, naked and alone, in a room with no windows or doors and scrambled to unfold my uniform and pull it on while I took in my surroundings. A cot was fastened to one of the walls, the structure of its metal frame questionable at best and a thin, threadbare mattress on top of it. Against the other wall was a toilet, with the top of the tank also functioning as a sink.
Everything was stark white and blinding to the eyes. Not a drop of color to be seen. I found myself longing for Kai and her colorful hair, eyes, and skin. Such beauty shouldn’t exist in a place like this. The contrast was too stark. She deserved to be somewhere among palm trees and sailboats.
But then again, I didn’t know what she deserved. I’d just met her, and she was in here for a reason. Even if I didn’t follow Guild law, they still punished people who had committed real crimes too. Not just those who refused to fall into their ranks.
My uniform made a buzzing sound and began to conform to my body on its own. Hugging my curves and shortening the arms and legs to an appropriate length. A badge just above my left breast appeared with the words Quinn, A. and a number. 108.
For the first time since that morning, the world around me came to a screeching halt and the silence was unwelcome. I stared at the bed. The last time I slept, it was in my own bed with my sister in the room next door. Had it really been less than twenty-four hours since she died?
My brain was a flurry of activity. Thoughts, worries, and regret all took up space and fought for my attention. But my body was bone weary and exhaustion was winning out.
I sat down on the cot, which somehow managed to be even harder than it looked, and put my head into my hands.
The face of the mysterious stranger came back into my mind unbidden. His dark hair and eyes like the pit of a volcano. The G on his wrist a puzzle without all the pieces.
And then Kai, who never mentioned how she knew my sister.
Nothing made sense. And I got the feeling that what I knew of my world was only a tiny fraction of what the rest of our world knew. Winter was hiding things and so was the Guild.
I laid back and as my head fell, a thin pillow materialized under my head. A tight-knit grey blanket covered my legs and I pulled it up, thankful to have something to protect me against the bitter chill of the air.
Winter’s secrets would have to wait until tomorrow. Until I could think straight.
Maybe, I hoped, we were allowed out of our tiny rooms and I could find Kai again. Ask her what she knew. Find the pieces of the puzzle that were missing.
I wasn’t sure what time it was when I woke up. The harsh fluorescent lights were now tinged with a strange orange color, as if they were trying to recreate the sunrise and failing miserably so that it looked more like everything had a bad spray tan.
Metal ground against the far wall of my cell and I looked over to find a door appearing, a man in grey poised just outside of it.
“Breakfast,” he said as he waited for the door to completely finish sliding out of his way before he walked inside. “You’re a newbie, so I have to walk you to the cafeteria. Take notes. I won’t do this again.”
Before I even rose from the bed he was walking back out of the room and down the hallway. I scrambled to jump up and catch up with him, doing as he said and taking mental notes of the turns he was taking.
“Breakfast every morning at seven. If you’re late you don’t eat. We aren’t babysitters. We won’t make you show up. And when it’s time to leave, you leave. The last ones milling about will be taken to solitary for twenty-four hours.”
He was walking so fast. Each one of his steps equaled four of mine.
“After breakfast you clean your cell. We don’t care how clean it looks. You clean it every day. Then you go outside if it isn’t raining. If it’s raining, you can go to the library or the TV room, nowhere else. Then lunch.”
He turned abruptly into a room filled to bursting with people, the din so loud I wanted to cover my ears.
I could barely hear him as he continued. “Then you work. Then dinner. Then you sleep. Got it?”
He didn’t wait for me to answer before he turned on his heel and left me standing in the entrance to the cafeteria.
I searched the crowd for Kai, less interested in eating whatever goop was on the menu and more in figuring out the mystery surrounding my sister. But the sprite was nowhere to be found. Her blue hair would have stood out in the crowd, which looked a bit like a bowl of salt and pepper if you let your eyes unfocus. Did they keep the sprites somewhere else?
“You look lost,” a familiar feminine voice said as someone took my elbow and looped their arm through it.
I turned to find Kai, who must have just entered behind me, smiling that same earth-shattering smile from yesterday.
“Thank goodness,” I breathed. “I was looking for you.”
“Oh, never do that. I’m a terrible Waldo.”
The place where our arms interlocked felt good. As if human contact was exactly what I needed. But as I looked down at them, I noticed that her skin where the uniform ended and her hand began looked as if it was cracking. Like the floor of a dried river baked in the sun.
“Kai, your skin,” I almost shouted before realizing that bringing attention to ourselves probably wouldn’t be in our best interest. “Are you okay? Do you need water?”
She pulled at the sleeve of her uniform, but since they were magically fit to our exact size it did no good. “I’m fine,” she said flatly. “I’m just not used to being out of the sea this long. It will take some adjustment.”
We walked toward the line which resembled one in a school lunchroom, complete with shoddy plastic trays and bored looking cafeteria workers. Arm in arm. Two outcasts in an entire facility full of outcasts.
“Can I do anything to help you?” I asked as I contemplated what it would be like to be an actual fish out of water.
“No,” she said as she cut her eyes to me. “Now stop. It isn’t good for either of us for me to appear weak.”
Weakness wasn’t really something I’d thought about. It wasn’t like either of us could hide the fact that we were small. We weren’t going to be winning any arm wrestling matches anytime soon.
“I have some questions for you,” I said as we picked up our trays and went through the line. The cafeteria workers placed bruised fruit, some slop that I think was supposed to be oatmeal and burnt toast on our plates before we were released into the wild of the general population. “Do you think there’s anywhere we could talk privately?”
Kai’s eyebrows danced for a moment before she looked back at the tables full of Guild-damned inmates and groaned. “I doubt it.”
We found a table near the corner of the room with less people than the others. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do considering our lack of available options.
At one end sat a man who didn’t appear much older than me. He wouldn’t have stood out except, in the overcrowded lunchroom, no one was near him. The others would look at him and whisper, but instead of interacting with him, they seemed to shy away, as if no one dared approach him or get too close to him out of fear of what he could do to them. His hair was jet black, darker than any of the others. As if his hair was not hair, but a black hole, sucking all light out from around him.
He lifted his head as we passed and his eyes were just as black. No iris, only pupil. Dark circles swirled inside milky whiteness as he stared at us.
“Come on,” Kai said, pulling me away from him and toward the other end of the table.
I didn’t want to look away. Something about him made me want to go over, talk to him, touch him… What was I thinking? This was the Grey, not some sort of matchmaking event. And relationships between light and dark mages were always bound for trouble.
“Who is that?” I asked as we sat down and my eyes found him again.
She leaned forward to get a good look at him. “He
ll if I know. I just got here, remember? I can feel his energy from here though.”
I spun my spoon in circles through my mush as I continued to stare at him. “So, is that a sprite thing? Feeling others' energy?”
“No,” Kai said without emphasis. “That’s just a me thing.” The man pulled his drink toward him and took a long slow sip while staring at the wall in front of him. “It’s radiating from him in waves. I’ve never felt that much power.” Her words held such reverence, as if she’d seen a god in the flesh.
One side of his mouth quirked up into a grin as he stood and picked up his tray to leave. I held my breath as he turned toward us, before realizing the trash can was on the other side of me.
He tilted his tray into it, spilling the contents into the can. The veins in his hands and wrist bulged slightly as his hand lifted to put the gaudy bright blue plastic tray on the shelf above the garbage can. He turned back toward the exit, walking past us one last time.
As he did, he nodded in our direction. “Have a nice day, ladies,” he said in what was clearly a Southern accent.
My heart stopped beating and my mouth forgot how to form words. I sat there as if I was paralyzed.
Kai coughed and shook her head. “Yeah, you too.”
We both watched him exit, the guards letting him pass through, moving aside while still staring unblinkingly forward, as if he wasn’t one of the prisoners. Even though his uniform clearly identified him as one of us.
I took a deep breath, pulling myself out of his orbit and back to the very important matter at hand. “Okay then,” I said, shaking my head to clear it. “First off, seriously, how did you know Winter?”
Kai’s attention became entirely focused on peeling her banana. “Winter was the most powerful white mage in the Northeast. A lot of people knew her.”
Winter was powerful, sure. But not the most powerful. “There are things you aren’t telling me.”
“There’s a lot that a lot of people aren’t telling you, Autumn.”
I thought again about the dark stranger. About Kai. About Winter. “That’s an understatement.”
She looked around the room before her eyes settled on mine with a deep intensity that made me fairly uncomfortable. “Winter was planning things. Big things. Things that involved mages and other magical creatures all over the world. Things that would change everything.” Her voice was barely a whisper, but it felt as if she was shouting, the words hitting me with determined blows.
I had lived with her. I spent nearly every moment with her. We told each other everything. Just the time alone it would take to pull something like this off would have been massive, I couldn’t have missed it.
Or could I?
I thought about how the weekly supply runs had been taking longer and longer. She’d made a friend at the apothecary, she said. They’d chat while she shopped.
She had become more and more distracted in the past few weeks. Forgetting if she gave a patient their medicine and having to check our notes. Locking herself in her room to “brush up on her magic.” Constantly stepping out for phone calls.
I’d wondered if it all didn’t have something to do with her friend at the apothecary. If she hadn’t developed some sort of crush.
She was in her twenties after all. And she’d devoted most of her youth to helping others. She deserved to experience something like young love. I didn’t hound her about it because I knew she’d tell me in her own time.
But…
“How do you know all of this?” I asked, bringing myself back to the present.
“I was enlisted to represent the water sprites. There was supposed to be a meeting yesterday morning but when Winter never showed… we all left. Now I guess I know why.”
“So is that why you're here?”
Kai rolled her eyes and laughed. “No. Nothing so dramatic. On the way home I sunk a boat of Guild reps.”
I gasped and covered my mouth. Murdering Guild reps was the magical equivalent of a human murdering a police officer or politician.
She let out a long slow breath and pushed her tray a couple inches away from. “In my defense, no one died. And they were on an illegal hunting expedition to kill endangered monk seals. It was a public service more than anything.”
I wanted to ask more, to beg for more information, but a buzzer went off and people began to leave the cafeteria.
Kai stood, clearly not wanting to be the last one out and draw the ire of the guards surrounding us. She’d obviously been given the same lecture on her way to breakfast.
“Wait,” I said, standing up and grabbing her arm. “You have to tell me more. You can’t just leave me with that.”
She looked at where my fingers wrapped around her forearm. “This is hardly the time or place.”
“Then when? Where?” I was desperate for answers. I couldn’t go back to that empty cell like this.
“Get your tray and act like you have some common sense. Stop drawing attention to us,” she gritted out between clenched teeth.
I looked around to where her eyes were darting. The lunchroom was emptying quickly, and the guards were starting to take note of the stragglers.
There was no other choice. I grabbed my left-over breakfast and discarded it just like Kai said.
She patiently waited for me, although from the way she bounced from one foot to the other, I could tell it made her anxious to do so. “It’s the Guild,” she muttered as I drew close again. “Winter said she had proof that the Guild was lying to everyone. She was going to show us at the meeting.”
I was silent as we walked past two guards. “And you have no idea what it was?”
“Na-da,” she said, sticking her hands in her pockets. “Winter was kind, but not very open, if you know what I mean.”
I did not. Winter had always been open with me. But we hadn’t had a choice. Not after what happened with our parents. Not with being the only thing the other had.
But then Lucy’s round face came into my consciousness. It wasn’t strange that she accompanied Winter on the supply run that morning, explaining that Winter needed additional supplies delivered to in-house customers. Maybe that was because she was attending the meeting. Maybe Lucy knew more than I did.
Pangs of jealousy rose in my stomach alongside flutters of hope. There had to be some way to contact her. Some way to find out what she knew.
“I might be able to figure something out,” I said as we came to one of the turns in the hallway that the officer had me memorize earlier. “But I’ll need a way to get in touch with someone on the outside. Do we get to send letters or anything?”
Kai started in the opposite direction of my cell and I realized we were going to have to part. Guards were coming up the hallway. We didn’t have much time.
“I’ll find out. Come find me whenever they let us loose again,” she said as she rushed away.
She disappeared among the throngs of people heading to their cells and I immediately felt the weight of loneliness which only worsened as I headed into the small closet-like area that would be my only personal space for the rest of my known life.
The door disappeared behind me as I stared at the blank walls and tried to make sense of my new life.
Chapter Five
All I wanted were answers. Isn’t that what mages were taught from their youth? To discover the truth using our gifts, to use those gifts to the extent of their abilities? Winter deserved that much from me, after all she’d done…
But what, exactly, had she done?
What could have been so monumental that it required her death to keep what she knew from being discovered?
And who else could have known enough to order a command against a white mage such as Winter?
But had I even known Winter? When there were people like Kai who seemed to know her as some legend while all I ever saw was my sister—who was Winter really? Was I blinded by her mystique, or had she really gone so far out of her way to hide who she truly was from me?
; The pounding in my head from the brightness began to beat in time with the pounding of my heart. The sound of the blood in my ears threatened to become the last sound I’d ever hear if I didn’t focus on what had happened and what I needed to do to get out.
Get out?
No one ever got out.
I closed my eyes and shrank to the ground, my knees hitting the floor beneath me hard enough to make my teeth chatter. The relentless chill found every possible way to creep beneath my uniform, to my skin and through to my bones. Wrapping my arms around myself, attempting to retain any lingering warmth, was futile but I tried anyway. Just as I tried to make sense of my life.
No one ever escaped the Grey. It was the one place mages feared—a place without magic, a place where prisoners disappeared and were never heard from again. The Guild did as the Guild wanted, and there were no judges or juries in the magical world. If they felt you’d done wrong, you were automatically guilty, and they would stop at nothing to find you.
I just never expected them to find me so soon. Without asking for an explanation.
I gritted my teeth against the tears before shutting my eyes.
I just wanted to talk to my sister.
I needed to know what happened to her. I just needed a chance to finish and—
My eyes flew open as thoughts of the night returned to me.
Lucy. And the dark stranger.
I still couldn’t get her look of disgust out of my mind.
And the mysterious mage...
I swear on my honor that no harm will come to you, Quinn daughter.
But who was he?
Then there was the matter of that mage in the cafeteria, and his power that pulled me towards him like a moth to a flame...
My fists met the floor before I could stop, the impact of frustration resounding through my bones as I let out a moan of pain and helplessness.
As if from nowhere, a bundle of cleaning supplies suddenly materialized in the corner of the room. An old broom with broken and worn bristles, a mop—which had clearly seen better days—some sort of spray cleaner, a rag, and a bucket. No instructions, no commands. Just a quiet whisper of a memory in the back of my head.