4.106: Detention

The funny thing was, the cell they lead me to wasn’t all that different from my room in the school.

I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, really, but it made sense. I already lived in a cave underground, with a magically sealed door and no possibility of windows. Where could they put me that would be more secure than that? The only real adjustment that needed to be made was to not give me clearance to open the door.

There were some differences, of course. The cell was much smaller, containing only one bed, and with no force fields inside. It was very sparsely furnished, and the adjoining bathroom was very basic. There were a couple of cameras in the ceiling, which they hadn’t bothered to conceal in any way; they’d be easy to destroy, but I had no intention of doing that. (What would be the point? They’d just put me somewhere else, where I couldn’t sabotage anything.) A brief experiment before they closed the heavy stone door behind me told me that there was a force field over the doorway, preventing me from leaving when it was open. People could open the door without worrying about me attacking them or trying to escape or whatever.

It was, in fact, a lot better than I had been expecting. Sparely furnished, sure, but not terribly so. I had a bed, a small dresser full of plain black robes, and even a little desk and chair. If I asked, would they give me some paper to write letters? Maybe.

They’d taken all of my personal effects and I hadn’t had my tablet on me anyway, but there was a small bookshelf stacked with books. Clearly no thought had gone into their selection, beyond making sure they were all in English – there were books three and five of an eight-book fantasy series, an old microbiology textbook, a collection of science fiction short stories, completely random stuff like that. I grimaced to myself. I had resisted for so long, but finally, circumstances were going to force me develop a hobby of reading for entertainment. Melissa, if the guards let me write to her, was going to be so smug about that.

I sat heavily down on the bed. I’d asked to see Kylie again, after the interrogation, but they hadn’t let me. I knew she was alive; her magic settled in me as naturally as ever. I wondered if there was some way for us to influence each other through the magic, beyond just me getting restless when a lot of it was being used. Perhaps we could’ve developed a communication system with it. Too late, now.

I had the vague sense that I should probably be very upset. I should be feeling hopeless. Or angry. I should be crying. Instead I was feeling… not much of anything. Some things had happened, and now I was in this room. Eventually, different things would probably happen. I sat patiently, waiting to feel the enormity of what had just happened, of how trapped I was, of how doomed the planet might be, but I didn’t. The feeling just didn’t come.

This was just what I was doing now. I was sitting on this bed, in this room.

Eventually, I got tired and went to bed, but the light in the room was bothering me. It was more intense than the light I was used to in the school (after some thought, I decided that this brighter, yellower light was supposed to mimic sunlight), and I didn’t have the ability to turn it down or off like I could in my old dorm. It just blazed away, declaring that it was eternally mid-afternoon. I wondered if it was locked on like this so that they could always see with the best lighting through the cameras, or if it was a deliberate psychological thing, designed to mess with my sense of time and disorient me. I supposed that the reason didn’t matter. I pulled my blankets over my head to shut it out and went to sleep.

When I woke up, there was food. I ate it. Later, more food was delivered, by a pink-cloaked figure who didn’t speak to me. I ate that, too. I started on book three of the random fantasy series. It wasn’t very good.

I’d been planning to count my days in prison, do the thing that people do in movies where they make hash marks on the wall or something, but I quickly realised that this was going to be completely impossible. I had no frame of reference for the passage of time. I tried at first to count by meals, but I had no idea if they were being delivered regularly, or how many there were per day; the time between them seemed to vary wildly, but that might have just been me. There were no clocks in the room, the light was always consistent, and I was never allowed out. I knew that, like with the lighting, sometimes prisoners were fed on an inconsistent schedule to disorient them for interrogation purposes. I had no idea if that was happening to me. I didn’t see what the point would be, since I’d been fairly honest, but they might still believe I was a Fionnrath spy and denying it. They might be trying to soften me up for more.

I tried counting days by sleep cycles, too, but that plan fell through the window after… well, I think two or three days, but it’s hard to be sure. I quickly found myself in a generally lethargic sort of state, drifting off or waking up inconsistently. There was no clock to keep a schedule by, and no reason to keep one. If I had any sort of regular sleep cycle left, I had no idea what hours it was on. I knew that Kylie was alive, and she was channelling magic a lot, but I had no other knowledge of the outside world.

Time passed.

I read through the fantasy books, and the science fiction stories. I began to wonder what the psychological effects of solitary confinement were. I knew it was supposed to be really bad for you, but I’d never looked into specifically what happened or why.

Time passed.

I finished most of the books. I read some of them two or three times. I was given some paper on request and wrote letters to friends and family, but I had no idea if they were ever delivered; I got nothing back. I took to pacing for hours at a time; at least, I think it was hours. Hard to tell. I was getting dangerously close to the point where reading the microbiology textbook was starting to look tempting.

Time passed.

The heavy stone door opened. I glanced up, expecting to see the pink-cloaked person who brought me my food and never spoke to me or reacted to anything I said. Instead, there were two other pink-cloaked people. Both strangers.

And between them, Kylie.

“Kylie!” I rushed up to the door, almost smacking into the force field before remembering it was there in the nick of time. “Are you okay? What’s going on?”

She gave me a watery smile. She looked tired, but not hurt. “I’m fine,” she said. “Are you alright? Have they hurt you?”

“No, no; I’m fine. What are they – ?”

“There,” one of Kylie’s guard’s grunted. “He’s alright. Let’s go.” She pushed the door closed.

“Kayden,” Kylie called out, “don’t wor – ”

The door shut, cutting her off.

I sat down, reeling from the longest conversation I’d had with anyone except myself in… however long it had been.

Okay. Think, Kayden. Don’t just drift off to sleep again. Don’t just… no, it’s time to wake that brain up again. Think.

This explained a lot, actually.

I’d been left in this room, unhurt, for… some time. Nobody came by to talk to me, nobody seemed to have any interest in me, but they hadn’t sent me to a proper prison or anything. Kylie was channelling Fionnrath’s Destiny pretty regularly, and they’d brought her here to show her that I wasn’t hurt; their manner suggested that she’d demanded this, and the demand had been met.

Refujeyo was making as much use as they could of Fionnrath’s Destiny. Why not? It was a very powerful prophecy, and its mage was at their mercy, all legally locked up as a terrorist. I was being kept nearby to help her channel the magic, and as a hostage for her good behaviour. She was probably being kept at Duniyasar itself, the best nearby place for her to channel, and I was within familiarity range… that didn’t really tell me much, I already knew I was beneath Duniyasar, we’d walked here from the school, but it was nice that it all fit together.

Okay. Did any of that help me?

No.

I lay back on my bed. I stared at the ceiling for a while. I drifted off to sleep.

Time passed.

The microbiology textbook turned out to be as incomprehensible as I’d expected.

Time passed.

The door opened. Like I always did these days, I looked over excitedly to see if Kylie was there. Like always, she wasn’t. It was just the usual person with food.

“And how are you doing today?” I asked.

They didn’t respond. Maybe I should have lied about more stuff so they’d interrogate me again. At least it would be a conversation.

The food wasn’t bad. It wasn’t fantastic, but it wasn’t bad. I’d say it was ‘ready meal quality’, and varied enough to be interesting. This time there was chicken and rice, a mandarine for a snack (it was always a treat to get a bit of fruit for a snack), a small cup of apple juice, and a chocolate pudding cup. Not the most coherent meal in terms of flavour balance, but if I’d ever cared about that sort of thing I certainly didn’t now. I ate my pudding first because life is short. (It made my throat feel weird. Hopefully I wasn’t allergic to anything delicious.)

I could try writing to my family again. The guards had allowed it the last time I’d asked (at least, the food guard had brought me some paper, pen and envelopes without explanation, and took them away when I was done), but I had no idea whether the lack of a response meant they hadn’t sent my letters, or they hadn’t bothered to deliver the replies, or no one I’d written to had wanted to write back. I could understand that. Everyone probably hated me right now. They thought I was some doomsday extremist who’d tried to destroy their world.

I thought of my last conversation with Saina, and bit back a sob. I rubbed my eyes dry. There was no sense in thinking about any of that. I couldn’t change that.

I finished my chicken and pulled a book at random from the shelf to reread. Ugh, it was a book about the history of Mesopotamia. Well, no take backsies; if I allowed myself take backsies I’d spend the rest of the day pulling and rejecting books from the shelf. I settled into my chair, sipped my juice, and begrudgingly prepared to read about the development of early agriculture again.

I was almost out of juice and halfway through a passage about the importance of animals in early crop farming that was absolutely fascinating to somebody somewhere presumably, when nausea gripped my stomach. I stood, ready to rush to the bathroom to throw up, but a wave of dizziness overcame me and I dropped like a stone.

I struggled to get up. My limbs worked fine, I just… couldn’t work out where to put them. Pins and needles crawled through my body in an eerily familiar sensation as the room seemed to swing wildly back and forth while I tried to hold onto the floor. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a paper cup lying on the floor, dribbling the last of its apple juice onto the stone. Had… had someone managed to magically poison me? In prison? How?!

Why?!

With a mind full of questions and absolutely no answers, I blacked out.