Elain lay straight on the floor, staring at the ceiling, searching for shapes in the cracks in the stone. The light was just barely enough to see by. She couldn't tell from which direction the man was screaming. His voice shook her bones and pierced her until it felt as though the sound was coming from inside her own head. When he went quiet, it was a relief.
She sat up. Her hair hadn't been cut in a long time, and it tickled her bare collarbone—or that might have a spider, she didn't care. The motion made her dizzy, and she knew if she tried to stand she'd black out. From somewhere deep in her mind, the words salt deficiency sprang forward. At one time, those words meant something to her, but it was hard to remember anything down here. If she concentrated, she might remember.
All that came easy to her was her name and a few scant details of her life. She had a son and a husband. She was a scientist. She went into the Hollow and—
Whether her memories ended there or not, she didn't know. Her train of thought was broken by what she saw outside her cell. Their eyes glowed in low light, like dogs or cats. This one wore clothes of a fabric that caught the glow of a distant fire, a deep purple laced with gold. The big, muscular guard was with him; he never came down here without protection.
She called it him, but its voice had a feminine quality when it produced humanoid sounds. The creatures' language contained a few syllables that could have come from a human, but the rest was meaningless growling and trilling. He sounded like a monstrous crow that had learned to mimic speech.
His arm moved, and she knew with a sinking resignation that he had selected her again. A second later, the gate screeched open, and the guard's heavy footfalls entered her cell. Its form was a huge moving darkness, but it had two arms and two legs and a head and a torso just like a man.
Were it not for her situation, Elain would have been ecstatic to study the creatures. She was too weak now for even hatred; she had felt enough in the early days, and she had burned herself out into numbness. As the guard grabbed her with a huge hand and hauled her up, she felt, if anything, annoyed.
Not only at the creatures, the tests, the pain—at herself, for being so goddamn good at enduring it all.
Had Elain been in the frame of mind, she would have been astounded at how much the human body could endure. They showed her another human, once, who had lost well over half their body mass. All their limbs, their eyes, their teeth, redundant organs, slivers of fat and muscle gleaned from their torso and abdomen and back, and even their scalp had been taken. Still their remaining lung continued to pull in air, and their heart beat to transport that foul-smelling oxygen around their ruined, live carcass of a body, and there may have even been thoughts in their head. Their body had been thoroughly desexed, but she suspected they might have been a man; there was no way to be certain. They couldn't speak, and registered no recognition that anyone was there at all.
He watched her, as if gauging her reaction. Later, she reckoned it was some kind of psychological test, and she wondered if his experiment was successful, whatever it was.
In the corner that received the least light, some moisture seeped in from outside the room, and strange mildew grew there. She marked it with her fingernail to pass the days. There was no sunlight, no changing of seasons, and she knew she missed some days and counted others twice, but it still had to have been years.
When it was quiet and dark, the time when she and the other prisoners—how many were there?—were meant to sleep, she would go over her memories and remind herself of things. It was important to hold onto things, to remember what made her human, because she hadn't seen herself and she was afraid if she didn't think about her face, she would start to imagine herself looking like them. If she didn't think about who she used to be she would stop being.
One day she woke to an interminable roaring in her ears. It was a low and dull sound but it was there, and she feared it. After so long, she didn't know she could be afraid of things anymore. She supposed she used to get afraid, long ago when each new horror was something she had never before experienced. She supposed that was why she feared the noise.
There were other noises. It sounded like running, and most amazingly of all, human voices. There were many of them, all yelling at each other, but not screaming. Her heart pounded so hard she thought it would burst, overburdened by what she was witnessing. Tears came to her eyes.
Free, said a voice in her head. She stood, fell back onto the wall for support, and surged forward. She caught herself on the bars just in time to watch a scrawny young man run by. He saw her and skidded to a stop, his eyes bugging out at her face.
"Ma'am," he said. He turned and yelled, "There's someone here!" down the hall, then he was gone.
He must have been some kind of scout. The people who appeared before her next had a heavy cutting tool that they used to snap the old lock off her bars. Someone took her by her arm and helped her walk. It had been so long since she last felt human contact that her skin tingled where she was touched.
Her rescuers had obviously not spent as much time down here as she. She saw others on her way, blank-eyed and gnarled ones like herself, as they went down the hall, but there were many young ones. There were many that still had their whole bodies.
Two men guided her up some steps—she had to be carried—and then they were in a larger, wider room. She stared around at the people gathered here. There were dozens, and they were all stuck at the large windows. The man set Elain down, but she was weak and woozy, so she leaned against the wall and simply watched quietly.
"We're gonna die," someone moaned. "It didn't matter! We're dead! That's why there's nobody here—oh god, oh god!" He collapsed into sobs. The rest of the people were either still or quietly weeping.
Elain struggled over to a window to see what was going on. The brief promise of escape made the sight hurt all the worse. Water was pouring in from seemingly all directions, filling the cave. Already the lower levels of the prison would be full of water.
"Let's get to higher ground," a woman shouted. "We have to try!"
"There is no higher ground," a man replied. "Sorry."
"Oh...oh fuck…"
Elain sank to her knees and pulled herself into a compact little ball, as she often did when frightened. It was almost hypnotizing to watch the water as it rose, making little whirlpools and waves. After so much pain, she was at peace. The other long-time prisoners were quiet as well; only the newer ones screamed and struggled against fate, not having experienced the full range of pain and horror this place could inflict on a human being.
In her last moments, Elain chose to think of her family. She knew she had one son and a husband, Marcus and Adam, but she had no way of knowing if the faces in her memories were accurate. It didn't matter; what mattered was that she never let go.
"I can't believe you made me leave all my equipment!" Ukkon's shrill voice pierced through the snowy forest. "I had time! I could have gotten more of my things! My experiments!"
"I don't care," Myrrah snapped. "Go ahead and blame me for saving your gaudy little ass. Just tell me if we stand a chance of surviving the winter with what we have."
Ukkon hugged himself and sighed theatrically. A genuinely pensive and calculating look came over his face. "We won't go extinct," he said.
Myrrah sat down hard on a log, glaring at him.
"I'm sorry, my queen," Ukkon said. "I can't change the fact that the evacuation was incomplete. Blame Skorge. Oh, if only I could have saved a few of my test subjects…"
"Ukkon—"
"We could have eaten them," the scientist added hastily. "Most of them didn't have a lot of meat left though."
"There's another group of survivors coming into camp," Myrrah said all of a sudden, standing and striding towards their little huddle of huts in the distance. A thin curl of smoke came from a struggling fire. Ukkon followed her, sparing no further thought for his lost property.