Prolouge
My name is A'shayla Haza.
If it were aboveground, it would be storming. Not that light, sunlight-spattered rainstorms, but the dark blankets of clouds that press in oppressively, shattered momentarily by bright flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder.
The whips cracked above our heads, beading out an intricate melody of groans and cries, punctuated by the occasional scream. The blood that ran in rivulets down our backs felt all the hotter because of the almost icy air that surrounded us. The scent of blood mixed with the dizzying scent of radioactive uranium surrounded us day in and day out.
The people around me grimly locked their lips around their screams of pain, some separating plain rock from the radioactive uranium, other shoveling diluted uranium into the red mouth of the breathing reactor. On the level beneath us, we could hear the metallic clang of spades against rock, signs that the miners were hacking away below.
What is this place, you might ask? What is the "we", this "us" I speak of?
This is the Factory.
Suck an innocent name for the closest thing to hell on Earth.
In the Factory, the pureblood Fairies have enslaved the Half-bloods. We mine their uranium. Why? I have no idea. I'm personally of the opinion that most fairies are mentally imbalanced… take that back, I KNOW that they are.
Most of the half-fairies are taken at an early age. Others are taken later, but memories are a burden and a cause, so they try very hard not to do that.
I'm not sure whether I'm one of the lucky ones or one of the cursed. I usually lean toward the latter. On one hand, I experienced life on the outside. I felt the warm sun on my face and learned some other language other than Aramic. On the other hand, having something and then losing it is worse than not having it at all, in my opinion. Images from above are burned into my brain. Even memories of the god-forsaken desert this lab is buried under is precious and painful in my mind.
I was taken when I was twelve.
Need I say I hated it? Probably not. So the first chance I got, naturally, I ran. I have to say my greatest mistake was going down. I ran down level after level. But my footsteps fell on stairs and more stairs... Always more stairs. To this day I hate stairs. Only one good thing came out of that ill-fated attempt. Yori.
No, Yori is not a guy.
Yori is my five-year-old daughter. I say daughter for lack of a better term. I named her, raised her, and to this day, attempt to protect her.
From what I remember, Yori has intense violet eyes, curly pearl-white hair, and caramel-tan skin.
Now, it's a little different. The two lasting consequences from my attempted escape are these. One, two scars that start at each temple and end at the corner of my jaw in a straight line. The other? I'm blind.
Now, being blind isn't half as bad as it makes out to be, though there are Pros and Cons.
Pros:
1: It gets me lighter, if slightly more dangerous, work.
2: "Seeing" 360 degrees with echolocation.
3: Having people underestimate you. (Annoying, but definitely helpful if you milk it.)
Cons:
1: Not being able to see with my eyes.
2: Not knowing what I look like.
3: Tripping over objects people leave on the floor.
4: Having to rely on other people's descriptions of color, texture… so on and so forth.
As I said before, there are Pros. But, in my eyes, the cons definitely outweigh the pros. I never thought it would save my life. But it did, somehow.
It's hard sometimes, but you get over it. I can't see reflections, which can be annoying. I also can't see words on a page, pictures, tapestries, and unless the words are slightly sunken or raised, I can't read.
One disastrous escape attempt later, and here I was. I stayed down in that pit for three years, in which my life was my version of hell. Yori has never known anything else, but like everyone else here, she knows that there's something better.
One thing changed my world forever.
I had known about the fairies and the humans and my personal hell. I'd thought that nothing else could possibly exist. How much fantasy can go into one world anyway.
It all started when they decided to move Yori up.
In any other context, that would have been a good thing. Not in this one. I'm not going to go into details, because that would scare most people who were reading this. Note the word were.
Yori is my daughter. If I was a child when I was taken, I am not now. I've seen too much… and, though I hate to say it, done to much to be a child any longer. I have people depending on me. When I made my decision, it changed my entire world. When I made my decision, I thought I had reached the peak of adulthood, that there was nothing worse than the existence I led then. I was wrong.
When they decided to move Yori, my child, my baby, up, I knew what I had to do.
I had to run.
And this is my story…