I'll never know how long it was before I crawled back into reality, but it was a slow and painful climb. There was no question in my mind of what happened; I knew it instantly, with all the clarity with which you know a dream you've just awakened from. The first thing that came back after that memory was pain in my head and shoulders, sharp and pounding as though it had only recently begun to afflict me. I saw the brightness of…wherever I was as a whiteout behind my eyelids, and I groaned as I turned my head away from it. Through this, I realized I'd been looking up, as my head immediately rolled down and my chin pressed against my collarbone. The darkness there was a slight relief, and I opened my eyes.

At first, my vision swam a little, but as I looked, my legs slowly came into focus. I saw a patch of red where my bag had slapped continuously against bare skin, but otherwise I was intact. At the top of my vision was a table, I could tell, and looking up, a dull pain shooting through my head, I saw a glass of water upon it. Upon seeing it, I became hyper-aware of a strange taste in my mouth—lingering detergent smell that had morphed at the back of my throat. I swallowed instinctively.

And yet, as I thought that it would be a wonderful relief, I knew I could hardly be that lucky. Frowning, I tried to move my arms—and felt a pang in my shoulders as my wrists stayed locked together.

"Cruel bastards," I spat. I lifted my head and looked around, slowly.

There was nothing on the walls, which were painted just a shade darker than the color my abductors had been wearing. The lights above me were kept in clouded boxes—the only breaks in the constant dull gray— and their light diffused into a homogenous haze that filled the room completely, leaving no shadows but those cast by myself and the table. Turning to look behind me was difficult and mildly painful, but I was able to glimpse a door that was roughly the same shade. I assumed there must have been a camera somewhere—no way they'd leave their prize alone—but I couldn't see it from where I sat. For curiosity's sake, and maybe just to make sure my legs were in working order, I stood up.

It wasn't difficult to do, but I still staggered a little when I finally reached my feet, my calves bumping against the chair. I was briefly dizzy and my shoulders were beginning to bother me, but one passed and I ignored the other.

Beginning to pace around the room, I eyed each inch and corner carefully, looking for any imperfection in the otherwise smooth walls. In fact, it was actually unnerving how smooth they were. There weren't any signs of brick lines or even paint texture, almost like they'd sanded it down to featureless matte that was utterly uniform in the suffused light.

"Hey!" I shouted. "Someone better come in here and tell me what the hell you want with my family, or I'll come out there and ask you myself!" My voice hit the walls and died.

Nothing was said in response, and my movement had at last taken me to the door. It was flat as the walls, free of even a tiny square window to see into whatever lay outside. Everything in here was completely cutoff from everything out there.

Everything.

A sudden chill ran through me, then, as that single word resonated in my thoughts. Wherever I was, I was completely isolated, being watched by people I couldn't see with cameras I couldn't see in a place whose location I didn't know; a place that was surely filled with rooms like these and crawling with men as cold and efficient as those who'd taken my parents. And I was alone with my hands cuffed and my head still aching, with no way to escape or even fight back should someone threaten me now.

Silence weighed on me like gravity given physical presence; I could feel it in my ears and see it wriggling across the walls. My palms started to sweat and I was trembling, goose bumps hard on my skin.

I turned from the door, pressing my back against it, and the smallness of the room, too, suddenly struck me. Everything was too close together. The walls pressed inward on the lonely table and chair, and me: little more than a mouse they'd given a bed and a half-empty water bottle. My breath started coming in odd intervals, and I could feel my pulse increasing.

Were my parents in a room like this?

Thinking of them, I could feel a tiny ball of anger, like a dull heat in the center of my chest, pounding beneath my fear. I tried to cling to that and swallow down the panic that tried to stop me from shouting, "Hey!" though it caught in my throat and emerged with a strange catch.

I gulped, focusing on rage as I glared up, turning my head in the hopes that I'd meet the eyes of whoever was observing me. "Hey! I know you're listening! Come in here and tell me what's going on, or I swear I'll—"

A loud buzz cut me off. My heart leapt into my mouth and back down again.

"Quiet down, please, Miss Delmar, and step away from the door."

Surprise still tingled in my muscles and I shifted my gaze all about the room, looking for the source of the voice. It had been like the light: evenly filling the whole room with no apparent point of origin.

"Step away from the door," the voice—of a man, I noted—repeated, calmly but with clear authority. "I'm prepared to use force, if I must, to bring about compliance."

I flushed with anger, despising the voice even as I recognized the promise fueling the threat. I straightened up and walked towards the table, but I refused to sit down.

A chuckle came from the intercom. "So needlessly stubborn."

"Tell me who you are," I demanded, ordering my voice to be steady, "and what you want with us. Now."

A pause. "A great deal, my dear, you should be able to figure out for yourself. And in any case, I hardly think someone in your position is qualified to be making demands. You are merely an insurance policy, and I simply came to tell you to calm down, before you get on the guards' nerves." I could hear him grinning, and it made my stomach turn.

"'Insurance policy?' What, my mother wasn't enough to get my father to let you drain him dry?"

"Oh, no. We didn't even mention her and he was already promising us staggering sums if only we wouldn't harm her. It was quite touching to watch, actually. You see, I thought it prudent to ensure he stayed just as cooperative. Time can often turn the weak fools into noble ones, and I couldn't have him, or Mrs. Delmar, for that matter, getting any rebellious ideas. We've been promised a great amount, and there's a lot of yellow tape we'll have to go through to get it, and you're here to ensure that they don't try anything along down the line to get out of our bargain."

"I find that hard to believe," I said, staring angrily around the room. "In fact, I don't believe it."

"Oh?" He sounded amused.

"I think you never knew about me at all before today, and once you found out, you had to stop me from going to the authorities. I'm just a loose end in this whole scheme of yours that you had to tie up."

At that, he laughed; a rich, piercing sound that seemed to fill the whole of the universe around me. It made me shudder.

"How funny that you think there's something we don't know about you and your family," he chortled, and I forced myself not to think of all that had gone into the confidence he held in that statement. "But I suppose you're partially right about being somewhat of a loose end. Originally, I'd planned on grabbing all of you at the same time, but due to you breaking routine, I only just missed you. However, the plan has still been completed. We've successfully removed all available help on the outside, while keeping all possible variables in. All that's left is the matter of payment."

"And what's this payment going to do for you! Why do you need my family's money?"

"Now, now, Cicero. I've said you should be able to figure it out by yourself, so I'm going to leave all that to you. Now, do sit down. You're going to be here for a while. I suggest you get comfortable."

I could hear the finality in his statement; envision him moving to silence the hiss of static filling the room. Desperation gripped me.

"Wait!" I blurted. And though I heard him say nothing, I knew he was still listening. "Just…let me hear their voices. Let me know that they're okay!"

He chuckled. "At the moment, they're just fine. We still need them to complete the process for us, don't we?"

Both of us knew what I was wondering, as cold drops of sweat blossomed on my trembling skin. "And after that?"

A few moments of the dull, droning whisper of the intercom.

"I'll leave all that," his voice rumbled through the speaker, "to you."

Click.

I felt the sound like a blow to my gut and actually staggered back, my eyes rolling up to the ceiling. There, the lamp-boxes quivered in their stagnant gray prison, and I watched them, nonplussed into numbness.

In truth, I wasn't surprised. After all, no matter how confident the man was that he and his group would never be discovered, it would be stupid to take that chance. It was only logical that he dispose of the evidence once he was through. In fact, it only surprised me that he refused to tell me anything about the actual group in whose HQ I was being held. If he truly was going to…dispose of the evidence, why would it matter if I knew anything? He'd said multiple times that I could figure a great deal out, but all of it was guesses that I'd need some kind of confirmation for; mostly, their objective in this whole thing.

World domination? Even in this state, that sounded idiotic, but for all I knew, I was right. And all I knew was that they needed money, which failed to narrow it down at all. Would he have told my parents everything, or were they in the same condition as I was: confused, angry, and more than a little frightened?

My head was whirling as I pondered, trying to piece together an entire plan based on a voice and a room. Dizzy, I wanted to slide into the cold metal chair. I missed and hit the ground, flushing stupidly in midair.

Pain shot from my tailbone to my neck, and I winced as it joined the throbbing in my shoulders. I remained where I was, however, as both sitting down and the new aching seemed to clear my head somewhat. I leaned back and continued to look at the lights, my flimsy vest sliding down about my wrists.

I almost wondered if I'd see any other lights besides these again, but I couldn't bring myself to; it was a far too depressing and far too pathetic thought, even now, to let pass through my perception. Or perhaps, in truth, it was simply the least possible of my worries. It was much easier—strange as it sounded—for me to wonder the same thing about Mom and Dad, though, as an answer in the negative could almost be a given if I chose to accept it. In fact, it'd be the perfect thing for the man on the speaker to use against me later. Maybe that was his plan: to kill them once he'd gotten all he wanted and make me a member of their organization. A leader was always looking for new people to follow him, right?

Who's to say he didn't want that future for me, and who's to say their deaths wouldn't make me more inclined towards it, wouldn't be a breaking point after weeks or months in this room? Who's to say I wouldn't help him do the same thing to countless other families, just like my own…?

"No."

A fluttering began in my stomach, akin to the instinctual 'fight or flight' fear, but I knew that this was different. This wasn't telling me to run away so that I could live, but to escape this room so that my parents could live. Because there wasn't a single other person in this world, right at this moment, that could help them. I feared only, suddenly, that I would be unable to do what I had to.

But I needed to overcome that. Needed to try something. Needed to get out. But how?

My insides jumping, I looked back towards the door. I could try it, but I hardly believed they were stupid enough to leave it unlocked. I could try and get them to unlock it from the other side, but they would be prepared, no doubt with tools similar to those they'd used on my back at the house just in case—

Then it hit me: the pokeball!

I looked at the vest by my hands and fumbled for the small, secret pocket. My heart leapt when I found the little sphere, glad they hadn't discovered it, and I clutched it tightly in my sweaty palms.

There was a moment as I got awkwardly to my feet, brief but powerful, where I thought it could be empty; a simple kind of calling card or an accidental bit of evidence, but I couldn't dwell on that. If it was, I'd need a plan B I currently couldn't perceive, and if it wasn't…I swallowed thickly, glaring at the lights above as I readied to open the ball—there would be no turning back.

So, sucking in a breath, legs shaking with anticipation, I whispered, "Go!" and let it roll out of my hands.