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Cinder's POV:
The Captive
My fingers are shaking slightly as I press the numbers displayed on my phone. It beeps, and I raise it up to my ear, holding my breath. Please work please work please work…
The beeping stops, and Kai's cheerful voice buzzes out of the speakers. "Hello. Sorry, but I can't get to my phone right now. Please leave a message, and feel free to call me back later!"
I sigh and turn off my phone. That's the third time I've called, and he's still not answering. There's no denying it now: he's ignoring me.
I'd barely gotten any sleep last night. My head was buzzing with everything that had happened. Scarlet, Sybil Mira, the werewolves, but mostly, that conversation in the hospital. The way the others all looked at me when I told them what was really going on. The way Kai had looked at me… I can't help a slight wince at the memory.
Scarlet had taken it the best, but I'm not sure she counted because by the time I finished she was only half-conscious and giggling a little. I'm sure that at this moment she is furiously ranting about it and attracting a load of weird looks from the doctors. So really, the person who took it best was Thorne, who mostly just shook his head and muttered about how stupidly crazy his life had gotten. Annoyingly, he'd already started calling me Dracula by the time we left the hospital. Cress… well, Cress was just a wreck. She spent a lot of the explanation curled up in a little ball, tears running down her pale cheeks, shaking her head and muttering "It's not true, it's not true." Over and over, like a mantra, in an attempt to convince herself that all of it was nothing more than a bad dream, or a joke gone too far. Judging by the glassy look to her usually bright eyes as her dad took her home for the evening, her attempts were in vain. As for Kai… he wasn't confused. Or sad. Just angry. I'll never forget the fire in his usually calm copper brown eyes, the way his lip curled in disgust as he looked at me. The sharp edges of the words he spat in my direction. The cold quiet of his voice as he said, "You knew. You knew what was wrong with him. You knew how to cure him. And you said nothing. I thought you were my friend, but really, you're nothing more than a liar."
Liar. That word had lingered in my ears all night, like a venomous snake, sinking its poison fangs into my soul with every quiet echo. Liar, liar, liar…
"Cinder!"
I start as the sound of my name pulls me out of my thoughts. I blink at the blue-haired figure who'd spoken, my jumbled thoughts struggling to recognise her for a few moments.
"Hi Iko." I say, when my brain finally catches up to the world around me.
She walks over to stand beside me, yellow eyes narrowed with concern. "Still no answer?"
I shake my head, heaving a sigh. "I don't know why I'm even surprised. You saw his reaction yesterday."
Iko fists her hands on her hips, scowling at the phone in my hand. "It's not like Kai to be this unreasonable for so long."
"Unreasonable? We lied to his face for years!"
"Great, now you're being unreasonable." Iko grumbles, "Cinder, Kai's a nice guy and all, but do you really think he wouldn't laugh in your face if you told him that you're actually a vampire princess who's trying to overthrow a tyrannical queen of another dimension?"
I shudder. "Please don't call me a vampire princess. That makes me sound like a character straight out of a romance novel."
"That's totally beside the point. The point is, Kai wouldn't have believed you even if you had told him the truth."
"So, we could've told him a half-truth!" I retort, "Said we're immigrants! That our country's a dictatorship!"
Iko shook her head sympathetically. "Cinder, we both know that wouldn't have done anything to change his reaction."
I open my mouth, even though I don't know what I'm going to say, when the phone in my hands suddenly rings.
My eyes dart down to the screen, hope sparking in my chest. Maybe it was Kai. Maybe he wasn't ignoring me after all. Maybe he wasn't mad anymore. But the spark fades as quickly as it came at the sight of Dr Erland's name on the screen.
Sighing, I press the accept call button, putting it on Speaker for Iko. "What is it Erland?"
"First of all, a little respect please." He says indignantly, "And second, come to my house as soon as possible. Something's happened."
Dr Erland glares at me as I make my way to the living room. "I was hoping you'd only bring Iko."
I raise an eyebrow at him. "What's the problem? They already know everything."
"That doesn't mean they get to participate in our meetings!"
"If Thorne says anything stupid, feel free to tell him to shut up."
"We can hear you!" Thorne's voice calls out.
"I know!" I shout back.
Dr Erland sighs and massages his forehead. "Let's just get to it."
I enter the living room, and immediately cringe under the weight of three stares. Cress is winding her long blond hair around her wrist uncomfortably. Thorne is twiddling his thumbs, trying and failing to look casual. Scarlet is picking at the bandage wrapped around her hand. There are some fresh red spots on the white fabric. Kai isn't even here.
I clear my throat and turn to Dr Erland. "So," I say, my voice an octave higher than usual, "what is it you wanted to talk about?"
With one final suspicious glance at my friends, he tells me. "Last night, there was a sudden surge in Lunar bioelectricity on Emperor's Road."
"Cinder, translation please?" Thorne asks me.
I shrug. "Don't look at me, I don't speak scientist."
Dr Erland glares at me. "We've been over this a million times!"
"Your explanations were also in scientist."
There is a quiet giggle. Surprisingly, it came from Cress.
Dr Erland sighs. "In the other dimension, the energy is different to the energy here." He says very slowly. "It is called, "bioelectricity". They use this energy to power the technology they use to travel between dimensions. That surge of Lunar bioelectricity means that they travelled back to their own dimension. Now do you understand?"
We all nod.
"So if they went home, that's a good thing right?" Scarlet says, "Less giant wolves running around."
"Unfortunately, I don't think they only brought themselves back." Dr Erland replies darkly.
He opens his laptop sitting on the coffee table, and pulls up a window showing a photo that… doesn't really show much of anything. It's just some shapeless splodges of colour on a black background.
"Um… what are we looking at here?" Iko asks.
Dr Erland glances around at us. "You all know how infrared works, I assume?"
Thorne scratches his head. "Something to do with heat?"
"Infrared images show how warm or cold something is using colours. What you're looking at here is similar, except instead of heat, it shows bioelectricity."
He points to a silver blob. "This creature here, for example, is Lunar." He points to a golden blob. "And this one is Earthen."
I point to a smudge of colour that seems to be a weird mixture of silver and gold. "What about this one here?"
"That is probably just an Earthen that's really close to a Lunar at this point. Anyway, the footage this image is from shows the Lunars taking the Earthens away. And judging from the size and rough shape of the Earthens, these are humans."
Iko sucks a breath in through her teeth. "Ooh, that's going to be one painful trip for those poor guys."
"Are they going to torture them or something?" Scarlet asks.
Iko shrugs. "Probably. But when you go into a dimension that's not yours, your body does not like it. The result: a whole lot of agony. Like legitimately-wish-you-were-dead kind of agony."
I notice that Scarlet's turned very still. "Is something wrong?"
She shakes her head. "No, no, it's nothing."
I frown, opening my mouth to question her further, but Cress speaks first. "Do you know who was taken?"
Dr Erland shakes his head. "Unfortunately I haven't yet found a way to switch the film from bioelectric detection to real foota-Crescent, don't touch my computer!"
Cress ignores him, her fingers flying over that keys. Occasionally she clicks on something and there's a ding. We all exchange confused glances, trying to figure out what the heck she's doing. But this is Cress. The only one who understands what she can do with computers is, well, her.
Eventually, she turns the laptop around to face us. The shapeless splodges are gone, replaced with high-definition images. A group of werewolves are piled on top of one, large brown wolf. Two humanoids are glaring at each other, and one of them is holding…
I feel the blood drain away from my face and I take a shaky step back in an effort to somehow escape from the digital image. Because, stuck in the grip of that Lunar, is Kai.
A/N: Sorry the cliff-hanger didn't get resolved, but hey! The group is properly starting to form!
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