15 – 'The Hollow'
Loren's head was pounding from the moment he opened his eyes. He didn't need his medical training to know that he had concussion.
He became aware of his injuries one by one, and began cataloguing them as he would with any patient he was expected to treat. There was a deep laceration in his right side, just below his epigastrium. His wrist was at least sprained, maybe broken – it was hard to tell with ropes thick around his hands. His hair felt matted and sticky, probably with blood from the wound that had caused his concussion. His legs felt numb, and for a moment he panicked that they weren't there at all. Through his hazy thoughts he realised it was down to the position he had been bound in – on his knees, as though in prayer. He shifted them and with a hot spreading pain, he discovered the burns on his shins, second-degree at best.
Feeling intensely sick and thirsty, but satisfied he was in no immediate medical danger, Loren turned his attention to his surroundings. The wall he faced was odd. It was not metal, like all the walls he had ever known in his life. It was solid, inconsistent in its various colours and patterns that seemed to move and stretch in the firelight. He was close enough to press his cheek to it, so he did, using it to investigate in place of his restrained hands. The wall was cold, slightly slimy. Was this… rock?
Earth! That was right, he had come to Earth!
He smiled, though it made his cracked lips sting. He'd actually made it. And to think his first sight of this brave new world was a rock wall two inches from his face.
The air tasted wet, of something organic. He sucked at it hungrily, calculating that he'd been without food or water for roughly forty-eight hours.
But if he really was on Earth, who would have done this to him?
Starved, bound, with his wounds untreated… he knew some of the young criminals would be less than pleased to see him, but he had been expecting a warmer welcome than this.
He tried to loosen his bindings. Now he was here, he had a job to do. His hands were stuck fast behind his back, unable to reach the treasure in his inside pocket. His skin itched from the movement, and he realised his burns must be more severe than he first thought.
He heard footsteps, and immediately tried to shuffle around to see who was coming.
"Hello?" he called out, as loud as he dared. "You might not recognise me, but I swear I don't mean you any harm. It's me, I'm Loren Matthews, the medical apprentice. I know what the Ark did to you all, but I want you to know I don't condone it. I came here to help you! I was sent by –"
Someone hit him on the back of the head. He saw his blood spatter against the wall.
While he was still reeling, his assailant span him around. The person was holding a flaming torch that blinded him at first. Between squinting and blinking, Loren began to understand the face he saw before him.
He wasn't one of the One Hundred. Firstly, he was far too old – probably early thirties. It was just so hard to tell under all that war paint. Loren had seen plenty of old-Earth documentaries about prehistoric hunters and the way they decorated themselves to seem more unsettling to their prey, and this man didn't need the blood-red markings that covered his face. Loren was already unsettled by the look in his deep-set eyes. His clothes were patchwork, and caked with dirt. Most striking of all was his hair – black, swept to one side, to better expose the animal skin pattern that was closely-shaved against his skull. Loren didn't know this man, but he knew that he frightened him.
"P-Please…" he said, feebly, though he wasn't quite sure what he was about to beg for. His life? Some information? Just a sip of water?
The man gave him a warning look and backed away, revealing the room in full.
It would have been circular, if it had a man-made shape. The erraticness of the walls and their sudden jutting sides told Loren this was a cave. It felt like an old word, and he'd never really understood its meaning until now. Even the floor was wall, and there was no sky to speak of. The space was big enough not to trigger his phobia, but he still felt buried and hopeless. His chest tightened horribly.
There was nothing else in the cave, except for the person strung up like a doll right next to him. He almost leapt out of his skin. Her appearance was so sudden, though she had obviously been there all along. Her head was slumped, yellow-blonde hair tumbling in tangled waves over her face. Her arms and legs were bound separately, apart, leaving her standing like a suffering starfish.
The man produced a dirty container of water and pressed it roughly to the girl's lips. She awoke suddenly, lifting her head to drink desperately from the sudden gush of water. She was pallid and trembled softly where she hung. Starved, Loren diagnosed. As soon as the man pulled the cup away, the girl was out again.
"She needs food," Loren said, remembering to wear his best expression for telling patients news they did not want to hear. "And possibly medicine. If you have my bag, I could –"
The man pressed the cup to Loren's lips mid-sentence, and he almost choked on the water. He gulped it down as best as he could. Then the man began to gather his things and grabbed his torch.
"Please!" Loren called to his back. The water had reinvigorated his bravery. "Just bring her some food. I don't know what you want with her but she'll be no good to you if she's dead."
The man muttered something Loren didn't understand, and left, taking the light with him. Loren was left in the dark and silence to ignore his own gnawing hunger pains.
It was some time later before he thought to try and speak to the girl. The darkness had an anaesthetic effect that dulled him of his panic or indeed his reason. More than a few times, he just barely stopped himself from falling asleep by trying to recite the correct treatment for osteomyelitis but his brain was too foggy to even remember the symptoms.
The fourth time he caught his eyelids drooping, he risked a timid, "Hello?" to the girl, but she didn't even shift in reply. He tried a few more times, generic statements of bedside manner, such as, "Can you tell me your name?", "I'm right here," and, "Everything's going to be okay".
He repeated the last one a few times, in the hope that he'd start to believe it himself.
Eventually he found that singing helped. He'd always liked music, but never enough to perform in front of other people. In the dark and the silence, it was easy to forget that anyone else was there.
He sang an old song, one of his mother's favourites, stumbling over the words he couldn't quite remember. The cave lent its own curious acoustics to his voice, made it sound like it was coming from somewhere outside of him. The thought soothed him. He was struggling to remember the chorus when he heard a murmur from somewhere beside him.
"Excuse me?" he said, his confidence falling away. "Did you say something?"
"The words… you got them wrong."
The girl's voice was shaky and broken, but Loren almost laughed with relief.
"It's 'cause I'm tired of feeling alone'...not 'being alone'," she added.
"You know it?"
"Of course."
The cave fell as quiet as it was dark. Loren shifted uncomfortably in his bindings.
"I didn't say you should stop."
Loren flushed with colour, and was glad she couldn't see him. "Singing?"
"Yeah," the girl agreed. "Go on...please."
He tried to ignore the sound of her fluttering breaths, to imagine that he was alone. And he sang, because it was all he could do. She let him continue, uninterrupted, until he fumbled a running note and she stepped in to help. Her voice was small and wavering, but for every verse they completed together, she began to sound that little bit stronger. Loren took comfort in the fact, and by the time they reached the end of the song, his self-consciousness had slipped away with his exhaustion. They met the final note together like a duet that had been accompanying one another for years.
The last note rang out in the echoes of the cave, and they fell silent once again. Loren didn't want to speak, didn't want to break the spell of safety they'd created for themselves in that dank, dark prison. But soon he found his questions burned more intensely than his skin wounds.
"Who is he? The man who's captured us?"
"I don't know his name, but I call him Ocelot. You know, because of the hair. He's a Grounder," the girl paused. "Earth-born."
"Are they trying to hurt us?"
"They've hurt some of us, yeah."
"Aren't you scared?"
She sucked in a breath that might have contained her answer. "We just have to wait for our chance. That's all."
He tried to imagine the two of them, injured and weak from hunger, trying to overwhelm the huge man to escape. Every scenario he pictured played out badly for them. He wouldn't tell her that. He refused to crush her spirit.
"You're Loren Matthews, aren't you?" The girl asked. "How did you get here?"
Loren was pleasantly surprised. The girl knew him, though they hadn't exchanged a single word on the Ark. "Yes, that's right. I… I borrowed an escape pod."
"Borrowed?" She chuckled. "That implies you're going to give it back. I think the word you're looking for is 'stole'. You stole an escape pod."
He didn't have a defence for that. It was, after all, the truth. It didn't sound as though she was judging him, but she could, if she wanted. Because he knew her, had known her from the moment he'd seen her face. She was a piece of his own personal puzzle, the reason he was here on Earth in the first place. "It wasn't for nothing though. I've been given a mission, and I think it involves you, Seren."
"Wait, what did you just call me?"
The unmistakeable sound of footsteps could be heard from the mouth of the cave. Loren guessed it must have been a tunnel, from the way the sound travelled, reverberating endlessly around the mossy walls.
Loren tried to explain as quickly as he could. "I recognised you, when I saw you earlier. I have a picture of you, in a box I was given. It has your name on the back: 'Seren Hecate Ward'. It had your birthday too, you're a Taurus."
The torch of their captor was throwing erratic light all around the cave. Both of them winced at the brightness, but now Loren could see he was right, beyond a doubt. The impression of her was much younger, but yes, she was definitely the girl in the picture.
"That's not my name," the girl breathed. "I'm Marlow. Driftwood. I don't know where you got this picture, but –"
"Shof op!" came a booming voice from the cave entrance.
It was the man Marlow had dubbed Ocelot, and if the tone of his voice hadn't silenced them, the look on his face might just have. Loren was sure he had imagined how spiteful and cruel the man had looked, during his quiet hours in the dark. It seemed the reality was much harsher.
Both Loren and Seren – Marlow, whoever she was – watched the man with lips shut tight and eyes downcast. He set his torch into the rocky wall, then did something Loren would never have expected. He sat down cross-legged on the floor. He stared at them, then slowly, from his pack, produced a strip of white meat, browned at the edges from the fire it had been cooked in.
The smell flooded the cave immediately. Loren's mouth filled with saliva, his tongue already imagining the taste. The meat on the Ark had become a rare, tasteless thing – a product of a hundred years of close interbreeding and chemical injections to replace the sunlight the animals would never again see. But this. This was the real thing. Loren guessed it was the breast of a chicken, or maybe a pheasant. All he knew for sure was his hunger.
Wordlessly, the Grounder began peeling strips from the tiny breast. He held it up between pinched fingers with cracked and dirty nails.
"How many of you are there?" he said, in English devoid of any accent.
Loren and Marlow exchanged a glance. The game was clear: play along, give him the information, and their prize would be the food they so desperately craved. Let him try, Loren thought, jaw clenching as though to keep the words locked behind his teeth. There was no way either of them would –
"A hundred," Marlow answered in a heartbeat. "Plus one, if you count him."
The Grounder tossed the meat at Marlow like she was a dog collecting scraps under the table. She caught it, and Loren heard her swallow.
Had she gone mad from the hunger? She was betraying her people. He'd seen enough interrogations in old movies to know this wasn't how things were supposed to play out. There was supposed to be a battle of wits, a threat, or at the very least a refusal.
"Do you have weapons?"
"Some," Marlow confirmed. "But soon we'll have more."
He tossed her the chicken. She ate.
"Where from?"
"We're making them," she answered. "Can I have a drink this time?"
The Grounder obliged, pushing the cup to her lips. She thanked him obediently.
"What kind of weapons are these?"
"Bombs, mostly. But we've made other things, more basic. Like that knife you took from me."
Marlow nodded towards the wooden knife tucked into Ocelot's leather belt. He shrugged his indifference. "It's a good knife. At least for skinning chickens." Suddenly he looked at Loren. "You. Why have you come here?"
Loren stiffened. "I can't tell you."
"You can't?" The Grounder said through gritted teeth, the meat dangling tantalizingly from his fingers.
"I won't!" Loren clarified, shaking his head so his curls covered his eyes.
The man turned to Marlow. "Do you know why he's here?"
"We haven't had much chance to talk, but he said he had a mission. Apparently he has some photograph of me. That's all I know."
He threw her the chicken. Loren felt a black hole begin where his stomach should be, and he wasn't entirely sure it was from the hunger.
Ocelot wiped his hands on his dusty clothes. "Pretty little boy wants to starve," he observed. "Suit yourself." He crammed the remainder of the food into his own mouth, sucking the grease from each finger as he did so. Without another word, he packed up his things, took his torch, and left them in the darkness.
Loren couldn't find the composure to speak to her for a long time. He was still battling his disbelief when Marlow finally said, "I know it's not much, but I let a piece fall on to the floor. It's about a hand-span away from my right foot, if you can find it."
Loren didn't move.
"Why did you do that?" he asked weakly, into the darkness. "Why would you sell out your friends to someone like him?"
Marlow's voice was steady when she eventually chose to reply. "That wasn't an interrogation."
"It looked like one to me."
"It was a trust exercise. Everything he asked us, he knew the answer to already. He's been watching our camp, setting up traps to catch us. He knows how many of us there are, what weapons we have. If he watches closely enough he'll see the bombs being made."
"You shouldn't have told him about the photograph."
"You told him yourself!" Marlow sounded incredulous. "Announcing it at the top of your voice while he was coming in here. He even knows my star sign, for God's sake. Why would you even say that out loud?"
Loren scratched at the ground with his bound feet, feeling like a scolded child. "I didn't know he could speak English," he muttered.
"So treat this as a learning experience. We know the guy speaks English, he's stingy with his rations, he smells like a skunk's armpit – and, most importantly, if we want any chance at all of getting out of here, we have to play along with his games."