(A/N): Sorry this was a bit later than you may have expected... I wrote Chapter 22, for one thing, so there's now a longer run, and I had to edit some of it to make details line up (it's just minor, minor things now... I couldn't fix them or was too lazy to), so, here's Chapter 21!
PS: As pointed out my Marquis Carabas in a PM, the Dragon Order DOES rely on muggle technology a great deal - in their society, muggles and wizards are roughly on par with each other, and it's the 'half-breeds' (muggle-borns and squibs) that are below with no rights. Just so that people got that :)
PPS: There's also a link mentioned somewhere in here... the 'link' is the promise made between Melanie and Coraline earlier that they would stay together forever. If I remember right, it was the chapter right before Coraline went to the Other World for the third time.
PPPS: I just wanted to add a third one of these XD
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: LIGHT
First the van. Then a train. Then an airplane. Each time they changed vehicles, Coraline was reminded that they were moving farther away from Melanie.
As they went along their way, more children joined them - Coraline and her guard were soon traveling with possibly another fifty children of varying ages and their guards. The train and the plane were filled with kids who had no more tears to cry.
As the hours turned to days, Coraline began to feel desperation flooding her mind. She had broken the promise. She had broken the link...
One day, Coraline got off a bus and found that the group was in front of an impossibly tall building. Walking in, they were taken down random hallways, with the group splitting in half at points until it was just her.
Her guard led her down the hall to be put in a cell containing seven scared people (from what she could tell, they aged from around her age to seventeen). The kids in the other cells along the hallway looked at the newcomer to their domain. The guard left shortly.
One of the kids in her cell, a boy of around seventeen with a ragged appearance, asked her, "D'ya want some Magic, kid?"
The teen apparently didn't care about her answer, but walked over and gave her a strange substance unlike anything she had ever seen.
"Ah can't tell yah where ah get it. Ah jus' do, got dat?"
"How do you use it?"
"Yah smoke it, kid. Yah're a dumbass, ain't yah? Yah think ah'd be here if ah had any'o the real stuff?"
Coraline, barely conscious, saw light through her lids.
She was almost blinded by it, but didn't move. She knew something was open - the hatch she had been unable to find since she came in the room.
She opened her eyes to glimpse it shutting very quickly and silently. In the light she saw the food and water they had left in the middle of the room.
The hatch across the room shut, and Coraline was left in darkness.
(A/N): We'll get out of these memory sequences soon, don't worry. Is next chapter soon enough? XD
Anyway, there's a bunch of action coming up, and then the final climax, and then the epilogue... I think that's it, then. Unless I set it up for a sequel, which is not possible in this thing's canon, as it ends with a nice little 'shocker ending' that's actually pretty well set up, if I do say so myself. It's got around - five? - deaths in it. I think. I can't remember :P