And I want to drown her in the hot springs.
I want her to choke on the water, the heat, and die in it, because how fucking dare she, how dare she communicate like that with me, as if we are somehow in “this” together, the inability to wash because of males? She thinks there is a kinship to be found in me, just in this one moment, but all other moments she is slaughtering my kind.
I have nothing but loathing for her.
I have nothing but pure, unfiltered hatred for the beasts that act just as the beasts of humans do.
Because there is nothing I hate more in this dark world than seeing that we might not be so different.
That festers in me, rotting my soul, twisting my face. I hug my knees to my chest too tightly, and my shins start to ache.
The emptiness of my stare pierces into the cold warrior as he rises up to the surface, shrouded in steam and shadows.
That loathing in me was a flame—now it’s a blaze.
He runs his hands over his hair, flattening it back, before he gestures to the female—and he speaks a single word, a curt sound, that has her chucking a bar of soap at him.
It cuts through the mist, fast as a bolt of lightning.
The warrior catches it with a swipe, too easy, before he starts to run the bar down his chest.
A huff swells my cheeks.
I’m not exactly feeling secure enough to be bored, but there is the return of that hollow hum amidst the anger, that emptiness, a void that just grows and grows.
I slide a tempted look at my backpack.
Magazines in there. Books, too.
But I’m in a magazine mood. That sort of temper that’s best to read trash in, stories that don’t matter, fillers in the blank spots of life.
That’s what I need right now.
But I leave theVogueandPeopleuntouched for now.
Doesn’t matter anyway, everyone in those mags, in the pictures, in the stories, everyone behind it who took the pictures and wrote the articles—they’re all dead.
Maybe one or two survive in the units, with the captives, somewhere in the world.
Like the people here down at the riverbank, washing leathers, and some further down at the end of the rockpools, starting small fires, pouring rice into pots.
Most of them work.
The tattered ones.
But that smaller group down there, of the well-kept women, sit by the warmth of a rockpool.
Not one of them chips in with the other captives.
Like me, they don’t do a single chore.
A guard is posted closer to them, not wandering the border of the light and dark, not staring directly at them, but casually wandering a pace back and forth, as though unbothered, or completely fucking secure in that those three women won’t run—or won’t get very far.
I find Connie among them.
And my eyebrows lift as she brings a red stick to her mouth and bites into it.
A Twizzler.
