Looking around, I see I’ve cleared this entire section of cells, but I’m not leaving yet. I might not know exactly who Emonie and Wick are or who they areto me, but I know that we were arrested together. And I know that Emonie gave me that Vulmin ring, trying to help me remember.
I have to find them.
So I work meticulously. Thoroughly. As quickly as I can.
The inmates crawl out from their dark spaces like rats flooded from their holes. Some look like they’re near death, others like they’ve only just been tossed in. Most take one look at me and my coiling ribbons and run the other way toward freedom.
But none of them are the two people I saw in my memory.
I pull at my tangled hair in frustration.Where are they?
A sinister thought enters my head, telling me they could be dead already, that I could be searching for them for nothing. I bat the thought away. I refuse to believe that until I see it with my own eyes.
But my frustration continues to build with every cell I open. Luckily, I get to take it out on the next two groups of guards that I run into. After they refuse to tell me any information, I leave them as gold lumps upon the floor.
When I open the very last cell on the very bottom level and find another woman who isn’t Emonie, I lean against the wall, panting hard, sweat dripping down my temples.
They’re not here.
I slam my hand against the wall in frustration, teeth gritted and eyes burning.
“Lady Auren?”
I jerk upright at the call, looking at the woman as she gets up from where she was crouched in her cell. She has a mark on her cheek, like someone took a whip and lashed it across her face.
I study her, hoping recognition will flare, but it doesn’t. Tears fill her eyes as she rushes over to me, her bare feet scraping against the floor that’s now littered with flecks of gold.
“Lady Auren,” she pants again, reaching forward to grip my hand. “You saved us!”
My eyes flick up to her ears that are blunt and rounded like mine. My brow furrows, thoughts tripping over the divots in my mind. The information I seek isjustout of reach.
Even though I don’t recognize her, she recognizes me, and it makes a fragment of relief fit into me. It might be strange, but her knowing me makes me feel more real. To her, I’m someone. I just have to figure out exactly who without making myself vulnerable.
The look on my face must show something concerning, because she pauses and peers at me, her hands dropping mine. “Are you alright?”
“How do you know me?” I ask carefully, my tone guarded.
She blinks. “You…you came to save us. At the manor. Remember? I first saw you in the village.”
My thoughts stall, her words not bringing up any connections. “Do you know who Wick and Emonie are?” I ask, changing tactics.
Her face screws up in thought, and she shoves away limp, oily clumps of hair. “Are they the ones who came with you?”
“I…think so?”
She shakes her head. “You three weren’t brought down to these levels with us.”
“Us?”
“More of us Oreans, yes. They didn’t kill us all,” she tells me, tongue darting out to her cracking lip as it quivers. “Though I think that’s only because they wanted to use us against you.”
Oreans.
I feel my brows draw together in a frown. That word is just at the edge of a memory…
The woman’s eyes drift over my shoulder, and then she suddenly runs past me. “You’re okay!”
I watch as she hugs another man, and then five others reunite with wet eyes. I’m guessing these are the Oreans she mentioned. Each of them is marked with their own evidence of abuse, and each of them has blunt ears.
