For a second I thought he might smash his way through by force of will alone; he slammed his hand against the divider, again, and again, and again.
He stared at me, his eyes wild, as if silently begging me to survive this. To outlast it, outlast even him.
I crawled to the glass, cheek hot and throbbing, and pressed my palm to where his face hovered.
He mirrored me, and we stayed like that, breathing the air between us.
I couldn’t tell if I was comforting him, or the other way around.
The violence receded, but it left an afterburn in the air: the man’s words, the way he’d described me, the black hunger that seemed to be the only real thing left inside me.
I hated that he was right.
What terrified me was not the pain, but the clarity, the sense that I could become whatever monster he wanted, given enough time and pressure. I could taste the animal in my spit, the way it curdled around my tongue.
Eventually, the pain faded. Replaced by an emptiness so vast I thought it might swallow me whole.
I tried to feel anger at Caiden for his uselessness, his inability to save either of us, but it was like poking a corpse with a stick.
I didn’t feel hatred. I didn’t feel anything.
The silence blossomed. The darkness pressed in around us, but I was grateful for it.
Darkness hid the worst of our wounds, made us secret again, unobservable, unspectacular.
THE PRESENT
AMELIA
The isolation slowly eroded my sanity.
Caiden stood just beyond the barrier of the cage, yet he felt impossibly far away, and I stumbled deeper into the shadows. My flesh had grown cold from the absence of warmth; I longed to be held.
In this warped atmosphere, I yearned for that person to be Caiden, for he was all I had in this desolate room. We were two ghosts adrift in decay, bound by our desperate need to reclaim the light.
Civilization felt like a distant memory, a dreamlike dystopia where safety and security had become forgotten luxuries. The thought echoed in my mind: we cannot die down here.
That was my driving force. I refused to succumb to another corrupt experience; I would survive.
Yet, I often wondered what my mental state would be once we escaped. Would I still be the same person I was before this wilderness retreat?
Silence enveloped us, stretching time into an unbearable eternity. Each moment forced me to question my senses. Was I truly here? Was Caiden really there? The scents of decay drifted in and out, and strange sounds erupted from the depths of the basement.
It was crippling.
My breath hitched in a ragged gasp, caught in the suffocating stillness. Was this madness, or merely the result of prolonged deprivation?
The line between reality and insanity blurred, the very fabric of my existence fraying at the edges.
I pressed my forehead to the wire mesh, letting the cold pattern imprint itself on my skin. The ache in my jaw had faded to a dull pulse, but the memory lingered, a sourness behind my eyes that refused to drain away.
I could not stop thinking about the precision of his violence, the way he’d calibrated the force of his hand to stun but not shatter, to mark me without marring.
He wanted us intact, or at least recognizable—to ourselves, to each other, to whatever god might be watching.
I thought about what he’d said, about mothers eating their young. I imagined mine, gaunt and trembling, dragging me to the mouth of some deep, wet cave and gnawing my limbs until I was nothing but a shorn, voiceless stump.
I imagined myself doing the same to Caiden, if pressed hard enough. I didn’t want to, but the urge curled in my belly like a parasite, whispering that one day I would be grateful to have someone softer than bone to bite down on.
