by D. N. Hoxa
“Okay,” said Millie with a sigh when we could no longer even see the entrance. “Okay. You’re okay.”
I’m not, was what I wanted to say. “Where are we, Millie?”
She resembled more a ghost than herself when she looked at me. “We’re in a mining site. The biggest mining site in Alfheimr,” she said in a breath. “And we’re working for the masters for some no-name precious metal.”
“Working?” That didn’t look like work to me.
Squeezing her eyes shut for a second, she let go of a long breath. “Look, the people here don’t exactly talk. All I know is that the masters are looking for something, a rare metal, a very valuable metal, and we’re stuck here until we find it.”
“We’re slaves,” I whispered, unable to comprehend the meaning of that word properly.
“Workers,” she insisted, but it was for her benefit, not mine. She couldn’t handle the world slave any more than I could. “The good news is, as soon as one of us finds even a trace of it, we’re free. We’re all free to go home.”
As ridiculous as that sounded, I couldn’t bring myself to laugh. “Are you kidding me?”
Rolling her eyes, she stepped away. “No, Morgan, I’m not kidding.”
“Come on, Millie. Look at this place. Look at these people!”
“These people are working their asses off to find that thing so we can all go home,” she insisted.
“You really think they’d let us go even if we find whatever the hell it is they’re looking for?” I wasn’t mocking her—I was just curious.
“I do,” she said, and though I hadn’t known her for long, I knew she didn’t believe herself anymore than I believed her.
“Then you’re a fool,” I whispered despite my better judgment.
Her chin quivered. “Do you have any better ideas, Morgan? Because we’re here now and we’re not going anywhere. If I don’t believe that there’s an end to it, how the hell am I going to get through it?”
The humans walking by us didn’t bother to even raise their heads. Nobody spoke a single word. They all seemed…broken. Way beyond repair.
“We have to get out of here,” I whispered. Better safe than sorry.
But Millie shook her head. “Can’t be done.”
“Sure it can. I just need to check this place out and make a plan.” And wait for nightfall. And find a weapon. And a way out. And… “Sim!”
The memory of him fighting those guards punched me in the gut. He’d been here! Sim had come back to help me, but…
“Where is Sim?” Millie asked halfheartedly.
“Here,” I said, looking around the tunnel as if the imp was going to appear in front of me any second now. “He was here. He was with me when they caught me.”
“Then he’s gone,” she said. “You were alone when they caught you.”
I smiled. Finally some good news because if they hadn’t caught Sim, he was going to come back for us. He’d done it once. Why wouldn’t he do it again? A weak ray of hope lit my face. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Something I could hold onto until I figured out what to do next.
“We’re going to get out of here, Millie,” I whispered, feeling a little more like myself.
“I know,” she said with a small smile. Again, I got the feeling that she didn’t really believe in her own words.
“We really are,” I assured her. We just had to be ready for when Sim came. Because he would come.
“Until then, you better learn how to use that shovel because if you’re caught not working, they’ll throw you in the pit, and there’s no way in hell you’ll ever get out of there.”
This time, her words rang truer than the hell we were in.
The pit was a series of more holes in the ground where they put the people who disobeyed for the night or a week, or even a month. According to Millie, nobody had ever survived for a month because apparently they didn’t give food or water to the people in the pit. But they did to the rest of us. Breakfast and lunch—no dinner. What they called food was a piece of bread so hard I could break someone’s bones with it and some sort of stew that smelled like bad morning breath. I ate because I needed my strength, but by God, I wouldn’t wish that stuff on my worst enemy.
No, wait. I would. I would make the masters eat as much of that thing as possible, if I ever had my way. A girl can only dream.
Lucky for me, I already knew how to use the shovel because Charles had put me to work in the small garden behind his training center more than once—against my will, I might add. But the end of the tunnel we were in was far from a garden. It opened into a huge cave with so many gas lamps on the walls they looked like fireflies. No Valkyries, but there were guards in there, flashing their swords, looking angrily at us as if to say, don’t even think about it. But I did. I thought about it. There were seventeen of them in the cave where about fifty humans worked their way deeper into the ground. Mud and white rock all around us, but nothing else—no rare, valuable metal that the masters wanted so badly as to enslave all the humans who’d had the misfortune to pass through a screen to Alfheimr.
I’d asked myself many times before why the masters gave away their things and their clothes marked with sigils that could enable humans to pass through screens. The answer was finally staring me right in the face, and it didn’t feel any better knowing. Not at all.
Everybody kept on working. The people had no uniforms, no hats and no lights aside from the gas lamps. Some of them were young, but others old. Really old. How long had these people been here? And did they really believe that when they found whatever the masters were looking for, they’d get to go home?
I don’t know if that was it, or if it was the Valkyries, or the bones of the people who’d lost their lives in this place that they kept out in the open in piles for everyone to see, or even if the fear of dying had something to do with it, but each and every human in that cave worked like they were getting paid millions. Whatever they’d seen, whatever they’d heard, it kept their heads down and their mouths shut, and that alone scared me more. How was it that so many people refused to take action against the guards and the Valkyries when they could outman them easily? What kept them so obedient, and did I want to know?
In the end, it didn’t matter. No matter what Millie said or believed, there was no way I was spending another day in that hole, slaving for the fucking masters like they owned me when they didn’t. I would do whatever it took, start a riot if I had to, but one thing was for certain: I was going to get out of there.
Eleven
I was right about one thing. I didn’t spend one more day in that mining site—I spent seven.
Seven days and three failed escape attempts.
Seven days of hushed conversations and avoiding eye contact. Seven days of that awful food and water that tasted contaminated like raw sewage.
But it was only my third night in the pit, so there was that.
It was an unusual night—a starry night, at least when the clouds cleared. It was pretty to look at through the wooden bars of my hole in the ground. I’d already gotten used to the smell, and I feared I smelled worse. They didn’t do showers here, apparently. Good thing they weren’t big believers in mirrors, too.
The first two nights I tried to escape through the gates through which I came in. The containers I’d seen and hidden on were where we slept. We—the slaves.Our beds consisted of a mattress filled with hay, and of course, no pillows or sheets. Who needs those, right? I tried not to think too much of it, or the “dress” I’d found at the end of the mattress the first morning I woke up in the container. Millie said I was required to wear it and leave my clothes on the mattress. When I got back, they wouldn’t be there. I said, hell no. I was going to keep my clothes, thank you very much. And then I’d tried to leave the container, and eight guards had showed me that their swords were there to make sure I did as I was told. Despite the anger, I’d returned inside and left my clothes on the mattress. I never found them again. Now, I wo
re a colorless dress that was more like a piece of fabric with three holes in it for my head and arms, and fell all the way down to my ankles.
On the third night, I tried to take my time. I planned for four days, and on the fifth, I made my attempt. I aimed for the main gates, as I’d watched the guards closely, and found they changed shifts at midnights, and the gates were unguarded for forty seconds each night. It was my chance to test the waters. I was going to get out of there and drag Millie with me if I had to, no matter that she was too scared to try.
Turns out, she was right to be scared. I thought I had a chance when I actually reached the gates and looked up to see if I could climb. I had twenty seconds left, if I counted right, and twenty seconds would have to do for both Millie and me to get to the other side. Then, we could run and hide in the woods, and disappear from that place forever. I’d gladly go back to Vanah if I had to—just as long as it was far away from this place.
But I’d failed to calculate one thing—or maybe four. The Valkyrie that stepped soundlessly behind me while I searched for a good place to climb the wooden gates was very hard to miss. Her shadow under the weak light of the moon enveloped me, and I jumped around just in time to see her blue eyes as they narrowed. She didn’t do much—just slapped me with the back of her huge hand and threw me three feet to the side. My jaw and ribs could tell you the story much better if they could speak and complain about the pain.
Then came the guards, angrier than I’d ever seen them before. They threw me against the ground and kicked the hell out of me before they pulled me up and dragged me to the pit. I think I understood why. While they dragged me to the pit, I could see the body just ten feet away from me, lying on the ground, motionless—the body of a guard. It was the third one they’d brought in at night that I’d seen. Something was hunting them out there—or someone—and I couldn’t have been happier, even though I’d gotten a good beating, probably for interrupting them while they carried the body.
Now I was in the pit again, and I was afraid that this time they were going to keep me here for a week, if not for the whole month.
“You keep ending up in here,” said a voice from my left. I couldn’t turn because my ribs were a mess, but I’d already seen the man in the pit next to mine.
“You speak.”
I’d tried to talk to him the first night. He’d been there for God knows how long. He was about thirty if I had to guess, looking healthier than half the other slaves but just as dirty. His hair could have been blond, but it was now black from who knows how many missed showers, and the rag that covered his torso smelled of rot. He sat on the ground, like me, with his head against the wooden bars buried deep in the ground that separated us.
“Are you stupid or something? How many more times are you going to try to escape?” he asked. His heavy accent said he was definitely not American.
“As many times as it takes.” I tried to turn my head so I could see him better. My jaw protested by sending a jolt of pain up to my brain. “Where are you from?”
“Germany. You?” he said with a weird smile on his face, as if he knew secrets I didn’t. His teeth, at least, were still white.
“New York. How long have you been down here?”
“A few nights before you first came here. I’ve lost track of time since.”
I raised my brows. “That’s probably more than a week. How are you still awake?” I’d only gone hours without water, and I was already feeling like shit.
His grin grew. “I have ways.”
Hopefully he’d share said ways because I had the feeling I was going to stay down there for a while.
“You didn’t answer my question. You dumb or something?” Though his accent was heavy, I could still make out his words perfectly.
I smiled. “Or something.” How was it that you were considered stupid for trying to escape this place?
“You are not gonna make it, you know. Lotta people have tried before you. Weston’ll tell you all about it,” he said in wonder.
“Who’s Weston?” People didn’t exactly share names in that place. They barely even talked to each other.
“Possibly the oldest man here who still lives,” he said, waving his finger in a circle. “You should hear the stories he has to tell.”
“What stories?” The man shrugged and looked up as if to check if someone was listening. Nobody was. “Come on, we have nothing but time to kill.”
“Until time kills us.” He smiled again, and it made him look like the freaking Cheshire Cat.
“Indulge me. Tell me your story,” I said, hoping to have something to distract myself with other than the throbbing pain in my body. Fuck, that Valkyrie had been strong. I hadn’t forgotten how big she was, either. Screw trolls—she was someone I’d think twice about attacking.
“No story to tell. Was going about my business one day about five years or so ago when I stumbled into one of those screens and found myself here. The devils in black found me couple days later.”
He shrugged. The devils in black were Lion-eyes and his friends, the ones who roamed the world in search of humans, apparently. The majority of the slaves were brought in by them. God, how I wish I could kill each and every one of them with my bare hands. “Been here ever since.”
Sennan was right. I’d taken my freedom in Vanah and his protection for granted, and I’d had no idea.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered before I realized. This was no place for sorry.
“Sorry is not gonna save us.” He was absolutely right.
I felt myself getting dragged to the far ends of hopelessness. I’d been in this world for three years, and I didn’t know what went on in even half of it. To see that I wasn’t the only one and that so many people had suffered the same fate as me, and no one had made it out was heartbreaking.
“Tell me about Weston’s stories.” Another useless attempt to distract myself.
My fellow pit-prisoner/slave sighed, like that was going to make him feel lighter. At last, he spoke.
“He told me once about the time this place first began. How the masters rounded up the humans who’d crossed to this land and told them glorious tales about how they were going to save this world if they dug a big hole in the ground, right about here.” He laughed. “Everything was different then, he said. Everything.”
“So what happened?” I had a hard time imagining masters as good guys, who’d ask of people to slave their lives away for them.
“Fuck if I know,” he said with a shrug. “The people probably got sick and tired of digging, so the masters made them. They keep searching for that thing, and they are not gonna stop until they get it.”
“What the hell are they searching for, anyway? There’s no precious metal in this place. Nothing but dirt and rocks.” With a mining site this size, they should have seen that by now.
“Precious metal, my ass,” said the guy. “They are not looking for precious metal.”
My curiosity piqued, I turned my head a bit more, screw the pain.
“What do you mean? What are they looking for then?”
He raised his hands to his sides. “That’s all I know, New York. But you better keep your mouth shut, or it’s my head.”
“No, no, tell me, please. What are the masters really looking for here?” My heart beat fast in my chest, but I wasn’t sure why. Maybe the way the guy looked, like he really knew a secret I didn’t this time.
“C’mon, just tell me. I won’t tell anyone, I swear.” Ignoring the pain, I stood on my knees and grabbed the bars between us.
“All I know is that these fools here believe that humans are going to bring their gods back,” he said reluctantly.
“No kidding. I’ve been caged by Diviners who thought Odin himself was going to come back to them through a human body.” I hadn’t forgotten about the Diviners of Kall or the old man who told me he wanted nothing to do with me.
“Guess everyone hears what they wanna hear from it,” he said. “But that’s all I know.”
“Are you sure? What else did Weston say? Did he mention anything specific?” He had to know. If he really was one of the first people to start digging here, he would know what the hell was going on here and why we were being kept as slaves.
“Don’t know, don’t care. Enough questions, New York,” he said, irritated now.
“C’mon, you can’t leave me with that. You know more. Just tell me, please!” I would beg if I had to.
And I did.
But my fellow slave from Germany didn’t say another word until dawn lit the pits we were in, and guards came to pull me out.
Twelve
I wasn’t sure why they let me out after catching me trying to escape three times. My best guess was that I was fresh meat and I had more energy to spend digging than most of the other slaves . Either way, that was fine by me.
“Do you know Weston? He’s an old guy who tells stories,” I asked Millie when they brought me my shovel and pushed me onto the ground—their very polite way of saying get to work. I found Millie as quickly as I could.
“You have to stop trying to escape, Morgan. There are more than five hundred people in here, and nobody else tries to escape. Doesn’t that tell you something? They’re going to lock you in the pit until you die, and then I’ll be completely alone!” she hissed in my face, her skin pale as a ghost under the dirt. I got that she was worried, but we were going to die if we didn’t get out of that place anyway.
“I really need to find this Weston guy. He’s like one of the first humans to have dug in this site. Do you know him?”
Millie looked offended. “I don’t.” She turned around, pickaxe in hand, and walked deeper into the tunnel.
I went after her. “There must be someone you can ask.”
