Sacred Trust

by Roxanne Barbour

  Her voice suddenly sounded so formal. But I’m sure the universal translator was to blame. Thankfully, my captors had left me my translator, or my captivity would be excruciating.

  And I agreed with her feelings of stress. So I started a letter to my father. I’m not sure when he would ever receive it, but the action did prove therapeutic and improved my mood. After the letter, I worked on a game.

  Eonus and Ruen were as busy as I was. However, I wasn’t sure what projects they worked on. And since I couldn’t read Arandi or Basilian script, I couldn’t even snoop.

  Finally I said, “I’ve made up cards for a game I used to play a lot with my Dad and some friends. The game is called Uno. We could try it this evening.”

  Clunk went the food dispenser; our dinners started to arrive.

  “Good,” said Ruen. “Our tr…I mean, for some reason, I am quite hungry today.”

  “So am I,” I said. “Perhaps our creative activities have stimulated our appetites.”

  “Hungry,” said Eonus. He valiantly tried to go along with our deception.

  In the end, we all actually ate ravenously.

  “Does anyone want to play Uno?” I asked.

  “Certainly. What is it about? How do we play?” asked Ruen.

  “It’s very simple. I’ve made a deck of game cards. That’s all we need to play.” Some heavier card stock had been included in our stack of supplies, along with coloring markers.

  “We each start with seven cards. Each card has a colored symbol. We determine who goes first and then that player starts by playing a card. The next player must either follow with a card of the same symbol or the same color. If you cannot play, you must draw a card from the pile in the middle. When someone runs out of cards in their hand, they are the winner.”

  “Sounds simple,” said Ruen.

  “Easy peasy,” I said. “Well, except for the special cards. I’ve added cards that skip a player, reverse the direction of play, and ones that are wild.”

  “Wild?” asked Eonus.

  “The card lets you match the card on the table,” I said. “Especially useful if you have nothing to play and don’t want to draw a card. After all, the strategy is to get rid of all your cards.”

  After a couple of games, the strategies were apparent. Ruen liked to mess everyone up—she loved Reverse and Skip. Tata, on the other hand, proved to be methodical. Plodding was another word I could have used.

  “That was fun,” said Ruen.

  Eonus nodded, and the amused look on his face made me think he actually enjoyed the game.

  “Good. I have lots of other games in mind to play. Being cooped up is boring,” I said.

  “Yes, it is. But now I am tired. Our snack should appear soon, and then to bed,” said Ruen.

  “I’m tired too.” Unusually tired, I thought. “Perhaps it’s something in our food. None the less, I need a bite to eat, and then a long nap.”

  While we waited for our snack to arrive, we had a short discussion in the amenities room to plan our next day, and then we returned to the main area and the snacks awaiting us.

  “These munchies are pretty good,” I said.

  “Yes. Our captors have our dietary restrictions down pat. I really am getting tired though,” said Ruen. I suspected some sort of mood-altering chemical in our food, but what could I do—other than pursue the thought tomorrow—my eyes were closing.

  I went to sleep thinking how much I missed my father, but at least I wasn’t alone in my forced captivity.

  Chapter 16

  “You know, our food is okay, but the same stuff every day is getting a little monotonous,” I said at breakfast the next morning.

  “No complaints,” said Eonus.

  “What do you mean, no complaints?” I snapped at him. “I’ve got plenty to complain about,” I shouted, jumping up from the stool I was sitting on and sending it rolling across the floor to bounce off the wall. “You hear me out there?” I shouted, striding over to the door and banging my fists on it. “I want out of here! Whoever you are, let us go home! Please!”

  “Nara, stop!” Ruen stood up and ran to me. “You’ll hurt yourself,” she admonished, trying to grab my flailing fists.

  I knew I had to be bruising them on the door but I didn’t care. It took Eonus snatching up my hands and pulling me away from the door to finally halt my tantrum. Still, I stood there, trying to jerk free of his grip on my wrists. “Let me go!” I cried, jerking one hand free to beat on his chest, getting physical in hopes our captors were listening.

  The next thing I knew, I was in his strong arms, held tight to his heaving chest, his heart beating loudly against my ear. My hands were free now to wrap around him, and surprising myself, that was exactly what I did.

  He lowered his mouth to my ear, his breath warm on my skin as his palm rubbed my back. I couldn’t help myself; I shivered in response, the tingle shooting all the way to my toes.

  What was Eonus doing? In the amenities room last night we’d discussed this whole scenario, of the unstable human going into an emotional meltdown, hoping my antics would get some action from our guards. But grabbing me up in his arms and telling me how good I felt there wasn’t in our plans.

  I shoved away from his chest, and peered up at him, doing my best to put the sound of tears in my voice. “At least our captors should let us know what’s going on—why we’re here,” I ranted. “We need information, and we need to see our families.”

  “You need to calm down,” said Ruen, again part of our ploy.

  “I don’t want to calm down! And I don’t want to talk to you guys anymore, so leave me alone!” I stomped over to my bed and plopped down on it hard enough to make the springs squeak.

  The room fell silent. We hoped that final statement of mine would explain our silence while we went exploring again. Our decision last evening had been to go in the opposite direction to our first foray because we decided checking out the tram station would be too much of a risk.

  With as little noise as possible we climbed up into the tunnel and stepped onto the moving walkway, which took in the opposite direction of the one we took yesterday. After passing through an archway we came upon another viewing window. We hopped off the walkway and looked into an enormous compartment, this one devoted entirely to growing fruits and vegetables. With the growing lights in the ceiling instead of in greenhouses, there were several fields that together stretched hundreds of feet in breadth and width.

  “See those people over there?” I whispered, pointing toward the back of the gardens, where about twenty-five individuals were picking some kind of reddish fruit from what looked almost like cacti. “They’re all albinos, except one.”

  “Yellow skin,” said Eonus.

  “Yes. And look how shabbily they’re dressed,” I said, “And they’re all so skinny. Look at all this produce, and they don’t look like they get enough to eat.”

  “Hush,” said Ruen. “I hear voices.”

  I listened, barely hearing the faint drone of voices coming from the mesh of wires, tubes and piping. I motioned for Ruen and Eonus to follow me as I crossed the walkways via one of the access/egress points where you could step off a walkway going one way and either go back the way you’d come on the other walkway or continue on by taking the next walkway moving in the same direction.

  Instead of doing either, I climbed through the maze of conduits and pipes in the center until I came upon a grate in the floor exactly like the one in our cell ceiling. We peered down through it to discover the room below us was filled with albino adolescents. They were sitting in circular rows, with an oddly dressed albino woman in the center, speaking from a raised dais. Her language was so similar to both Basilian and Arandi, many of her words were converted to our native languages by our translators. It soon became obvious this was a class in astrophysics.

  Stunned, we stood there staring at one another until Ruen opened her mouth to speak. I quickly put one hand over her mouth and put a finger to my lips signal
ing quiet until she nodded her understanding. Careful not to make any noise, we climbed back through the maze of pipes and tubes to the alcove on the other side of the walkways where the viewing window was located. It seemed Eonus and I still had no words for what we’d seen. Ruen on the other hand…

  “Who are these people?” she asked me in an urgent whisper.

  “If you and Eonus don’t know, how am I supposed to know? This isn’t exactly my neck of the woods, you know!”

  “Quiet,” Eonus reminded me, as my voice started rising.

  “Sorry. Ruen, how much time do we have left?”

  “One hour. No more than that.”

  “Eonus, should we continue on or go back.”

  “Continue.”

  Ruen and I looked at each other and nodded our agreement. We followed Eonus forward.

  It wasn’t long before we came upon another viewing window and again stepped off the walkway at an access/egress point. Through this window lay a campground with tents scattered throughout and albinos milling about. Although the tent design and materials used in them was different, it reminded me a lot of the Old West Native American encampments I’d seen in my Earth history books. “Do these people live here?” I wondered out loud.

  “Looks like it,” Ruen answered.

  “Overflow.”

  Not understanding exactly what Eonus had meant, I frowned up at him. “What do you mean?”

  “No more houses. Too many people.”

  “Ah.” I turned back to the view before us to watch a woman hand washing clothes in one of the large basins along the back wall. “Look at their shabby clothes and lack of amenities,” I said. “These are lower class people I bet.”

  “We no longer have lower classes on Basili,” Ruen said, obviously perplexed.

  “None either,” Eonus added, obviously referring to the lack of class distinctions on Arandi as well.

  We stood there a few more minutes absorbing the life going on before us until Ruen gave us the signal to start back. We returned before lunch arrived, but only by a narrow margin. We needed to rethink our strategy or at least our timing.

  Our lunch had been changed up a bit, so our little skit this morning had definitely been heard and complied with.

  “I think I’m going to use the afternoon to write in my log,” I said. “I need to record my feelings about what’s been going on. It will help me vent without my taking out my frustration on you two.”

  “Talk now?” asked Eonus. A smart move on his part to remind our captors why there’d been silence all morning. What he hadn’t said anything about was that clutch he’d pulled me into and what he’d said to me during it.

  “Yes, I’m feeling better now. And I’m sorry about this morning.”

  “Understand,” Eonus responded. “Not angry.”

  “Good. I’m glad.” While we’d been talking, I had been drawing pictures of what we’d seen today and yesterday, and showed them to both Ruen and Eonus.

  “I like your idea,” said Ruen. “I want to write a letter to my Dad, even though I know I can’t send it. He must be ravaged with worry. I really miss him.”

  We spent the afternoon drawing and writing up notes, and exchanging them. Thankfully, my com had been updated to read Arandi and Basilian written language. Although being able to contact anyone had been disabled, we could still use the basic functions of our coms. After we’d finished, I made motions indicating we should put our writings under our mattresses to hide them.

  But Ruen contradicted me. She pointed up to the ceiling—she wanted us to stash our writings in the tunnel. I couldn’t argue with her logic, so that’s what we did.

  After dinner, Ruen said, “I put together one of our Basilian games as best I could. The pieces are pretty artless, but my drawing is not bad. Take a look.”

  Her game board depicted our discoveries of the last two days. Clever girl!

  “The object of the game is to gather points, and the first one who gets fifteen wins.” We learned about the ways of acquiring points. Ruen had created a unique way of discussing our situation, without drawing the attention of our captors—I hoped.

  “So what do we have?” I asked. “Do you need to refine it before we play?”

  “The game is not finished. So far, I have added the section on herd beasts, the greenhouses, and the tent housing. So we need to gather points from each of those areas.”

  “What does this game depict?” I said. I wanted to understand Ruen’s thoughts on what we’d seen so far.

  “This game introduces us to a self-contained community, and how it all fits together,” said Ruen. “I will add more parts to the game board tomorrow. I have not played this game in a while, but it is slowly coming back to me. Nara, can we use your stones for counters?”

  I rummaged in my bag and handed over my collection. Under the guise of playing the game, we made a few alterations to Ruen’s game board. However, we’d been remarkably consistent in what each of us had seen during our excursions.

  Then our snack arrived, so we took a break to eat.

  Again I started to get sleepy, so I pointed to our snacks and made a movement indicating drowsiness.

  The head motions I received indicated they agreed with my deduction.

  Chapter 17

  The next morning only two of us were there—Ruen had disappeared.

  “Where do you think she is?” I asked Tata. Not the brightest question—how would he know? Perhaps Eonus saw something in the night.

  Eonus shook his head. “Bad.”

  I had to agree. Her disappearance wasn’t a good sign. Had our captors transported her out in the middle of the night, or had they snuck in and carried her away? I had no recollection of last night—not even a dream.

  Only two breakfasts appeared at the regular time. I hope this doesn’t mean something bad had happened to Ruen, I thought. I started to shake.

  “Stay,” whispered Eonus, and I agreed with him. To go exploring without Ruen would be stupid—although, I ached with curiosity about what else we could find on our next search.

  After we returned our trays to the ledge, we were both at a loss about what to do with our time. We certainly couldn’t go off looking for Ruen, and playing a game didn’t seem appropriate while we worried, so we settled down to do some diary writing.

  Settled turned out to be not the correct word for my feelings—I couldn’t concentrate with Ruen missing. I even got up and checked our door to see if it had been left unlocked. Although why I did that, I didn’t know—we didn’t even understand how Ruen had disappeared.

  I paced around the room, wondering if we should venture into the upper level to look for Ruen—if nothing else, we could look down through the floor grates to see if she was in another room—until Eonus growled at me. Okay, maybe growl overstated his sound, but he did make his feelings known in a grunt. So I settled down on my bed, continuing to ponder what we could do to find Ruen. After a time, I looked up to see Tata staring at me. The look on his face was a puzzle.

  “Nara, we…”

  Ruen’s sudden materialization in a prone position on her bed interrupted whatever Eonus had been about to say. I rushed over to her—she looked so pale—and took her hand as I sat down on the side of her bed.

  “How are you? What happened?” I asked. I put my arm under her shoulders and helped her sit up—although I may have moved her too soon. She shook small and fragile in my arms.

  “Ah, you know, I have been better. I think I experienced that transporter of yours, Nara,” she said. “Sometime last night I woke up in another room with my eyes covered. And the questions followed.”

  “Questions?” asked Eonus. He stood over us, his hands on his hips. It was obvious he wanted details.

  “Oh, why we were following albinos and why the three of us were different from each other. Questions like that.” She stopped to draw in a breath. “I answered them truthfully.”

  From the look on her face, I gathered she’d left out the part abo
ut our current explorations. “Did you find out anything about our captors? Or any information at all? Like where we are and what this place is designed for?”

  “No, they wouldn’t answer my questions. Then they gave me some kind of truth serum, I think. And now I’m back here. The whole thing wasn’t totally unpleasant, but it wasn’t a good experience. Sorry, guys, I’m tired and need to rest. Whatever they gave me made me a bit sick to my stomach.”

  Ruen lay back on her bed, so I covered her with a blanket and we left her in peace to rest. Tata and I didn’t know what else to ask her anyway, considering our abductors were most likely listening.

  After a short while, lunch arrived, and I got Ruen’s for her. She didn’t need any help eating, but I sat beside her at the table anyway. We both needed comforting—we were family now.

  After lunch, Eonus pointed at me and then at the ceiling; he wanted to go exploring. Ruen nodded her understanding.

  Although Ruen’s color was returning, her energy levels were too low to join us. As she laid down again, Eonus lifted me through the open grate into the ceiling. Then I tried to help him up, but his weight was too much for me alone. He managed better on his own to hoist himself up through the access hole. Unable to replace the grate, we left it on his bed.

  “Let’s go further along yesterday’s route,” I suggested.

  Nodding his agreement, Eonus took off at a fast pace on the moving walkway, correctly deducing we would need to hurry if we wanted to go further and still get back by dinner time. Suddenly, he stopped dead in his tracks, and I had to put my palm to his back to keep from running into him. “Stairs,” he pointed out, taking my hand and leading me off the walkway at the next access/egress point.

  “We call them escalators,” I told him, noting one led up, the other down. “Are you game?” I asked him.

  He gave me a reticent look. “Way?”

  He was leaving it up to me to make the choice of which one to take. I couldn’t read the signs on the walls that apparently explained where the escalators led—obviously Eonus couldn’t either—so I silently applied eeny, meeny, miny, moe to the problem and picked, “Down.” Easy peasy.