There’s something to be
said for the sleep of the righteous. Slipping into dreams within seconds of
closing your eyes, floating along as image after lovely, fanciful image carries
you gently down the path from tired to rested so that you might awake refreshed
and ready for the next day.
This was not the sleep
of Meila Vex.
Meila tossed from her
left side to her right, seeking in slumber the comfort she tried so hard to
pretend she didn’t need when awake. She turned from back to stomach, her
unconscious body’s attempt to hide from the nightmares that plagued her. And
still, in sleep, she suffered.
Dreams have a way of
reminding the flawed of their mistakes, and regret is not a thing so easily
loosed when the damaged close their eyes.
When Meila woke, it was
on a gasp of pure terror, her heart believing fully the vision that had shot
her from sleep to wake. For a moment, she just lay there, feeling the galloping
of an organ that seemed not to be made for such furious movement. On nights
like this, she wondered how long her heart could sustain such speed before it
simply gave out.
When images of the
dream continued to haunt her even as her body calmed, she sat and pressed her
fingertips to her forehead. At the movement, a vicious headache roared behind
her eyes, and her heart rate spiked again, and the dream reared forth with its
ugly message of blame.
“Not your fault,” she
whispered. “Not your fault.”
Of course, saying was
different than believing.
The black of the room
suggested the ultra-dark of predawn hours, when the moon had fallen away but
the sun had yet to rise. She didn’t have to get up for a while yet, but there
was no way she’d be getting back to sleep. Groaning against the hangover, she
reached for the nightstand to check the time on her phone.
Only, the nightstand
wasn’t there.
Meila stilled, frowned.
Wondered if she’d somehow gotten turned around so that she’d slept with her
head at the foot of the bed. But as she moved her hand in that direction, it
smacked into something hard, sending a sharp spear of pain running up her arm.
“What the hell?”
Oddly, it was the confusion
in her voice more so than the rap of her hand against an object that should not
have been there that caused unease to ripple along her spine. Cautious in the lack
of light – and with the motion-induced headache, she reached her fingers out
slowly, slowly, jumping slightly when they made contact with something solid,
even though she now knew it was there. And when she ran those fingers over that
long, straight, and unyielding mystery, she realized it was a wall.
But her bed was
supposed to be in the center of the room.
She stood on legs that
weren’t quite steady, with a stomach that turned in protest, only to find cold,
hard floor under her feet where her rug should have been. Careful, inching
steps forward on that floor with arms stretched out before her brought her
quickly – too quickly – to the opposite wall. A wall that was perfectly flat,
without pictures or even empty picture hooks.
She’d taken down all
the pictures of Alec, but there should be more, shouldn’t there? She’d left
some of her family, hadn’t she?
She frowned again,
tried to remember the details of the previous night’s drunken purge through the
fog of a hangover that seemed stronger than it should have been. She remembered
yanking Alec’s pictures off the walls, emboldened by the courage of tequila,
but she didn’t remember moving the furniture. She sure as hell didn’t remember
spackling the walls smooth again.
As her unease deepened,
she searched for the light switch. Instead, she found what felt like acres of silken
wall, unmarred by windows or shelves, unblocked by furniture. Until she found
the panel.
Just a small, slightly
raised piece of…something. Metal? With two round buttons on it, one above the
other, each the size of a poker chip. That was the moment she knew – the moment
she understood that pretense was the antithesis of self-preservation. No matter
how much she wished to make sense of what was happening in a way that would not
terrify, there was only one possible explanation.
She was not at home.
With shaking hands, she
pressed the top button on the panel. At once, a searing white light flooded the
room. She cried out as the bright of it scorched her eyes and then put a hand
over her mouth to stifle the sound. In the time it took her vision to adjust, a
dozen possibilities skittered through her mind as to what she might find here,
each of them worse than the last. But slowly, the room revealed itself to her,
and she could see that it was nothing she’d imagined.
Just a small, simple space,
with walls and floor of black glass. A bed against the opposite wall, no
windows, no decorations. Nothing else, in fact, save for the panel with the two
buttons.
And the big metal door
that boasted no handle of any sort.
Breath beginning to
come in shudders that shook her whole body, Meila looked slowly back at the
panel. She tried frantically to think of all the options available to her, but
she could see only one that was viable in any way. She wiped suddenly damp
palms on the pants she’d fallen asleep in the night before, and then she
pressed the second button. That giant door slid slowly open, one solid hunk of
metal that grated against the floor, sending a cloud of pulverized glass to
puff gently at her feet.
And then Meila saw what
lay beyond that door, and her heart lurched once at the sight.
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