Gretel found that her prison was somehow even greyer and bleaker than what she had seen of the world just outside those sliding metal doors.
The bed took up most of the space in the tiny room of her compartment, and she quickly noticed that was for a good reason too.
The layout looked to be standard issue enough for almost anyone and everyone of any size and weight to sleep on comfortably if they crossed their arms over their chest and slept as if they were never going to wake up ever again.
It took up the entirety of the width of the room, and, from where she was curled up on the floor against the door, there was only one scant inch worth of space left between her feet and the end of its metal, boxy frame.
The bed itself was comprised of multiple layers of thin fabric that she could see would definitely not keep a person warm.
Slowly, and on her still shaking legs, Gretel stood
Emmet spent most of the day sat at the corner of the living room with a heap of catalogues that Lila had dropped by with at lunch time. She had smashed her fists into the front door so hard that it had been a minor miracle that the wood hadn’t been damaged, shoved all the books into Emmet’s face that she was going back to the café now, before running off again, giving Emmet barely a glance at her face. He still saw the trail of bandages that sailed behind her, wrapped around her neck and travelling below her shirt, and had moved to go towards her, his fears only assuaged when she had popped her head around the corner once more and had smiled at him. She flashed him what looked to be the old peace sign, before she had scampered off once more. If he hadn’t been in charge of keeping an eye on the oven, he would have followed her. Jasper had spent most of the day muttering to himself as he combed the house further for any other surveillance devices throug
Gretel laid down there on the boxy bed, staring up at the ceiling pointedly whilst thinking about nothing in particular.There was nothing but an expanse of dull, lifeless grey up there, the only light source being one tiny, probably halogen, bulb that also seemed to be producing grey light.It was almost impressive.Every now and again, Gretel bent her knees, testing whether she would still be in pain, or not, when she eventually had to stand up and go wherever she was directed by the guards.The door to the side did lead to bathroom, and she was at least glad for that, but the questions of cameras and microphones still remained.But what would actually happen if she found them?If, by chance, she had managed to discover the location and range of each of the listening and spying devices, she would have been still recorded finding them. It would maybe, probab
The knife that Lila had thrusted forward had been dropped almost immediately as her wrist was grabbed. A horrible snapping noise echoed through the office, as Lila lunged over the table to punch the man, on the opposite end, in the throat. She saw her own blown out pupils in the reflection of his widening eyes, and she watched him crumple to the floor, choking on air. As dispassionately as she could, Lila slowly and calmly walked around the table, keeping a distance of over twice of her own height away from Tweedle Dee. “I’m not going to do what you’re asking of me. I’m not going on a little adventure and becoming your spy. And I’m not coming back home to give you exactly what you want, because, if you’re going to send me over there, I’m going to kill someone,” she explained to him. If she was in any other situation, she would have crossed her arms over her chest as she looked down on him. She was beginning to feel the pain of her wris
A loud bang and a hiss woke Gretel up, her body startling as she was wrenched, without her consent, out of the land of dreams and darkness and back into the grey hellscape of the reality around her.Immediately, after deciding that she would've massively preferred to remain unconscious for the entirety of her duration in this place, she attempted to scramble up out of the pile of blankets that she had found herself in.Her legs tangled up in the sheets, her knees skid over the fabric, forcing her to fall face down onto the cold and hard floor.She laid there as she reached backwards with both her hands to try and free herself from the very, very welcoming grasp and hug of her new sleeping space, whilst balancing on her bruised and sore knees.Hissing in audible pain, she rolled over to lie on her back, before sitting up to actually see the mess that she had found herself in.With
Lila spent some time in her room, rummaging through some of the old, out of date catalogues and books that she had taken from the local Argos branch whenever they launched a new set of items to buy, and threw out a few of the ones from the previous year that she hadn’t gotten rid of yet.She had kept a few scrap pages from the ones that did throw out, all tucked away in the back of the oldest catalogue in her cupboard and spent some time at staring down all of the items that she had circled with all the little notes that she had made.The vast majority were from the children’s toy section and they were embarrassing.Zuzu robot hamster pets, make your own colour marker selections, a brightly coloured swing set, and so many other things that she prayed that nobody, except for Kai, would find from her.She took all those pages and reviewed the toys that she had picked out, and then threw all
Gretel, frozen still and consumed by a flood of dread, startled and flinched when a hand lightly tapped her shoulder.She stumbled a few steps forwards and, in an attempt to keep her balance, threw her hands out to the wall to the side of her of prison box to try and steady herself as she tried to move.Panting harshly, she forced herself to count the count the lengths of her breaths to calm herself down and keep her mind from fully tipping over into a panic attack.Breathe inone two three four fiveBreathe outone two three four fiveThe expression of the spy from before came to the forefront, the sight of his crying, begging face materialising before her very eyes. She desperately dug the nails of her fingers into the palms of her hand, squeezing her eyes s
As the sun set, on the kitchen table, Emmet took a kitchen knife to the camera lens and carefully outlined the border between the plastic and glass, easily cutting off the skin of the device to peer underneath.He placed it under the big lamp of their “living room” and peered down into the eyes that had been spying on him.He could hear the catalogue being flipped through from behind him and a quiet sigh.Emmet couldn’t help but smirk to himself hearing Jasper’s sigh, before going to back to focussing on his self-imposed task at hand.A pair of tweezers were picked up next, and he attempted to pick up the inner organs of the machine, wiggling them around a little, before letting them down again, going back to pick up the knife and lightly saw through the plastic around the seam of the camera casings.The popped apart and Emmet found himself immediately cur
Gretel walked forwards, herded by the too many guards as one of the crowd of others from Gryaz.The hand wrapping around her own kept her from running away in terror, freezing up in fear, and just generally keeping her sanity from the stress related mania that pressed down on her brain.The world was too oppressive.The halls were absolutely silent.It was far too quiet.The lack of noise ringing her ears hurt more than the prior screeching of metal from before she went to sleep.The corridors were identical to the same ones that she saw the day before but, at least now, she found herself able to more easily track where she was going.Travelling in a completely straight line, missing one, two, and then, three crossroads, in favour of still marching on ahead, Gretel found herself being brought forwards into the same large hall that the exe
“Why’re you sleeping on the floor like that? Come on, get up. You’ll hurt your back doing that,” Doctor Marigold chided, dragging all her bits of heavy machinery around the office space to prepare for her demonstration.Behind her, Lila remained still.“I know that you’re not dead. Come, get up already,” she called out, stepping over a few sheets of paper that she had laid out to grab Lila by the shoulder and heave her up into sitting.The stubborn girl just flopped down again, not opening her eyes.“If you get the fuck up, we can move the flight a week forward so you can stop worrying about it,” Lucy Marigold shouted across the room.Like a rubber band, Lila snapped back up and finally opened her eyes.It had been harder to see the bags below them when they had been closed and Doctor Marigold wondered if she should buy the girl some sleep tablets.“I’m awake,” Li
Yolanda seemed to understand that she needed to back off and stop teasing Gretel, when the other woman's eyes suddenly misted over, and it was if she was no longer a part of this world.She kept the bubbling annoyance within her away from her face, putting on instead a mask of concern as she reached out and poked Gretel's arms, trying to maybe prod her out of her stupor and bring her back from the recesses of her mind.Yolanda had never actually seen somebody collapse inwards to a catatonic state over her own actions.It was interesting to see it all happen and fold out in front of her.She poked Gretel again, touching her in the face lightly to see if that would possibly work to pull the other woman out of her mind and back into the world where she was needed proper.It wouldn't reflect well on her if Gretel didn't wake up within the hour.It didn't feel as
When she awoke, she was sat ready to eat and was dressed just like her mother, in a pastel blouse and a lungi down to the floor.Lila looked down at herself and jumped when she heard rattling, noticing the ten, or so, bangles on each arm and the lines of mehndi that ran down all the way to the hems of her sleeves, resting halfway between her shoulders and elbows. A pin held her blouse shut at the top and a quick once over of her hair, with one of her hands, revealed that it had been styled in a simple bun and adorned with flowers.“This is weirdly romantic,” Lila commented, staring at the lit candles nestled in the variously sized candelabrums set around the circular room.There was no door, but a giant window which led to a balcony outside. There was no ceiling but the walls reaching upwards, all the way up, until they formed a dome in the same shade of dull brown that coated the floor and the giant, round table in the centre.The only dishes
“So, is she finally asleep?” Emmet asked the boy stood behind the counter. He was exceedingly slim for someone surrounded by sugar all day and Emmet could make out the outlines of his spindly elbows through his shirt. His face held a no nonsense, blunt, and almost bored expression. “Yeah, she is. She’s been knocked out on the sofa since I sent her back there,” Kai answered the long haired man in front of him, his hair pulled back by a ribbon matching his eyes before being pulled over his shoulder once more. He looked vain. “Oh good. Don’t tell her that I was involved,” the man asked, putting both his palms up to face Kai. “I’m telling her that you’re a fucking weirdo for that,” was the scowled answer. “No. Seriously, don’t tell her. She doesn’t like me and I don’t like her. She’s known my partner for longer that I’ve known him. She doesn’t trust me with him. Why’re you making that face?” Emmet tried to justify himself before giving up
“Are you sure that you’re getting enough sleep?” Kai asked Lila, watching her sway on her feet and clutching the front counter.“Yes,” she gasped, dropping her head into her hands, elbows on the table.“Go and lie down on the sofa. Go to sleep for a bit. I’ll wake you up when I have to leave for college,” Kai instructed her, tapping her on the shoulders and shepherding her towards the office.“… fine,” she conceded, letting Kai move her along towards the back.“You know that this just proves my point,” Kai pointed out, pushing her through the boundary of the door and closing it behind her.“Fine,” she whispered back to him, talking into the silence of the office.She let herself fall over the sofa, draping her upper body over the arm rest and letting her head be cushioned by the pillows. Shuffling a bit over to put her body entirely on the sofa, Lila f
“One! Two! Three! Four! Five!Now again!One! Two! Three! Four! Five!Now keep on going!”Lila landed each punch, timing her breaths to the count as she moved her fists, dodging underneath the swing that came towards her head, before blocking the second hit that came to her and moving along with the force of the fist that hit her arm.The swinging punching bag forced distance between Lila and Tweedle Dum, and she stepped back to where she was stood before, within the path of the moving bad, to put more distance between him and her.“One! Two! Three! Four! Five!One! Two! Three! Four! Five!”Lila punched the bag once more, landing all of her hits.“Okay, time for a break,” Tweedle Dum announced, grabbing the punching bag and pulling it back to him as Lila moved away from the centre of the room, sitting down on one of the rickety plastic chairs at the side of the room.She took of
“Bitch! Why’d you run off and abandon me like that!?” Lila shouted from behind the counter when Kai finally walked back into the store.She was waving her hands about and wore an apron covered in flour as the single customer in the store, an old man precariously balancing on his cane, slept whilst leaning on the radiator.“I thought that you wanted some bonding time with your family so I left you to do that it private!” Kai answered her, tiptoeing past their unconscious patron, in a combination of whispering and shouting.“They’re hardly my family and you left us in the middle of a public café!” Lila cried, not modulating her voice at all.In the background, the old man began to snore.“But you still talk to them a lot like you do to me, so I let you, and besides, I got about fifty more pages of Good Omens done in Waterstones,” Kai appealed, finally at the counter and opening up the
Gretel and Silver had their fun as he continued to teach her how the interface worked and how he had managed to figure out that the system was an older model from the lack of integration between the screen and the touch pad, and explaining how easily it would potentially be to do so once the technology, as displayed in this device, had been demonstrated and established to work in a functional product."We were working on something like this as well, back in the workshops back home for the company that I was in the research and development department for. We were trying to get our motion sensors to be as small as possible for more commercial and personal use of technology that we could sell to the public and those who couldn't afford the contact computers.We had no idea on how their tech worked, because of trade and company secrets and all, but we managed to piece together a few things by looking at the patents and when we bought a few and m
“Alright, the shop’s free. Why are you actually here?” Lila questioned, crossing her arms and staring down at the tablecloth of Jasper and Emmet’s table.“I’ve got lesson now. I’ll be back in a few hours,” the teenage boy behind Lila announced, picking up a bag that had been hidden behind the counter the entire time and rushing outside.Lila continued to stand there, waiting for a reply.Jasper couldn’t help but notice that she wasn’t meeting either his or Emmet’s eyes.“Are you planning to leave us?” he asked her back.Lila’s fingers dug into the creases of her shirt,” I’m going to be leaving for a trip soon, and I’ll be back as soon as I can. Kai’ll be running the shop and will be looking after things, broadly. He lives here now and I scheduled my leave for when his school term ends so he can take care of things.”“On thi