The Widow's Daughter: Flashback (Sequel to the Widow's Daughter)

Chapter One

"Where am I?"

I heard the words, but I wasn't sure I'd said them. The voice was too rough, too coarse to be mine. It was as it there were a stranger in my skin, lying in the dark, saying, "Who's there?"

"Do not panic."

I whipped my head around, trying to decipher where the mechanical, grinding voice had reverberated from. As soon as I moved, a blinding pain shot through my skull and I yelped, reaching up a hand to touch what was surely an egg on my temple.

Except I couldn't move my hand. It was strapped down. Metal cuffs - I knew they were handcuffs because I'd been cuffed numerous times - bit into my wrists.

Everything was black around me. So horribly, impossibly dark. I'd never known anything quite like it, and, if my memory served me correct, I'd spent a lot of time in the darkness as a child in Russia.

Wait... I had grown up in Russia!

Did that mean I had a deep, manly voice, that could be used to entice and seduce enemy agents? Did that mean I ate chunky borscht soup from a can and chugged vodka with my best mates whilst singing along to Rasputin by Boney Em? Was my name something like Vladimir, or Ivanowolf Yakutskermelenksy?

Why was that so hard for me to believe? Surely I should know where I grew up!

So... why couldn't I remember anything else?

"Do not panic," the voice said again. 

I could feel my breath quickening and my forehead begin to sweat. Contrary to the advise I'd been told by the voice, I began to panic.

"Do not panic!" the voice snapped, more forcefully this time. "You have just been saved from eternal peril by our Great Lord Almighty the Grand Master. You may applaud now."

I wriggled my cuffed fingers and tried to ignore the pounding of my heart. "Well, I would, except you've handcuffed me to this... to this... what am I even lying on?"

It was a hard slab of metal, a chair of sorts. Probably salvaged from some space ship, I suspected.

Wait.

Was I in space?

"Where am I?" I asked, praying that I wasn't any further South than Antarctica.

"Fear not, for you are found."  The voice was female, and American, but distinctly robotic. I could feel something happening beneath me. Vibrations coursed through my body as the floor began to move. The darkness whooshed past me, a low whine sending shivers up my spine. 

"You are home and there is no going back." 

Light, harsh and blinding, flashed in the corners of my vision, spearing the blackness in two. I heard pistons creak as a mechanical door was opened before me, and by the blues and purples of the nebulae swirling around my head as the metal chair zoomed forth, my suspicions were confirmed.

I was in space.

I swore. Loudly. And then I'm pretty sure I was about to cry, however my expletives were drowned out by the robotic voice. It was like a beetle scurrying through the undergrowth, rustling but also croaky in a way that unnerved: "No one leaves this place. But what is this place?"

I pushed against my cuffs as the chair sped up. A dizzying array of colours whirled around me and I winced, trying to escape, trying to remember.

I was going to die without even knowing what my name was.

"The answer is... Sakaar!"

Streams of light engulfed my vision and, I kid you not, Pure Imagination from the Willy Wonka Musical began to play. 

"Surrounded by cosmic gateways, Sakaar lives on the edge of the known and the unknown. It is the collection point for all lost and unloved things. Like you."

Although it was definite that I was being taken towards my certain death, I resisted the urge to flip off the unknown robotic voice. 

I was loved. By who, I didn't remember, but surely... surely I was loved. Surely I had a family, a family who was missing me and loving me and wanting me home, wherever that was. A family who remembered my name.

What was my name?

I must have parents... A mother and father, who gave me that name. Otherwise I wouldn't be here... wouldn't I?

Before I could spiral into an existential crisis, the voice continued.

"But here on Sakaar, you are significant. You are valuable. Here, you are loved."

"Oh, goodie," I found myself saying as the chair sped through a meteor shower. "Well, if you love me so much, can you let me go?"

But the voice was undeterred. My chair began to speed up and I felt my stomach drop. I clenched the arms of the chair so hard that my knuckles went white. "What the hell?"

"And no one loves you more than the Grand Master. He is the original; the first lost and the first found. The creator of Sakaar and the father of the Contest of Champions."

As the voice spoke, images of a shadowy man rising up on a dusky blue planet flashed around me. A city rising from the ashes. Two warriors in war paint fighting in a golden arena.

"Where once you were nothing, now you are something."

The music began to distort. Once again, I was plunged into darkness, but this time I wasn't really scared, rather extremely uncomfortable, as the voice spoke faster, and the ground rumbled beneath my bound feet.

"You are now the property of the Grand Master. Congratulations!"

Reds and greens flashed in the inky blackness. Anxiousness turned into distress as my surroundings warped and changed. I was getting flashbacks to when I was a little kid, forced by doctors and scientists to look at screens full of strange images and decipher their meanings. I remembered that if I didn't get one correct, I was hurt. Badly.

"You will meet the Grand Master in five seconds. Prepare yourself..."

I began to thrash against my bindings. 

"Prepare yourself."

I clenched my eyes shut as red strobe lights swarmed my vision. I was going to die. I was going to die.

"You are now meeting..."

In the name of Tony Stark's holey underwear, I was going to die.

"...The Grand Master!"

I screamed.

Louder than I'd ever screamed before.

And just like that, the lights, the flashing, the moving; everything stopped.

I was still in the chair, except surrounded by guards in yellow, red, and green uniforms. They were holding spears directed at me. The room was big and silver, spacious, in series of chrome and grey colours.

I swung my head around, looking for any sign of this Grand Master, whoever he might be.

The person standing before me was very different to what I'd expected.

It was a teenage girl of about sixteen. She had red hair cut choppily at her shoulders, bright green eyes streaked with blue eyeliner, and a silvery robe which spiralled down to her slipper-clad feet. Guards surrounded her, looking at her with admiration and respect.

As the girl did jazz hands and grinned, suddenly everything came flooding back to me. 

"Surprise!" my sister Holly said.