Heart of Gold

Chapter Fifteen - Hope

The bucket made a scratching sound along the floor as she moved it. Whatever she was expecting to find, what she found was not it. Instead of unmarred floor underneath the bucket, or where the bucket had been were letters. Not just any letters, but English letters. Human letters.

Sunny could not stifle her cry of surprise, but considering she was alone she did not have to. Slowly she reached out with one shaking hand. The letters had been engraved into the ground, some sort of sharp implement scratching them in roughly.

Calla.

Sunny slowly the letters with the tip of a finger. There had been someone else here.

She had known rationally that for the Slave Inspector to understand the workings of the human body, and to have implanted a chip that translated the Olcen language into English, and for the Miotalan to have understood her, there must have been other humans taken and studied. There had been someone from whom they had gathered all of this information. Yes, intellectually she had known this, but this was different.

This brought home the knowledge that there had been another girl taken from her family and brought into the outer reaches of space and to another planet

A girl named Calla, she supposed.

Sunny slumped back against the wall, the flat unforgiving surface pressing firmly against her spine. She wondered where Calla was now. If she was alive, what had happened to her here, in this very room.

It did not make for pleasant thinking, but now that she knew, she could not escape the thoughts.

She wondered what she looked like, this Calla. Named for the lily, she supposed. Sunny had always liked lilies. They grew outside her childhood bedroom at home, delicate and beautiful.

Sunny hoped that this Calla was not delicate. She could not afford to be.

***

This was not what Sunny's future should look like. She was supposed to be studying Law at her university, working part time at a local coffee shop to support herself as she built a life with hard work and dedication. She was supposed to have breezy weekends where she visited her parents and her siblings, rolling her eyes at her parents lifestyle, but inside revelling in the happiness of her childhood home.

She was not supposed to be locked in an eerie abandoned laboratory. Sunny had had enough science to last her a lifetime, Particularly medical science perpetuated by alien species.

But Kilnor was still incapacitated and Cade and Zandin had watched her being led away without a word of protest. And now she was here - in her worse predicament yet. She had thought waking up on the Olcen ship and realising she would never see her family again was the worst it could get, and then she had been proven wrong when Kilnor was stabbed and she was thrown into yet another cell.

Neither of those experiences compared to this. With the Olcens, she had Kilnor and they had received food and water. With the Miotalans, she may not have had Kilnor, but she'd had his team, a toilet, a bed, and again, food and water.

Now? Now she had nothing, save a spoiled bucket of water in the corner of her cage. No Kilnor, no team, no toilet and no food. All she could do was wait. Either to be rescued, or to die - whichever came first.

***

Time passed oddly for Sunny - probably because it no longer existed for her. The laboratory was deep underground, so no outside light penetrated, meaning that there was no night or day. With no food or meals forthcoming, time could not be measured that way either.

Sunny was surprised she had not gone mad.

Or maybe she had. Maybe she had arrived home, and her loveable but very left-of-centre parents had slipped her something in a brownie, wanting her to relax. Maybe this entire thing was a drug-fuelled dream, and she was really lying in a coma somewhere.