The Sigma Asset 🏳️‍🌈 (bxb)║AMBYS WINNER 2022

11: Zephyr

On the edge of sleep, I drifted in and out of a familiar dream. The blackness kept coming no matter how hard I struggled to pull myself back.

Yellowing polystyrene ceiling tiles came in and out of focus.

I knew this dream. Noah was in this dream. Did my brain repeat it often so that I could see him again?

Eighteen ceiling tiles parallel to the bed. Eighteen ceiling tiles perpendicular to the bed.

I wasn't scared to dream about this. I was just sick of being reminded about how little I knew back then.

I closed my eyes to stop myself from counting tiles. Instead, I picked through the assorted pieces of information that I'd collected over the past four days. I was learning as much as I could about this place where I was being held prisoner, ready for when I escaped and told the police, and Eomma took me home. These people were good at keeping information from me, but I was cunning.

I opened my eyes again, trying to focus on the ceiling tiles. At least my eyes were working properly again. It had been a frightening day.

They'd taken me to a room on the second floor, and had held my head against an apparatus. I didn't know what the machine was for, but I was told to look at a red dot and not to blink. A security guard had stood behind me with a gun. They'd shone bright white flashes of intense light into my eyes for what seemed like hours. I'd been too scared to blink even when my eyes were dried out and sore. My eyes were still painful and watering hours afterwards.

Then there were the fingerprints. They must have scanned hundreds of prints of each of my fingers. Then came the cheek swabs, workers with latexed hands running strips of cotton back and forth inside my cheeks until my mouth went dry and bitter, and my lips cracked. Nobody had spoken, just the guard grunting instructions to the workers until they'd finished, before bringing me back at gunpoint to Suite 300.

I wondered when, now that they'd taken my prints and my DNA, they'd throw me on the street like Cal had suggested. My flight had left a day earlier. But I had cash in my dorm room at UC Maria, so I could still get to the airport. I could ask the dorm wardens to call Eomma so that she could get me a new passport and book me on another flight. She'd be so worried by now. Perhaps the Police were looking everywhere for me.

A key scraped in the lock, and I tumbled off the bed and into a crouch, ready to hide, run, cower. Ready to beg them not to point a gun at me again.

Cal came in. "Get up," he said in that dangerously quiet voice, gesturing with his pistol for me to move. I flinched at the motion of the gun, and clung to the bed. "Now."

Cal led me down the stairs, the gun against my back, past the second-floor print rooms where they had collected my DNA, down to the first floor where a security guard was standing in the lobby.

A marble floor and a vaulted ceiling surrounded us; the building itself was pretty, if a little neglected. Perhaps it had been an office building or a bank from a bygone era. The heavy front doors loomed before us, and my breath shot out of me in a relieved whimper - Cal was finally going to throw me onto the street.

My heart sank as we turned left into an open-plan office, the front doors disappearing behind us. I began to cry in silence, hoping that Cal wouldn't notice. What more would I have to bear?

The office space was packed with workstation cells stacked with tablets and laptops, and was full of workers with heads down at their desks. Cal pushed me down onto a chair and disappeared into a smaller office, even more cluttered with tablets and laptops than the open-plan space that I was in.