Page 75 of Finding Her (Lore of the Fields #1)

Time had passed—how much, I couldn’t be certain.

The lights never dimmed. The windowless, clockless room lacked any temporal context.

Dia never stirred in her sleep, seemingly spared the nightmares that I was beginning to connect to my past experience in the facility.

The white lighting was eerily similar. I wondered if it was a side effect of the pods.

How long had I been in one? Months? Years?

It was a rabbit hole I needed to abstain from falling down right now.

There were more critical topics at hand.

I’d been playing mental chess all night, inventing solutions with limited resources.

They had weapons, drugs, and backup. We had…

the ability to heal quickly, and hospital gowns.

So far, being a “ demigod ” wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Most devastatingly working against us: limited time. Something had to be done, and fast.

The creak of the metal door lifting signaled our breakfast’s arrival, waking Dia.

She sat up promptly, alert and ready to take on a threat.

A Quadmos guard, not the same from yesterday, entered with a silver tray in each lower hand, the top of his head nearly touching the upper frame of the gateway.

He greeted us in a cheerful—no, mocking—manner.

At least the lady with the injections had offered us some dignity with her misplaced kindness.

“How are we doing, ladies?” He stepped up to Dia’s glass, crouching down and sliding the tray through a narrow slot at the cage’s base.

Neither of us responded.

“Not morning people?” he laughed, repeating the motion to slide breakfast into my enclosure.

I examined him carefully, considering any weaknesses that I may be able to exploit.

It was hard to find anything lacking on the eight-foot-tall beefcake with an extra set of limbs.

He must’ve thought so too, given there was no obvious weapon on his person.

Why would there be? We were trapped, a mere fraction of his size, and defenseless.

More than ever, I felt like prey in a world of predators.

They were literally using our bodies as fuel, without the decency of delivering a killing blow.

Being eaten in the woods would have been more merciful.

I was relieved to see him making his exit without further antagonizing us. Two arms stretched above his head and the other two behind his back with a yawn, flaunting his neutrality. He stopped in the gateway and looked over his shoulder with a smile, one hand on the closing button.

“You’re looking much better today, Dia,” he praised with venom on his tongue.

Disgust washed over me at his weaponized pleasantry.

I could only see one side of her face from where I sat, but he was right.

Her scars were all but gone. The bare foot peeking out from under her thigh looked almost normal, her open wounds healed to thin white lines.

She was running out of time. I was too. We were almost fully charged batteries again.

The gate thudded closed.

“How many sisters do we have?” I asked, hesitant to move towards the unappetizing tray of food resting on the ground.

“Lots.” Dia began shoveling food into her mouth as if her life depended on absorbing each calorie. Maybe it did, her muscles were nothing to scoff at. Her body was the closest thing to a weapon we had.

“And how many are in pods?”

“You don’t want to know.”

I tapped my finger against my thigh uncomfortably.

Dia was my only company. My source of information.

My sister . I’d spent all night wanting nothing more than to talk through this with her instead of being alone with my thoughts, and was disappointed by the curt responses now that she was up.

We could learn so much from each other. Not to mention, we were family. Wasn’t she interested in me at all ?

“Alright. Tell me about you, then. I don’t have a past, so it might be nice to hear someone else’s.”

“You’re having a hard time finding pleasant topics,” she grumbled with her mouth full.

“Then throw me a bone,” I laughed in exasperation. “Give me something to work with here, sis.”

She stiffened at my affectionate nickname. “I don’t have anything for you.”

I huffed out a frustrated breath, moving to grab my tray and join her for breakfast. “They’re not going to let you stall your healing by breaking your fingers for long,” I mumbled over the plate of food I didn’t want to touch.

It was mostly green leaves, beige cubes of unknown source, and supplements.

No sauce, no seasoning, no variety—just nutrients.

I missed Graysen’s cooking. He knew more ways to prepare an egg than I knew recipes in general.

“Excuse me?” Dia’s eyes shot back up.

“I thought about your plan. They aren’t going to like—” I swallowed. “— their product being damaged, even by itself. You’ll be put to sleep until you heal.” I popped a squishy cube into my mouth with disdain.

“They don’t like us healing doped up. It messes with the purity.”

“Fine, then they’ll restrain you. But you aren’t going to be allowed to cost them all that money.”

“So, what do you propose?” She seemed offended by my suggestion, as if she thought there wasn’t a single problem in the world she couldn’t solve with endurance and brute force.

“We add a little strategy to your brawn. I don’t think we have much longer, and your self-mutilation won’t do you any good once they catch on.”

“If you have a better plan, I’m all ears.”

But I didn’t. I knew that we needed one, and there had to be something to work with, but my mind was scrambled with dead ends.

Every time my thoughts tried to turn in a new direction, they were blocked, having to retrace their steps to the beginning of the cognitive maze.

There were very few weak points in our captor’s security, and none of them met the criteria of the fatal flaw that we needed.

I mulled over each hole in their system, pondering what could be done with it—if anything.

Back at the beginning of my mental labyrinth, I walked myself through another series of metaphorical twists and turns.

“Do they usually come in here without the tranquilizer guns for meals?” I assumed that had been what the guard was holding given our options had been "take the injection " or " get knocked out ". A way to enforce compliance without opening the cages.

“Yeah, it’s not like they need our cooperation for breakfast. And we can’t exactly hurt them in our current situation.” I could feel the way it made her pride bleed to not be considered a formidable foe by her captors.

“So if one of us started damaging ourselves while they dropped off food, they wouldn’t have any way to stop us without opening our door…”

“They could go get a weapon,” she dismissed blandly.

“They could… but are you certain they would?”

She didn’t reply.

“Look, if we’re going to mutilate our hands anyway, why not coordinate it with a meal, on the off chance they’re unprepared and panic?”

An exit to the mental maze. I wasn’t sure what lay on the other side—it could be death—but it was at least something we could act on. If time ran out, and we hadn’t thought of anything better, we would do what we had to.

She puffed out her cheeks with a contemplative exhale. “So, hypothetically, they open the door to stop me from damaging their money maker, and I attack?”

“I’ll do it too.” I didn’t love the idea of hurting myself after just having healed from some nasty broken bones, but I wasn’t about to put this all on her.

She smiled genuinely at me for the first time. “One of us is going to need to have functional hands for the rest of our escape. Besides, the self-injury was my idea. I’ll take down the guard, you get us out of here alive.”

“Do you think you can take him down?” I asked. It wasn’t that I thought I could do any better, but I hated to sign her up for a losing battle.

“I fought nastier things in the forest. I’ll be fine.”

She had fought things in those woods? I reflected on the animalistic noises with a shudder, grateful that I had never laid eyes on one of the creatures.

Dia wasn’t frail, but she wasn’t armed the way the rest of this planet was.

How she could take on anything in that forest, much less multiple somethings, was beyond me.

If I were going to be stuck in a life-or-worse-than-death situation, I was glad she was on my side.

Still, the odds weren’t in our favor. So much could go wrong. Risking what little freedom we had within our four walls wasn’t something I was looking forward to, but it was better than giving up.

“Do you think we have until dinner?” I asked, hoping to buy time for a better alternative to present itself.

Dia’s eyes flicked over my face, and I somehow knew that she was searching for injuries on me and finding none. “I think so. It was the scientist who made the call on when the last girl was healed enough, not the mealtime guard.”

“Dinner then.” My chest tightened on inhale. “Let’s plan accordingly.”