Page 56 of Her Magic Light

I squirmed my way to the wall, and a draft tickled over my cheek. I pressed it to the wall and discovered the checkerboard holes of some sort of ventilation grate.

The whisper was originating from here.

And it wasn’t just a whisper.

It was a voice.

twenty-one

“Hello?” My own whisper was my very cautious response. As much as I wanted someone to be there, it could be a trick. “Is someone there?”

The whispering stopped, but of course someone was there. I’d heard them.

“Hello?” I grew bolder. “I know you’re there.”

At first, the reply was unintelligible, just a string of whispered sounds that I couldn’t make sense of.

I craned my neck and pressed my ear closer to the vent until I started to hear soft words in the white noise.

“Who’s there?”

“Meira.” I whispered my name hesitantly. But surely it couldn’t hurt to share my name with someone I couldn’t even see? “Who are you?”

The person didn’t answer. Instead, they whispered another question. “Are you new?”

I shuffled into a more comfortable position then tried to work out how quickly I could emerge from under the bed if someone opened the door to my cell. It wasn’t somewhere I wanted to be caught in case I got the person talking to me in trouble.

Hell, who was I kidding? I didn’t want to be in any more trouble here, either. And it was almost guaranteed that whispering to someone through the duct system would get me into trouble. Solitary meant lonely, didn’t it? A new friend in the duct work didn’t qualify as “solitary.”

Still. I shrugged and winced as my cuffs rubbed against the floor, chafing my wrists even more. But I was already cuffed in solitary. How much worse could this get? Realistically, if someone was prepared to spend five minutes whispering to me, I was open to that. Desperate for it after only having had Locke and Coop to talk to. Two guys who didn’t seem to understand the talk-and-respond convention of conversation.

“Where are you?” The whisper came again, and it was unusual to have someone ask me questions for a change instead of issuing terse commands or just remaining silent in the face of my inquiries.

“I don’t know. I’m in a cell in solitary. I had a hood on when they brought me down.”

The other voice chuckled, and I strained to hear their real voice in the sound. Then the whispering resumed. “We’re all in solitary. Not all brought down in hoods, though. That’s different. You must be special. What did you do?”

I rolled my eyes. There was the idea I was special again. “Yeah. Special enough to be in solitary.” I injected my whisper with irritation and the person chuckled again.

“Oh, we’re all special, honey. Didn’t they tell you?”

“They’ve told me precisely nothing since I got here,” I whispered back, my words almost falling over themselves in my urgency to spit them out.

Really, I just wanted this person to talk more—whoever it was sounded like they had a clue about the facility, and anything they could tell me would only help me understand why I was here and how I could get home.

Well, I had the small accusation of murder to overcome first, but I hadn’t killed Adrian. Someone else must have done that and Coop got the wrong idea from the available information.

“Who are you?” I tried again to extract identifying information from the Female, I thought.

“Friend of a friend,” came the reply, but that was obviously all they were willing to reveal.

“I haven’t been here long enough to have friends.” I sighed as the words left my mouth. Didn’t want to stay that long, either. “And if I end up making them, I’ve been here too long.” I added a humorless chuckle of my own.

“A-men to that,” she agreed.

I sighed again. “I haven’t got a clue what’s going on.”

“What?” That word was more of a screech. “What do you mean youhaven’t got a clue? Have you had your tests? What’s your talent? Who have you met?”

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