1 - As Dark as the Night Sky

Ariza opened her eyes. There was nothing but black; black, as dark as the night sky on new moon. Her body tingled, though. She was awake. She was alive. Thus, she had to be somewhere. This was the third time she had to tell herself that, and neither of the two other situations had been good ones. She doubted that this one would be any different in a positive way.

The ground underneath her feet was rattling, just as whatever she was sitting on. She felt energy pressing against her left side, and her body gently moving whenever the energy moved to her chest or her back; as much as it could, with multiple straps around it, pressing it onto the wall behind her.

Ariza did not need eyes for understanding where she was: This was some sort of car driving to some sort of place, and, considering her recent unconsciousness and the straps around her body, her wrists and her legs, she certainly had not agreed with that. She doubted the orphanage did, either. Had it, there would probably at least be a window at the top of the car, to give her at least a little light. Or air to breathe. The orphanage was a state institution. There would have been no reason for them to be so secretive.

This made her come to another conclusion: This was a kidnapping, and a pretty well-done one too. This was no simple "old creepy man traps you inside his trunk"-thing. This one had been well-planned.

The straps around her body were attached to the wall, so she wouldn't be able to fall off to any side while she was asleep. Those straps weren't simple ropes either; they felt like those straps the people would use in asylums, for those who'd gone mad. The orphanage had sometimes used those too for difficult or violent children; fortunately, Ariza had never needed those things. Not that she had ever wanted to feel that warm leather on her skin, getting all sticky and wet because of the sweat that formed underneath.

How did she get into this situation? While she had at least rough answers about where she was and what this was, she seemed to have lost her memories to a certain degree. Did they maybe kidnap her while she was asleep? No way they could so easily sneak into the orphanage and kidnap one girl, with a dozen other girls sleeping in the same room as her. Except if they kidnapped all of her roommates, but she doubted that for various reasons.

Reason number one: Jamie Scott had punched a hole into the wall of his room two years ago, when he had been only six years old, and Ariza fourteen. That had given her one piece of very important information about their orphanage: the walls were thinner than some of the bread slices they got for breakfast. Sometimes, she would even hear how someone from the room next to her turned around in their bed. That was probably one of the reasons why she had soon become an extremely stationary sleeper.

Which leads to reason number two: There were around fifteen rooms in one corridor, all with around twelve to thirteen children in them. There were two corridors dedicated to bedrooms in total, one for the boys and one for the girls (some rooms from the boys' corridor had to be filled with girls though), making up around three hundred and fifty to four hundred children in total. This was not some small cute place to steal children from in the middle of the night, when all of these four hundred children were basically all at the same place. Someone would have heard.

And there is reason number three: Chicha would have heard.

Chicha was a girl from her room, with almost black hair and brown skin, pretty tall for her age, but her weight seemed to have not been able to catch up with her height. Also, Chicha had possibly the lightest sleep Ariza had ever seen in an orphan. Most of them were used to loud noises and turbulence during the night, and most of them also adapted to it and learned to just sleep like a stone; but not Chicha. Ariza had noticed her always staying up way too late during nighttime, reading her books or simply staring at the ceiling, and whenever Chicha seemed to be asleep and Ariza moved just an inch, she instantly opened her eyes. Ariza was still impressed over how Chicha was able to not wake up with heavy eye bags and low energy all the time. This reason only worked assuming that Chicha hadn't been kidnapped too, of course. All these reasons only worked assuming this wasn't some kind of mass kidnapping of four hundred children. But considering common sense, Ariza was pretty safe to assume that that was certainly not the case.

As the effects of whatever drug her kidnappers gave her slowly faded, Ariza began to notice the smells and the sounds of other people inside the car. She began to hear heads touching the walls whenever they would get into a curve, and the smell of a weird mixture of human sweat that seemed to get worse and worse with every moment they were in here. The air was thick and hot, and Ariza did not even want to imagine how her own sweat had to smell like for the others; considering they weren't asleep, which they probably were. Little wet pearls ran down her forehead, and her shirt stuck on her back, feeling like it would leave a big puddle whenever Ariza would get up from this place.

There has to be something I missed, Ariza thought, trying to remember the last thing she had done.

The last morning that she remembered was a Friday, the last day of school before the weekend. It seemed to have been a pretty regular day; no exams, no special events. Nothing unordinary. Nothing that couldn't have happened on any other day too. At least that was her first guess. Soon she had to realize that some things indeed had been odd.

Chicha had been the first thing that did not act as usual. She had been awake pretty early like on all the other days too, but when Ariza and her roommates went to breakfast, she told them to "go ahead, I'm going to catch up with you in a second". She did not catch up with them. Ariza and the others first did not notice her absence. The roommates couldn't really say they were close friends or anything, and they would all split and go to various different tables to eat there. Thus, nobody saw the empty space that usually should have been Chicha's seat. After hardly ten minutes, that empty space already got taken by another child or vanished from sight, since there were only benches to sit on.

The food was pretty normal, though. There were thin slices of bread and water, always enough not to feel hungry anymore. The women giving out the food just looked as scary as always, with their calculating gaze, staring at the children as if nothing, not a crump shared with each other, would escape their sight. Ariza always thought they looked quite similar, all with that same kind of gaze and the same kinds of wrinkles in their face. She had never seen them without their hygienic hat though, so she couldn't say whether her hypothesis about them being triplets was true - but she doubted it.

As soon as breakfast was over, at exactly 7:50 o'clock in the morning, the children left the canteen and went to their different classes. The orphanage had its own school implemented in its building; there was a section for the primary students (years one to eight) and one for the secondary students (years nine to thirteen). With sixteen years, Ariza was about to finish eleventh grade and thus, part of the secondary education section. The moment she had stepped into this sector when she had been a fresh ninth-grader, she had never wanted to go back. She had always appreciated the quietness this place was holding; no crying and running children, no teacher screaming at anyone to finally behave; just the sounds of quiet talking, maybe a few laughs here and there.

That day was actually a quite exciting day, as for school. In history, they would start to talk about the Great War in more detail, since they only gave basic information about what happened to the younger students, until they would be old enough to understand. Ariza didn't know much about what and why it had all happened, but what she knew was that New Zealand had survived it as one of the only countries and many people from Oceania and East Asia came here, until the government had closed the borders for any new immigrants wanting to get in.

Ariza walked through the narrow hallway to her classroom, then sat down on her seat in her classroom. As the other students slowly walked in, Chicha's seat right in front of her still remained empty. At first, Ariza didn't really notice, but the more students sat down on their seats, the more she thought about where Chicha was. When her teacher then entered the room and closed the door behind her, Chicha's absence could no longer be overlooked.

"Where's Chicha?" Miss Williams asked. "Ariza, you are her roommate, correct?"

"That's right. She said she'd catch up with us in a second, so we went to the canteen without her", she answered, truthfully.

"So Chicha is still in her room?"

"I think so, Madame."

"May you go look for her?"

Thus, Ariza got up from her seat and made her way through the orphanage, back to their room. This was the moment, something happened that was quite unusual, and if Ariza wouldn't have experienced it for herself, she would probably laugh over that story.

Chicha was asleep. But not just that was a pretty strange occasion, but also the fact that she did not wake up as Ariza entered the room was worrying. Chicha's state shifted from worrying to alarming, when she also showed no response as Ariza tried to talk to her, even gently shaking her. However, Chicha was still breathing, which was quite a relief after she had seen her being unconscious like this.

The next thing Ariza did was to head off to the infirmary of the orphanage, which was not that far away from the bedrooms. She decided to leave Chicha in their room, since she seemed to be in a pretty solid state and Ariza did not believe she would be able to carry her all the way to the infirmary. Not that she wanted to, either.

The infirmary was at the center of the orphanage, right next to the "great hall", as fans of a certain book series liked to call it (though the great hall wasn't that great at all). The orphanage always seemed bigger than it truly was. The most space was taken by the school and the two big bedroom hallways, and except for that, there were only a few "public" bathrooms, a hall for events and rainy days and a garden to play in, that hadn't been cared for since the orphanage's gardener had died half a year ago.

"Thank god", the nurse said as Ariza entered the infirmary. "What is it? Do you have a headache? Did you fall down? Any open wounds?"

"Chicha from my room doesn't wake up", Ariza said, quietly.

The nurse looked up from the boy next to her, which she had been focused on the whole time.

"Now that's..." she mumbled. "May you take that boy by the hand and then show me the way to your room? I can't let him be here on his own, or else he wouldn't be here anymore when we come back. He hasn't had his pills today and we only get new ones tomorrow, so he can't even go to school without disturbing anyone."

"That boy has a name", he said in a snotty tone. "I'm Jamie Scott."

Jamie Scott was a slender boy at the age of eight years, with pale skin and freckles all over his face. One could see the veins of his body shine through his skin very clearly, and some of them even went up to his face, stopping right at the corners of his mouth, making him look like a vampire who had just drunk blue blood. He had unmistakable red hair and light blue eyes, and he would always express how he was someone "very unique" to have this combination of hair and eye color. As for Ariza, she had never truly known much about that little boy, no matter how special his genes were. The only time he had gotten an extraordinary much amount of attention had been when he had punched a hole into one of the orphanages walls two years ago, but that had been about it. She only knew that they would give him some pretty strong medication ever since and thus, he was never heard from again.

Ariza looked at Jamie, then back to the nurse. Let's hope I won't end like that one wall, she thought as she went up to him to reach out her hand. "Come on, let's go", she said, doubting that he'd truly listen to her.

"You don't look very strong to be honest, are you sure you can keep hold of me if I try to run away?" Jamie smirked.

"You don't look very old to be honest, do you even know how to cross a street without getting run over?"

Jamie Scott took Ariza's hand without any more words.

As they were walking towards Ariza's room, Jamie seemed pretty normal. He did not try to let go of her hand, neither did he say anything insulting. The few times she had looked down to him though, he had this weird, exaggerated smirk, that kind of seemed a little too much.

Ariza realized just now how silent the orphanage was, with almost every child in their classrooms and nobody running down the hallways. You couldn't even hear people from the other rooms, since the school section was a little too far away. It was somehow...peaceful.

At least it had been, until Jamie Scott had decided to leave the two of them and to plunge through the orphanage's entrance.

"Hey!", Ariza shouted. She hesitated for a second, then ran after him without looking back at the nurse. The only thing that was even worse than having a Jamie Scott without his medication was a Jamie Scott run over by a bus.

That boy can run faster than he looks like, Ariza thought. She had never really been a good runner, though she had never thought she'd actually need these skills in real life. It turned out she was wrong. Jamie ran down the front yard right onto the street, which was nothing more than one track, one side leading into a forest and another one going through massive fields. Jamie decided for the forest.

"Holy crab, come back here!", Ariza shouted, but of course, Jamie didn't even listen. She doubted he even noticed her saying something.

She tried to keep up with him, while he became smaller and smaller in every second that he ran. And, before she knew it, Jamie was gone from her sight.

Some time he had to stop, and then, Ariza would get him. He would probably run a long time, but he'd come back. He'd never just stay outside during the night, and even lunch would probably be seductive enough for him to return. He would get into massive trouble, and maybe he'd even not get lunch or supper today. But he'd come back. What if he'd really get run over? Ariza did not like that boy, but that was nothing she would wish anybody.

"Jamie?" Ariza's steps got smaller. "Are you here? Please come back, or we'll both get into trouble."

Nothing.

"This isn't funny, you hear me?" Her voice trembled.

That was when she felt a strange stitch at her neck.

The next thing Ariza had seen was her awaking in that dark car, that appeared to be something like a van.

Now that she had remembered what happened, Ariza still struggled to understand why it all happened. Why had Chicha been unconscious? Where did Jamie Scott go? And, probably the most important question: Where was she brought to, and why was she brought to this place?

Just in this moment, the van stopped. Ariza heard the car's front doors open, and close a few seconds later. There were steps coming in their direction. Ariza guessed it were two people, but one of the two people sounded quite inconsistent in his steps. One long step, then one very short one. That person seemed to be limping.

They were talking about something. Ariza did not really understand what they said, but she could pick up some fragments.

"...stupid to be hurt by a child..."

"...at least I didn't lose one..."

"...how Red House can even hire such incompetent people as you..."

"Let's get them out of here."

Their last words had been pretty clear, as they must have stood right in front of the van's doors. Not even a second later, Ariza's whole field of vision was covered in light.

There were five other people sitting in the van with her, all of them deeply asleep. Her eyes weren't yet used to the light, so she almost saw nothing than white. There, right on her opposite: this silhouette, the red shine...was it Jamie? However, she didn't have quite enough time to think about that.

"Well, that's unfortunate", one of the men said, looking right at her face. "No worries, we're going to fix this." It was obvious he tried to sound friendly while approaching her slowly with something in his hands, but that hypocritical tone you would talk to children to shone through too much.

"No, wait, I don't wanna...", Ariza tried to argue, not able to move, but she already felt another stitch in her neck.