Chương 29: The Prisoners

Time ticked by and when he heard Boris's breathing become heavy in the worn armchair, Wretch looked up. There was a woman in the cage nearest to him, and another about one meter above the first. Hoisted even higher were two boys, judging by their broader shoulders and the length of their hair.

"Hey… he's asleep. I can tell," Wretch whispered. The nearest prisoner lifted her head, the thin body had only an arm and a leg, eyes dull and hollow. They were missing something, there was no spark there.

"Are you really Blessed?" she whispered. Wretch nodded, almost surprised to have gotten a reaction at all.

"I am. They hunted me, do you know why?" Another voice from above chimed in, animated, with a sense of preserved curiosity.

"No idea. I haven't heard of a Blessed getting trapped here. At least not from the people that were here when I first came." It was the young man with only a leg that looked down at him. His only limb dangling through a gap in the bars. Despite his condition, he had something of a smile as he talked.

"What did they do to you?" Wretch asked.

"They saw off your arm or the leg and when there are no more legs or arms to saw, then they take ya," the young man said, leaning towards the bars of the cage.

"But it's not that bad. You get food, a little, at least." He said with a tilt of his head. The woman in the cage next to him scoffed.

"We are already dead, what's the use?" The one-legged man didn't seem to care for her negativity.

"What can you do, anyway? Please tell me your blessing is to break cages!" The man said with a hint of irony.

"Sorry…" Wretch said.

"I can heal wounds and missing limbs, and turn my body into beasts I ate." The others looked at him with grim expressions for a moment, even the boys smile vanished.

"Oh man." The one-legged youngling said.

"You are in for a world of hurt." The realization hit him then and there. They needed limbs for something, and he was an endless supply. Wretch shuddered and his stomach twisted. He switched the subject.

"How many prisoners have you met here?" The young man stretched his five remaining toes.

"We were eight when I arrived, the kid at the top was here then, the girls came later. I'm Jonah by the way. You from a fancy family or something?" Wretch looked up at the prisoner in the cage hoisted the highest. Hanging squarely in front of the clocks painted glass. The poor kid only had an arm and stared through a gap where a shard of glass was missing.

"I am Wretch, but my friends call me Wretchy."

"That's not fancy at all!" Jonah said with a quiet snicker.

"Used to be a street rat. Stealing and thieving," Wretch said with a grim smile. He saw the boy raise an eyebrow.

"I'm Cynthia." The nearest girl said. She was the one that had been prodded in his stead.

"If you can turn into a monster, why can't you just turn and break the cage?" She asked.

"It takes a day to change a single arm and even if I did, I don't think I could break these bars," Wretch answered.

"Of course he can't break out of here, are you shits stupid? They wouldn't put him here if he could," the second woman hissed in a low voice.

"Just give up already." She continued.

"No one cares about us, trash from the streets. We're dead." It was quiet for a moment, only the low screech of the suspended chains and snores from the armchair.

"What's your name?" Wretch asked. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. She shook her head, scratching her hair with a lone hand.

"Victoria."

"I care, and I am escaping, then I'll gut that freak," he answered and pointed to Boris. They grew quiet for a moment and Wretch heard the grinding of gritted teeth and grasps tightening around metal bars.

"Do any of you know where we are?"

"No clue… but I bet he knows." Victoria said, pointing with her only arm to the boy hoisted up at the top, gazing without pause through the crack in the clock.

"Hey, you by the clock!... Look here." Wretch said as loudly as he dared. Boris stopped his snoring. Wretch froze. They held their breaths, Cynthia clutching a lone palm over her mouth. The man gruntled as he turned to the side, continuing his loud snoring. They all sighed in relief.

"The professor said once that he liked the boy's curiosity, and that's why he left him. He had been here the longest, even among the people I first met here." Jonah whispered.

"He spoke back then, if only a little. Never told me his name though, only talked about his mom. Poor sod," Jonah said. The clock above hit eleven and the chimes of the city bells rang, loud enough to make the chains hum. Still in the city, he thought. Most of the bells were on Saint Summit. And the chimes grew from somewhere above and then rolled like a wave to somewhere beneath them. A Spire, then. But which one?

Wretch and the rest tried to get the mute boy at the top to answer, but he never turned from the gap in the glass. Whatever world he was in, it was a more pleasant one than this. Instead, they talked in hushed whispers about where they came from. Jonah and Cynthia were both street urchins. Jonah had been taken in the night while scavenging for scraps behind a restaurant, close to the Inner Wall on the city's western side. He spoke enthusiastically of siblings, far too many for Wretch to remember all their names.

Cynthia was from the north side, close to the Outer Wall. She worked part time as a tailor apprentice, and survived the rest of the week by sorting through trash heaps after scraps of metal to sell to the smelters. She had been promised a meal if she agreed to an interview. After being led into an alleyway, a bag was pulled over her head and she was stuffed in a carriage. Victoria's story was similar. A forge-worker, twenty-two.

She shared an apartment with a younger sister and had been clubbed in the head heading back from work. The other prisoners were surprised to find that Wretch had been just another thief from the Lows looking for his father.

"You're just another scoundrel looking for his pa?" Jonah asked.

"I guess you could say that," Wretch answered.

"I had nothing else to do, not after my mother sold me for some coin."

"Another mouth to feed? Kids have been tossed for less," Cynthia said. Wretch shook his head in thought.

"She was not well. She could be kind and lovely, spinning grand ideas, other times she was violent. I reminded her of someone, someone she hated and she made sure I knew that." Jonah nodded and tilted his head.

"If we get out of here, I will introduce you to my brothers, they'll take anyone in." He said with a smile, teeth whiter than they had any business being. Wretch couldn't help but return the smirk despite the harsh situation.

"Then I will bring you all to a nice restaurant on the spires and give you a few pounds as pocket change."

"I'd like that!" Jonah said with a nod.

"Pastries preferably."

"How did you even become Blessed? I thought it was impossible for people like us?" Asked Cynthia. Wretch retold the story of how he crawled through the tunnels under the Lows and his fight with the ratling.

"Damn, I wouldn't mind becoming Blessed, but I ain't doing something like that," Victoria said.

"Does everyone become Blessed like that?" Cynthia asked, inspecting the nails of her sole hand.

"The people on my team told me most get Blessed after a big fight or when you succeed in something difficult. I wished I'd known sooner," Wretch answered. As time passed, they grew tired and, to the snoring of Boris, they curled up to sleep. They were nice people, Victoria seemed without hope, but the street rats, Cynthia and Jonah somehow had kept it together. Wretch scratched his claws against the bars of the cage, the metal was dark silver, made from some unknown alloy and hardened to a level he'd never seen.

The thick padlock was much the same. He gave up and laid down against the bars with a yawn. The cage was hard and cold, no position he turned to was comfortable, sleep didn't find him and he spent the time thinking about a way out. We are in a spire, can we alert someone? If there were other buildings close to this tower, maybe they could signal to a passing officer or perhaps breaking the glass would cause enough of a disturbance that officials would be called here.

He was rather sure that he could steal a pair of keys from the disfigured Boris. But he hadn't seen any. Whatever his kidnappers wanted from him, they seemed to want him alive. He would bide his time for the moment, he already had a plan in the works. Perhaps the Richter's would find him before that. If they're alive. As he pictured the Richter's house and the first people who had ever treated him with care, a dull ache settled in his chest. He was going to escape, no matter what.

He went over different possibilities until the snoring rocked him to sleep.