Tears stung at Adriana’s eyes as she thought about the girl’s tragic fate. The last time the old man had used Roxana she had staggered back into the room silent and bloodied, as she had before, but instead of falling down on her bed and sobbing, as she usually did, she had simply limped into the bathroom, cleaned herself up and walked right back out. She had started chatting to Adriana right away, in fact, and the words that she had said had chilled her to her very core.
‘I now know that I won’t see sixteen, much less twenty-one,’ she had said, in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘I’ll die here. My friends and I had a running bet, a joke really, about who would live to see the age of twenty-one and who wouldn’t survive until then. We’d laugh about it, we’d joke about all sorts of ridiculous deaths; having a piano dropped on one’s head while walking on a sidewalk, getting hit by a bus while crossing the road, and all of those silly cartoonish clichés … but now I know: it’s me. I’m the one who’ll die first. I’ll never see twenty-one. My life is over already, and I’m not even close to sixteen yet. But the worst thing about it, Adriana, is that I just don’t care. I’m so numb now that I can’t feel anything anymore. I just.Don’t.Care.’
The words hadn’t been the worst of it though. Words spoken or written could lie easily enough, but a person’s eyes always told the truth, and when Adriana had stared, teary-eyed, into the child’s irises, probing with her hazel orbs into the depths of Roxana’s soul, she had found a blankness, an emptiness as sheer and devoid of light as a crack in a bottomless crevasse in a deep ocean. In those eyes she had found death; waiting, incubating, gorging its bloated parasite corpse on what little life remained in the teenager.
It had terrified her to the core of her being.
Since then she had been desperately trying to awaken some sort of vitality, some sort of hope in Roxana, but her efforts had been in vain; the girl had long since abandoned any hope she might have had in freedom or escape, and had resigned herself to the terrible fate that awaited her at the end of this nightmarish journey.
Now, for Adriana to reveal to Roxana that all along she had had a key to the room, that she had held in her very hands an opportunity to escape from this hell – that would crush to powder any last trust the teenager may have had in her, the only person in the world she did still trust.
‘I’m so sorry little one,’ Adriana whispered to herself, guilt pulsing in searing hot flushes through her system. ‘There would have been no chance of escape for you. Even if we had used this key to get out, how far could we have gone? There are armed guards everywhere and cameras all over the place. The man assured me that doing this at the exact time he told me to would be the one and only chance there would be at escape. We couldn’t have done it ourselves, we just … we couldn’t have. Lord, I had the chance to free myself when that guard left his gun on the bed, I had the chance to get out, but I couldn’t even do that! There’s nothing I – we – could have done to escape before this.’
She tried to convince herself of the veracity of these words, tried her absolute hardest to believe in the rationalisations she was spouting … but ultimately, she could not.
‘But … but you won’t see it like that, will you?’ she murmured. ‘You’ll just see it as me being selfish, me keeping it for myself, me trying to save only my own skin. And perhaps … perhaps that is the ugly truth of the matter. Perhaps I am selfish, perhaps I should have sacrificed this opportunity for a chance to have got you out of here before that disgusting monster did all of those nightmarish things to you. But I couldn’t, little Roxana, I just couldn’t. I’m weak. I’m a coward. I don’t even know if I can go through with this plan that all of these people, these Rebels, whoever they are, are counting on me to do.’
She slumped back against the wall and ran her quivering fingers through her long, thick chestnut mane, trying to keep the need to hyperventilate and curl up into a ball of helplessness on the floor at bay.
‘Come on Adriana,’ she said to herself, trying to will some strength and courage into her shaking limbs. ‘Come on! This is your only chance to get out of this hell! You have to do this, you have to. Come on, come ON!’
A knock on the door jarred her back to the present and sent a gush of icy fear rushing down her spine.
‘Adriana? Are you done yet? Sorry to rush you, but I really am bursting!’
‘Okay, hold on, I’m coming,’ she said, hoping that Roxana couldn’t hear the fear in her voice.
She pulled a few pieces of toilet paper off the roll and bundled the key and watch inside the crumpled ball of tissues, which she gripped tightly in her fist as she flushed the toilet. Beaming as broad a smile as she could manage, she opened the door and allowed the girl to slide past her.
‘Thanks,’ Roxana said as
