The Tag Bearer

Chapter 20 - A Table of Offerings

I lay curled up on the cold tiles of my room; hungry and disorientated.

Hill had separated Bryce from me and whisked us away to our cells without the explanation I knew he wanted to give on my father's grand betrayal. I didn't know if Bryce was alive or still lying cold and hungry somewhere else, but it had been days since I last had contact with the outside world. There was no window in the tightly spaced cell, but a sliver of sunlight would have been very comforting to me.

A meal, usually cold, would appear every so often from a thin slit under the door. The space between them seemed like forever, but I found it was a good way of keeping track of time.

My mother's face came in and out of my mind today as I lay on my back, picking at the bits of skin around my nails. Her smile only existed in a few ripped photographs my blind father was too blind to even see anymore. They sat, high up on the mantelpiece like a tribute. A tribute that never made any sense to me.

Our old apartment block wasn't much. A few drab white walls, an elevator that never seemed to work and a gang of peace-loving drug addicts taking over the back staircases. But none of that mattered because she was gone. The moment she could, she fled, not caring about the family she left behind. The crippled father and his faithfully protective daughter.

I always believed she was lying dead in a gutter somewhere, but I guess she figured she would survive better with a bottle of gin than with her own kin. I frowned.

"Why is it that she left?"

"Who?"

I jumped, backing up against the wall of my cell. I hadn't expected a reply, yet here, a young girl stood gazing down at me, a bowl of hot oats cupped in her hands. Her hair was placed in a rushed bun below her right ear and her petticoat was a dull brown – much like mud.

"You were speaking aloud, miss," she said as she knelt before me. "Here eat this. He wants to see you in five minutes."

She placed the bowl of steaming oats and a wooden spoon on the floor next to me and turned to go. She was harmless. Perhaps she knew something? I'd sat in here for days without knowing a damn thing and it was time I pried someone for them.

"What happened to my friends?" I said after her, unravelling myself towards the hot oats.

She stopped dead in her tracks and gulped before she cautiously looked over her shoulder. "I'm not allowed to speak of this.... Miss."

"Surely you know something?"

Her eyes darted across the room. "I will be in trouble." She scooted out of the entrance, slamming the door behind her and bolting it.

Puzzled, I scoffed the porridge a little too quickly. It wasn't long before I was puffing like a dragon as the sludge burnt my mouth. I tried to cool it down with as much oxygen and saliva as I could manage, and eventually I just swallowed it whole.

Bad idea, Ellie. I scowled. I still didn't know what happened to Bryce and Matthew, and all this thinking was driving me out of my mind. Hill would come soon enough, bored himself of getting useless answers from the boys.

Perhaps the best course of action was to slowly leak the information to him? At least until I figured out how to escape?

I glanced up, my heart skipping a beat as the doors' bolts were clunked open. The door swung open on its hinges and two Officers appeared in the doorway to the little room looking affirmative yet lost.

"Stand," one of them ordered. I followed his instructions as he barked them out into the stale air. "Turn around. Hands behind your back."

A thin plastic zip tie was applied to my joint wrists and I was led out into the artificial light of a hallway. I squinted, my eyes burning at the glare. It blinded me as I stumbled over my feet and through the maze of hallways.