"How do you feel?"
Leyla shut her mouth and licked her lips, she didn't realize that she was clutching the blankets with both hands until pain jolted through her elbow. "I'm... thirsty."
Instantly her eyes fleeted to the half glass of water.
He followed the same direction.
"I... was thirsty and needed a drink."
The shadows that eclipsed his body seemed to expand and contract, breathing, and though he did not move from the corner the atmosphere dropped into something chilly as her skin broke out into gooseflesh.
He knew she had been pretending.
"I just..." her voice cracked. Leyla stopped and sipped a timid breath, "I needed water that's all."
His impermeable gaze lingered on her face, searching, then he began to walk towards the corner where the buckets were.
"I didn't ask what you needed," he corrected gravelly, "I asked how do you feel."
Oh.
Laying there with her face flushed from fear, a persistent pain sharpening as the medication wore off and sweat glistening on her brow, Leyla smiled wobbly.
"I'm fine now."
He was wringing the clothes in one bucket and tossing them into another. At her words his hands grew still and his face turned halfway watching her from his periphery.
Leyla's chin was trembling. She could feel it. And his sudden attention made her grit down on her teeth and look briefly at the night stand.
"I am." She reasoned weakly.
He finished the job and rose easily carrying the brimming buckets in either hand. A silence pervaded the room as he pivoted the door but just before he could step out—
Her stomach growled.
Leyla's eyes widened. She began to fumble with the blanket, shifting about while grunting in a futile attempt at covering up the sound.
The man had stopped at the threshold and turned partly to consider her.
She coughed again while staring at her nails,a frustrated flush of pink on her cheeks contrasting against her otherwise pale features.
I can chug the water once he leaves, she reasoned still not meeting his gaze.
"There's stew downstairs." He said, lifting her attention to him.
Without another word, he walked away leaving her mystified.
Leyla stared at the ceiling long and hard expecting an answer to form from nothing.
Had he been serious about her fetching dinner downstairs?
Or was he simply making a statement.
Her eyes slid to the door longingly. The sound below was now the bubbling of food and the scent of it; warm and hearty, threaded the air filling her nostrils.
The glass of water had been emptied in her final exertion of energy before she lay back down, breathing hard and trembling in pain.
Or hunger.
Or both.
She was unsure now.
Leyla didn't know how long he had been downstairs until the lights flicked off and familiar footsteps began their ascent. She held her breath and reverted her gaze to the ceiling, and after a hesitant moment, she shut them.
This time the man didn't pause at her door but continued down the hallway.
Her lips pursed into a trembling thin line.
He really was serious.
If she was to eat, she would have to go downstairs.
Yet the absurdity of it– him knowing she was immobile due to her injured leg and arm made it all the more ridiculously terrifying.
"Calm down," Leyla tried to assuage the fist that was slowly clenching and unclenching around her heart. "You're okay. You're safe. Ground yourself."
Spreading out her palm on the cool bedsheet, she shut her eyes and allowed herself to sink briefly into the mattress. An awareness of her current state gently rolled over the noises in her head.
She was safe.
She had escaped the farm and her elder did not know where she was. Though the journey on the road had been interrupted by the tragic accident, she had awoken to a stranger caring for her and he did not seem to know who she was.
Or what.
"He can't find you." Leyla muttered, wiggling her toes beneath the blanket. "If he could, he would have by now."
Because you're chipped.
Her eyes flew open and, in a flash of panic, she forgot her wounded arm which rose in the air stiffly before falling back as a cry of pain left her. Leyla blinked back the tears and used her other trembling hand to tap blindly at her ear, then nervously search the spot behind it.
Something rough and patchy grazed her fingers.
She blinked.
Her fingers slowed their movements, hesitant and gingerly grazing the areas around the base of her skull where her hair seemed to have been chopped in disregard. Slowly, they rose along the familiar path which she often rubbed when nervous, and found it covered.
She touched it again. And again. And again.
Adding more pressure this time and rubbing it back and forth until her nails pinched on the corner and gently began lifting the flap...
His bedroom door opened once more.
This time she didn't wait for him to pass by her door; "Hello... mister?"
The steps slowed as they reached the entrance. The man had changed from his daytime clothes and into a pair of grey slacks and loose long sleeve shirt. His hair was damp and his cheeks colored from a steaming shower.
She suddenly wished she could shower as well.
"Do you have any pain medication?"
His eyes moved patiently over her body hidden beneath the blanket, "Are you in pain?"
"I am."
He glanced at his wrist watch and a thought passed between them. "I administered a dose three hours prior to your waking."
Her mouth opened and shut indecisively. What did that mean?
"Can I have some more please?"
"After dinner."
And to her dismay he began to walk away.
Leyla shifted on the bed ignoring the jarring pain, "Wait– I just..." his steps slowed. "I can't move. I can't go downstairs."
The corner of his mouth tugged upward like a string drawing it, "I know."
She watched as he walked away.
Leyla stared at the now empty spot in dull bemusement. Something heavy was creeping over her chest and she didn't know where it came from.
She lay back hesitantly.
It was weird, this feeling. She had many reasons to not feel so laden; her escape from the elder's home was successful and she was alive... So why the clenching of a fist around her heart?
Why the growing despair in her belly?
Because you're still in a cage.
"I'm not," Leyla snapped trying to stifle the niggling voice in her mind. "I'm just injured and bedridden."
That's right. Her motion had been disrupted by the car accident but she was well and alive albeit with broken bones but that was mendable. "Once I heal, I can leave this place."
And where will you go?
She blinked at the thought, her fingers now worrying the threads of the blanket like a terrier worrying a rag.
You have no home, no car... no family.
"That's not true. They're humans out there I'm sure who live in —"
Harvest farms.
Plenty of them.
Thousands upon thousands of land well fenced and barricaded for the breeding of humans, for the preservation of the world's rare jewels.
Beyond that is nothing more.
Suddenly she saw no discernible end to this journey that had begun as a fantasy in her mind. Laying in her cot all those nights daring to dream that maybe, maybe, there were people like her who were free and living in nations where elders did not rule over them.
And in all her false fantasies, she had never thought once to inquire if such places existed.
Leyla had been running on hopes and dreams, and now those were achingly slipping between her fingers like fine sand.
Her voice was timid now, unsure of herself even. "Where will you go?"
Drawn into her disorganized dimming thoughts, she failed to perceive the noises downstairs as he prepared a bowl of stew.
Neither did she hear him open cabinets and rummage about briefly for her pain medication nor when he climbed the staircase and stood at her door with the steaming bowl of stew in one hand and a small saucer of assorted pills in various colors.
"Can you sit up?"
The sound of his voice startled her out of her reverie and she nearly cringed away, expecting him to appear by her bedside, only to halt and stare at his figure by the door.
Leyla opened her mouth to speak when the scent of food caught her nostrils. Her eyes fell to the bowl in hand, then rose hesitantly back to the man wielding it.
Hadn't he told her to go downstairs for dinner?
He hovered there waiting for her answer.
"I can," she admitted with that false smile.
Wordlessly he stepped into the room and approached her bedside. Leyla stiffened as he drew closer and set the bowl on the nightstand. A moment passed before he reached for her.
"What are you–"
Her breath caught as his hand slid steadily across the back of her neck.
His skin was calloused – hardened by labor– his fingers long enough to span the width of her neck, yet he only held what he needed.
For a heartbeat– the barest of seconds– his index finger settled on her erratic pulse and lingered there, as if savoring her heartbeat, before firmly raising her into an upright position.
The movement was fluid and effortless.
Leyla muttered an incoherent thank you while avoiding his gaze, immediately busying her eyes with her broken arm, the walls, the blanket... Her neck was flushed and it was not from fever.
She expected him to leave.
And when he didn't, her eyes finally lifted with great effort to the man now staring at her broken and useless limb.
His attention moved to the bowl with a spoon, then pointedly back at her with a raised brow.
Leyla scratched at the cast awkwardly. She began to answer him, tell him that she could do it, yet something in his expression held the lie back.
He made the first move, reaching for the steaming bowl and sitting just at the edge of the mattress which sunk with a protesting creak.
The sudden tilt in weight edged her outer thigh towards him.
Leyla had been fed numerous times since she had been born. By the nursemaid and then her elder, sometimes with spoons but mostly his hands.
The elder preferred the feeling of his fingers against her tongue, her throat muscles spasming around his fingers and would often slide them in deep until her eyes were bloodshot or she tasted blood from his nails scraping flesh at the back of her throat.
Leyla watched in mild trepidation as the man lifted the spoon to her mouth, hovering just out of reach from her shut lips.
She stared at him and realized the color of his eyes were an unremarkable brown but the yellow made them glint. The shadows under them had deepened not out of exhaustion but something she had noticed in her elder when he had not eaten due to depletion of humans.
A hunger.
When she didn't open her mouth, he withdrew the spoon and he held it to his own lips.
He blew on it slowly, eyes briefly leaving hers to focus on the task, and she watched in wonder.
There was a small nick on his upper lid that disappeared the moment his attention reverted back to the spoon held at her shut mouth.
She leaned forward and sealed her mouth around it.
The soup was thickened with potatoes and a few soggy carrots.
Had Leyla not been so starved she would have settled for waiting on another meal. But she hadn't eaten and right now her senses had dulled to anything beyond the act of swallowing. She waited, expectant, for another spoonful.
This time he didn't blow, only held it up to her mouth, and as her lips sealed around it he spoke.
"Which farm do you come from?"
Leyla froze.
Her teeth clicked on metal as he patiently pulled it out of her mouth.
She took her time swallowing while focusing on the patterned blanket.
He lifted another spoonful.
She hesitated, then leaned forward with her mouth ready, when he pulled back, the slightest movement of wrist alone.
Leyla stared at the lone pea floating on the spoon while mulling over his question.
It was evident he knew she was not his kind, and the surgical removal of her tracker whilst she was sleeping meant he was well aware that someone owned her.
Her tongue darted out nervously and licked at the salt on her lower lip.
She evaded instead, "How did you know where my code was?"
Leyla knew it was bold to ask him that.
Within the short time she had spent awake and strapped to the bed it was clear that he had the upper hand in her situation but just exactly what he intended to do with it made her hackles rise.
The spoon lowered into the bowl.
The man set a palm near the outside of her thigh and leaned on it while studying her, a line of muscle surfaced along his tricep from the simple action. Leyla stared at how it rose until the line of his sleeve where it disappeared beneath.
His face grew dark like a storm cloud and the silence that followed stretched thin like a thread drawn taut.
It snapped when he spoke, "That's not the question I asked."
And then he was rising from the bed with the bowl in hand. He paused as his eyes found the saucer of assorted pills, and his face cleared.
Leyla was reaching for it just as he did, "Wait–"
Their fingers brushed and grew still, hers were trembling.
The man's patient eyes fell on her, a dark brow rising in question.
"The eastern star farm," she explained– voice thin. "I'm not sure how far it is from here but that's where I was raised and bought." Licking her lips she looked at the pills then him, a wave of shame rolling through her.
"You escaped."
It was not a question.
She looked away nodding shortly.
"Who owns you?"
Leyla touched the bandage behind her ear. "I don't..."
"Who owns you?"
"He never told me his name." She explained. And when his hand never left the pills, she stared pleadingly at him. "I really don't know."
"Is he the only one?"
She blinked. "Yes."
Something glinted in his dark eyes. Like a shadow lifting briefly as he stared down at her thoughtfully with something that resembled belief.
His hand lifted from the plate and her shrugged shoulders fell in relief, but she didn't withdraw her hand. Not until he placed the stew beside the pills.
Once he was out of the room, only then did she pick the bowl and set it on her lap carefully using her good hand to feed herself.
The hunter stared at the flap of skin held between his fingers.
It was thin, carefully carved and beneath it was the minute tracker beeping colors of green and red like a silent alarm. His mind wandered to the young woman in the bedroom, her pleading wide eyes and starved mouth so readily spilling secrets.
His free hand rested on the flat of his abdomen feeling the faint edges of his ribs rippling beneath muscle. He was hungry.
And she was a banquet prepared for him.
He wondered why her owner had not devoured her. It was rare for a human to mature in a harvest. Typically they were devoured while young, when their bones were tender and their flesh unmarred by the trauma's of life. Those that were spared were simply for breeding and continuing posterity.
She, however, was not pregnant. He would know, her pheromones would have stunk otherwise.
So why was she still alive?
He detached the tracker from her skin and rolled between his fingers back and forth before crushing it and flicking it away.
All that was left was a piece of her, the rest down the hallway tucked in bed.
The first nibble of her skin tasted like heaven; like a finely sliced piece of fresh meat.
He ate it slowly, taking his good time all while the front of his shorts began to jut out like the prow of a ship.
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