A Dream of Lights by Kerry Drewery

Author:Kerry Drewery
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-01-19T11:00:00+00:00

Our work detail had changed a few days before. Medicinal herbs and wild ginseng were needed, they said, though I doubted any were for us. Maybe for the guards or their families in their living area with their houses and schools that were warm and clean and comfortable, with food that wasn’t corn or tree bark or grasses, that didn’t give you diarrhoea one day, constipation the next.

But this work gave us more freedom. We could wander out of earshot of the guard and away from where he could watch our every move. I wished he’d sit somewhere away from me, close his eyes and go to sleep and ignore us. I would work still, of course, we all would: quotas had to be met; punishments would still be inflicted if we didn’t.

How nice, though, it would be to work without those eyes staring at me, without waiting for him to come along and kick my legs from under me, or give half my quota away to someone else, or point his gun at my head as he had done so many times before, watching the fear on my face, the sweat growing on my brow and the shaking of my hands. Not knowing if that would be the day he would pull the trigger.

I watched him that morning as he moved from one of us to the next to the next, checking our bags, making sure we didn’t fill the bottoms with soil or the wrong leaves just to finish earlier. And I scanned through the undergrowth, thin and overharvested, searching for the right plants and the right leaves, but with my mind on other things.

An idea. A plan. Dangerous as it was.

I saw the girl again, my friend, bent over plucking at grasses, picking into the soil with her fingertips, and I made my way over to her, edging close, bending down, a glance over my shoulder to check where the guard was.

“How can I get her out?” I whispered. Her eyes flicked to me for just a second.

“My grandmother, how can I get her out of solitary?”

She shook her head. “Don’t be ridiculous. You know you can’t.”

“But… if I don’t… she’ll die in there.”

She shrugged. “Yeah. Or if not, she will when she comes out. Happens like that sometimes. There’s nothing you can do. You know that.”

“But—”

For a second she stopped working and turned on me. “No,” she said. “Forget it. Forget I told you. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“I’m glad you did,” I whispered.

“I’m not.” She plucked some leaves, lifted them to her nose and dropped them into her bag. “Because now you’re going to end up getting yourself killed. Or me. I should’ve known better than to try to be kind. That doesn’t help in here; you need to be selfish to survive.”

“Selfish is how I ended up in here in the first place,” I hissed.

She said nothing in reply and I edged away, feeling confused and sad. The only prisoner in this place that

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