Chapter 23: PoW

As the door locked behind her Grace turned on the light and burst into tears.

Those people! They just had no feelings at all.

She could cry, that was okay. Anyone would, after that. In fact it was weird how she hadn’t felt like crying while it was going on ... well Xenia wouldn’t have cared and Boris would’ve got off on it.

But she had to not be a victim. Well, she could be a victim, as long as she worked at stopping being a victim. And she wasn’t here as a victim anyway: she was here as a trick, as part of a rescue. Xenia had tortured her, but she hadn’t got the secrets; so far anyway. She thought the spaceship was in a lake, instead of being attached to an SES satellite, and she thought she had all the trackers when she only had two out of three.

Grace wiped her eyes and stopped crying. Boris had scared her, but hadn’t actually touched her. Not ‘like that’, anyway. Xenia thought she’d forced a secret out of her, but the great big blonde was losing, so far.

Grace looked out of the window, across to the opposite cottage. There was Mo, peering out! She raised a smile and waved. He waved back, though she couldn’t see his face with the light being behind him. He wouldn’t be able to see hers either. She moved and made a thumbs-up to the side, that he’d see in silhouette. He did one back - so hopefully they hadn’t hurt him too badly, or opened his wounds up.

After a moment she noticed something on the right - it was Emerald! And Cyan. Waving too. They hadn’t been tortured too badly either then, it looked like. Grace waved back. Her mum must be in the cottage next to her own, with Rose. She waved for a few seconds, until eventually they’d all waved enough and she stopped, saw the others stop, and closed the curtain. She hoped she’d be allowed to see her mum, and the others, in the morning.

She went to the bathroom, did her teeth and managed to cough up some of the water she’d been tortured with. Finally she crept into the bed, which had fresh clean sheets at least. She remembered her third tracker, that they hadn’t found. She couldn’t even feel it, but it was a foreign body wasn’t it? It might get infected down there if she left it in too long? The box of supplies and everything seemed to mean they were going to keep her here for a long time. She reached in, managed to grip it between her fingers, and pulled it out.

Where was the best place to hide it? No point being too clever, because if they scanned again they’d find it wherever it was. Unless she switched it off? What about the battery? There was no way of charging it and it only lasted two or three days. Mia couldn’t get here yet - how long would she be? She and Paul and Claude might be caught if they tried to fly so it’d be ... driving for ... how far was it? And a boat.

It was ridiculous not having her phone and Internet!

A boat would take ages to do whatever - a thousand miles or something. A week or even more perhaps? Ten miles an hour? A hundred hours: five days. On top of driving to wherever, Florida, say same as New York? Three thousand miles, at fifty miles an hour, sixty hours: two and a half days. A week, then.

Would Mia have seen this tracker’s location yet? The app had a history function didn’t it? So yes, basically, or it didn’t matter. And Xenia would leave the others switched on to lure Mia, Paul and Claude in, to some other part of the base where they could surround them or something. So Mia would be aiming for the base, at least, for now.

Alright, she’d leave it off for a day, then turn it on for ... fifteen minutes twice a day. That would look different from Xenia’s which she bet would be on charge and on all the time.

She turned the light on, took it out of the condom, switched it off and pushed it to the back of one of the drawers in the kitchen, with the pack of condoms she’d got in the drugstore. She put some water in the used condom and flushed it down the loo.

What next?

Oh, she had to get the lake message to the others, somehow. They needed to know she’d said the spaceship was in a lake, otherwise if they said something else Xenia would torture them all even more, knowing somebody was lying. And she’d already made the Striteracians pass out!

How though? What did she have?

She went into the kitchen, saw the big cardboard box and had an idea. She took the scissors and cut big letters out of the box: A C E F H I K L N P and S.

She put her gown on and took the scissors over to the window, which had wires in the glass - for an alarm of course. It was three in the morning and they were all locked in, with alarms and two layers of huge fencing, so why would Xenia bother with a guard? It would just be more people knowing about her secret operation.

Grace tapped on the window with the metal handle of the scissors, near the edge so it made a sharp sound. It wasn’t very loud but it was noticeable. She did a few taps in a little rhythm, and waited. She did it again.