Dust (Of Dust and Darkness) (9 page)

             
“Holly?”

             
Her eyes bolt open and she jumps to her feet. I reach to pull her back, apologizing for scaring her. She returns to the floor and releases a long yawn, stretching her arms. “Where do we go to pee?”

             
“There’s a fissure in the wall about half way down.”
             
I stare in disbelief at her for a moment. She’s kidding, right? “What?” she asks.

             
“You don’t go outside? You go right here in the cave? Doesn’t it smell in there?”

             
She shakes her head. “It’s really not that bad. It rarely gets used.” Another yawn.

             
“Why’s that? Does everyone hold it in all day?”

             
“No. Truth is, once you’ve been here a while, you really don’t go all that often.” I scrunch my eyebrows, trying to figure out how that could possibly be true. “Look. We’re all skin and bones here. What food goes in, our bodies tend to keep. And what water we drink typically sweats out through the day. Yes, we all go sometime, but honestly, it’s few and far between.”

             
“That’s awful.”

             
“You can go outside if you want, but a spriggan is going to go with you. Personally, I don’t want one of them watching me go.”

             
I moan. I don’t want an audience for this either. I snatch my lantern and follow the cave until I reach the fissure. It’s a skinny opening, and I have to enter sideways and leave the lantern behind, but it widens once I get in. Like Holly said, the smell isn’t bad. I tiptoe along the edge and crouch in a spot in the back. I relieve my bladder, trying not to think about how many times this fissure has been used without cleaning it. I wish I had some leaves to wipe with, but no way was I going to actually search the floor blindly. I tiptoe again to get out, determined to touch the floor as little as possible.

             
When I get back to my station, Holly is already asleep. I’m quick to drift off again, and when the pixies awake me a second time, I manage to react without panicking. We do this over and over again through the day. Like Holly said, pretty much every hour. Towards the end, I think my internal timer kicks in because I begin to wake up on my own, expecting the spriggans to be making their rounds again.

             
As the end of the day nears, I haven’t really had any questions answered, but I do feel a little more refreshed. My muscles aren’t complaining as much, though my stomach sure is.

             
A whistle pierces the air. “Come on,” Holly says, pushing herself to her feet. “Day’s over.”

             
Thank Mother Nature!
Now I can eat something. I follow her lead, grabbing my lantern and disposing of it just outside the cave. I’m the last to fall in line so I have a spriggan practically up my backside. There’s no wind as we progress and my skin feels slick and grimy. I feel
the spriggan’s hot, sticky
breath
heat the backside of my neck
and it sickens me. How does someone who does nothing but sit outside all day smell so badly by day’s end?

             
When the line stops I figure we’re back at the pit. The spriggan behind me stands guard as the others carry my fellow pixies to the bottom. Once the line disappears, a set of rough hands snags my arms. As we rise into the air, I realize I’m not being taken to the pit. I see nothing but a burned out wasteland with nothing but a stark skeleton buried halfway under the sand. I see no plants, no water, and no pixies. Where did all the pixies go before me? Juniper, Holly? Lily and Ivy? The violet-headed pixie, whoever she is?

             
I prepare my feet for an impact that never comes.
We descend beyond the wasteland, into air that ripples like waves in water and tickles my skin, and I suddenly see the pit and all the pixies scattered about. I look to the sky and I still see sky.
They’ve glamoured our prison!
No wonder these pixies have never been rescued. No one could see them even if they flew overhead. And who would stop on a bare wasteland with nothing more to offer than a bare-boned skeleton? No one.

             
The spriggan drops me several inches before my feet can touch the ground, and I fall forward on my hands and knees upon impact.
Jerk.

             
Some of the pixies are lining up to take a shower. What’s odd is they line up like they’re set to march, standing lifelessly and
not turning
to speak to one another. Others are working on our dinner, breaking nutshells and using a mortar and pestle to grind them up. They too work in silence. Tonight’s meal looks like a banana and some peanuts, which is slightly comical to watch them peel, since bananas are as tall as us pixies. I moan internally, wishing we had just a smidgen of pixie dust to make the food a little bigger. The molecular structure of living organisms can only be stretched a little, but in this case, a little goes a long way. How I would love to use the dust on myself and make myself larger than the spriggans themselves, but I know it could never happen. Even if I still had my satchel, the more complicated the molecular structure, the more difficult it is to will the dust to do your bidding. As weak as I am, I’d never get it to work properly. And I’d only be able to grow an inch or two anyway, which would still put me at a disadvantage next to a spriggan.

             
The pixies begin to segregate to their spots in the pit. Why didn’t they ever speak to one another? It’s bad enough I’m stuck here for the moment, a prisoner in some desolate wasteland. Must I go through this alone even with two dozen pixies by my side?

             
As if she can read my thoughts, Juniper brings me my dinner. She presses her hand to my forehead to check my temperature and asks, “How are you holding up, dear?”

             
“I don’t know, Juniper. It’s not right. Us being here. We shouldn’t be prisoners. We’ve done nothing wrong to deserve this. I want to…I want to…I don’t know. I want to go to sleep tonight and wake up tomorrow morning in my tree house and breathe a sigh of relief because it was all just a dream. And rest easy because I know this kind of thing doesn’t happen in the real world. I mean, how did this happen, Juniper? How can all of these pixies go missing and no one comes looking?”

             
“I don’t know.” Great. As if it were even possible, I think I just made her feel worse. But she lifts her head and curves her lips enough to smile, albeit forced. “Maybe you’ll be the pixie someone comes looking for.”

             
“It only takes one. Right?”

             
She pats me softly on the shoulder. “Right.”

             
I wish I could believe she meant that. Juniper lifts my chin with her finger and says, “Goodnight, Rosalie. I sincerely do hope you wake up in your tree house tomorrow morning and find this was all just a very bad dream.”

             
“Goodnight, Juniper.”

             
On my own again, I devour my food in five heaping spoonfuls and fill my stomach with three cups of water. Since I didn’t work the line today, I decide to wait for all the pixies to take their shower first, including Holly, who goes right before me. She offers a small wave and forces a smile as she passes, sweeping the lingering drops off her skin. Now finally my turn, I take my sweet time dumping waves of water onto my head, washing away the sweat and dirt that clings to me.

             
I choose a spot by the edge overlooking the drop off to make my own and gaze up at the night sky. How can the stars do this to me? Just a few nights ago they performed their show for me from the safety of my Hollow. Now, they twinkle and soar, carrying on above me in rhythmic fashion, like nothing’s different. But I’m not in my Hollow. And I’m certainly not safe.

The next morning I eat my mash, fill my stomach with water and hold my tongue as the spriggan’s sweaty hands remove me from the pit. I fall in line once again and observe my surroundings from the corners of my eyes. Still nothing. No birds, no insects, no signs of life. Feeling defeated, I take one last breath of fresh air before entering the cave and beginning my first (and hopefully last) day of slave labor.

             
I meet Holly at the back and place my lantern on the table. Two other lanterns are there and I take a peek at the pixie lying against the wall. The darkness makes it difficult, but I believe she’s got a bluish tint to her skin. I jump when a fourth lantern clunks on the table beside me, and I turn to meet the pixie with the gorgeous violet hair. Unfortunately, her grey eyes are ice cold and diminish the beauty of her other facial features.

             
“I’m a heavy sleeper. Don’t fail me,
newbie
,” she snaps, shocking me with her rudeness.

             
Willow
. Of course the pixie with the alluring features is the one pixie who suggested I be left to die so I wouldn’t diminish her share of mash.
Of
all the pixies to be responsible for…
She’s quick to turn her back and settle on the floor. I look to Holly with disbelief, wondering what it is I’ve done to offend this pixie, but she just shrugs it off.

             
Holly whispers, “Forget it. She’s…dramatic.”

             
You think?

             
“Alright. All we do at this station is sort the dirt from the dried mushroom powder.”

             
“What’s the difference?”

             
“No idea. Quite frankly, we don’t give a crap about the purity of their pixie dust.” My eyebrows lift and my forehead creases in amusement.
Way to go pixies
. “We just make it look like we’re meticulous.” The only table without a conveyer belt, Holly takes the pile of powder at the beginning and sweeps her forearm over it, spreading it into a thin layer before us. “If you see anything obvious, great. Otherwise, I don’t care which particles make it to your good and bad piles.”

             
I laugh internally, thinking the faeries deserve as much. “The sprigs don’t ask or check?”

             
“They wouldn’t know the difference either way. And the faeries obviously haven’t noticed the pixie dust isn’t as strong as it should be. Even if they did, these mushrooms are just one component they’d have to look in to.”

             
“That’s what they get for slave labor,” I add bitterly.

             
“Exactly. Anyways, the good will go into the sacks beneath the table. The bad will go into a bucket that we’ll dump on our way out of here.”

             
Holly begins sifting through the powder and I soon follow her lead. Taking a quick peek at the two against the back wall, I note that Willow and the other pixie, whose name I don’t know, are already asleep. The sleeping version of Willow is far more likeable, with features that aren’t taut with stress and anger.

             
“Holly?” I ask, waiting for her to murmur in acknowledgement. “Do you still believe you’ll be rescued?”

             
“No.” An invisible weight suddenly suffocates my chest. “I hope I’ll be rescued one day but I no longer believe anyone’s looking for me. I’m sure my family has come to terms with my death by now.”

             
“What’s a family?” I ask curiously.

             
She pauses to give me the weirdest look. “Seriously? Mother and father? Sometimes siblings, either a brother or a sister?” Now it’s my turn to give the weird look. I’ve never heard these terms before. “Wow. Okay. Your mother and father would be the female and male that came together to make your egg. That makes you their pixling. If they had any other pixlings, the females would be called your sisters and the males your brothers. Together they make up your family and they’re the ones that are there for you, no matter what. You take care of each other, have each other’s backs.”