Elemental

ELEMENTAL

Emily White

Text copyright © 2013 by Emily
White

All rights reserved

www.emilytwhite.blogspot.com

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may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in
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Summary: A girl with no memory of
her past escapes the interstellar prison ship she’s been trapped on
for the past years only to find out there may have been a good
reason to keep her imprisoned.

November, 2013 Smashwords
Edition

2nd Edition

To Jason—for inspiring me to work harder.

And to Victoria, whose constant support
helped me

get through the worst moments of doubt.

Thank you both.

Chapter One
:

Escape From Hell

I opened my eyes to darkness so utter and
complete, I wondered for a fleeting moment if I'd really opened
them at all.

Cycled air blew and I blinked away the
parchedness building at the corners. I closed my eyes again and
rolled to my other side. My shoulder splashed against a puddle and
I twisted onto my stomach, sniffing.

Sour and salty.

My own urine.

I pushed myself to the other side of the
cell and leaned my back against the wall. Cycled air blew against
my hair, my skin, my chapped lips. I ignored the burn, the way my
body ached for moisture. I'd been here too long to let that stuff
get to me anymore.

Ten years. And a few months.

Something the
Sho'ful
guards loved to
remind me of whenever they slithered past in the corridor just
beyond my cell door. Like specters. Only voices. Nothing else.

But they never told me why I was there. I’d
stopped asking a long time ago. Either they didn’t know or they
didn’t want to deal with the fact they’d put a child in a locked
cell.

“Get up.” A voice whispered against my
skull.

I pressed my eyes shut, waiting for the
rest. For the taunts and snickers.

“Open the door and leave.”

My eyes snapped open. Something was
different. I tentatively caressed my ear, sure I'd lost my mind
because the voice I'd heard, I hadn't heard with my ears.

It was in my mind.

A creaking sound broke the silence. And then
something large, cold, and hard pushed against my back, sliding me
across the rusty floor. When I stopped moving, I grabbed hold of
the thing that had pushed me and ran my fingers along its exterior.
Parts of it were rough and chipping away, and all of it was ice
cold.

I lay there running over and over in my mind
the probability that what I held in my hands was the open door.
Impossible. Yet…maybe.
Something
had pushed me. It could’ve
been the door.

But leave?

I burst out laughing for a precious split
second before I clamped my mouth shut. No one left
Sho’ful
,
and only fools thought to try. No light gleamed at the end of this
tunnel. I sat there, refusing to get up. The voice in my head had
been nothing but my imagination. It could be nothing more than
that.

I reached up and grasped the thing that had
moved me, and pulled myself up. I moved my feet to find some
purchase on the floor. They slid along its smooth surface,
throbbing with pain. I groaned in frustration.

With my teeth clenched, I laid my feet flat
against the floor and forced my shaking legs to lift me. It’d been
twenty-three atmosphere cycles since the last time I’d eaten, and
moving took more out of me than I'd have liked to admit. I leaned
my weight against the door and let out the breath I didn’t realize
I’d been holding.

I slid my palm along the doorframe and waved
my hand through the empty space.

It was real. The door was really open.

I leaned my forehead against the cold, rough
metal and almost screamed with elation.

For the first time in ten years, I smiled.
Ear to ear, my skin stretching taut, almost hurting. My heart
thrummed with excitement, my skin buzzed with it. Refusing to waste
one more moment, I clenched my right leg and prepared for my first
step out of my cell.

And froze.

The hounds.

The guards’ precious pets kept watch over
the halls to instill terror in the prisoners and dare us to plan an
escape, even though the locked doors made that impossible. A chill
ran up my spine as I thought about all the times I’d pressed myself
against the back corner of my cell, getting as far away as I could
from a hound that would come sniffing at my door. With perfect
clarity, I could still recall the sound of his claws scraping
against metal, sharp enough to gouge the hard exterior.

No one in their right mind would leave their
cell, even if they could. That didn’t stop the guards from dragging
inmates out once in a while to feed to the beasts.

I shuddered. They’d done that to the man in
the cell next to mine just a few feeding sessions ago. I could
still hear his screams, the sound of his flesh being ripped from
bone, and the crunch of the hounds’ teeth gnawing him apart.

No.

I shook my head to get the memory out. My
heart hammered against my chest in warning. The smartest, the
safest
thing to do would be to close the door and go on
living my life the way I’d been living it for the past ten years. A
beating heart, safe inside my chest and drowning in depressive
nothingness, trumped a beating heart spilling my blood onto the
floor to be lapped up by those monsters.

But I couldn't do that. This glimmer, this
phantom hope that warmed my chest was the first in living memory. I
couldn’t just disregard it and lock it away to die like everything
else in my life.

The cold truth of what I needed to do
strengthened me. I’d been dying long enough.

I took my first step toward life.

Several hours and a few bone-bruising falls
later, I’d crept through six levels and at least twenty corridors.
My efforts had not been rewarded. I was no closer to getting out of
this hell than when I’d taken my first step. I started to think I
was an idiot for listening to a voice in my head.

No, I
knew
I was an idiot.

I pressed the heels of my palms against my
eyes and smacked my head against the wall. Things weren’t going so
great. I needed to get out. The weight of the black nothingness
crashed in around me, suffocating me. I needed to get out. I needed
to get out!

Breathe, Ella. Breathe.

I couldn’t breathe. What had I done? An
interstellar ship didn’t have a way off. Why did I ever think it
did?

I took a deep breath and let it wash through
me. My heartbeat slowed until I could barely feel it at all. The
cold metal soothed my forehead. I just needed to stand there for a
moment with my head pressed against the wall and my arms dangling
at my sides. Things would work out. I’d be all right.

Too bad telling myself that over and over
didn’t actually help.

I turned my back against the wall and slid
down to the floor, resting my head against my knees. Every cell in
my body wanted to break down and cry. If I hadn’t been so terrified
of making noise, I would have. I’d never felt so lost in my life.
The hope I’d felt earlier had all but disappeared. If the hounds
didn’t find me, the guards would, and they’d feed me to the hounds
anyway. I’d been such a fool for leaving my cell. A tear burned its
way down my cheek, and I clamped my hands over my eyes to stop the
rest from gushing out.

Okay, I needed to think this through. I
lifted my head from my knees and wiped my tear-soaked hands onto
the ragged shreds of my muslin prison uniform. I needed to come up
with a plan, if only to keep my mind busy.

If I kept following the stairs down, I’d get
to the bottom. What then? Would there be a door to the outside? Is
that how spaceships worked? Of course, even if that
was
how
spaceships worked, outside was nothing but the vacuum of space. I
groaned.

My plan sucked.

I rubbed the blood back into my legs and
pulled myself up. A sucky plan beat no plan any day. One, two,
three. Step, step, step. After my first initial steps, I found it
easier to work in patterns and small groupings to keep track of
distances. So far, I’d gone about thirty-eight sets of triple steps
and most corridors were forty-three sets long before I hit the
stairwell.

Step, step—holy crap!

My face collided with the floor with a
sickening crunch. I clutched my head and moaned.
Sho’ful
shook and groaned as my body slammed first into one wall and then
the other. I tried to grab onto something to keep from rolling
around, but the smooth walls offered no handhold.

This had never happened before. Something
was definitely different. During my ten years on the ship, it had
been nothing but a smooth ride. Now,
Sho’ful
was shaking to
pieces. The grinding and booming ripped through my skull and
reverberated through my whole body.

Then the floor fell away from me. Or rather,
it dropped so suddenly my body went airborne for a few seconds
before crashing back down. Blood pooled in my mouth.

Oh no, not blood. Anything but blood,
please. I whipped my head around and strained my ears for any noise
other than the rattling metal and booming gears. Though I didn’t
have any way to know for sure, I suspected the hounds could pick up
the smell of blood
really
well.

My pounding heart probably didn’t help
anything either. Even above all the mind-numbing noise, I could
hear it racing in my ears. I tried to breathe deeply to calm myself
down.

The ship leveled out and settled. We had
landed, somehow I knew. Unfortunately, now that all the shaking had
stopped, my heartbeat thundered in the heavy silence.

I swallowed, waiting and listening. A leaky
pipe dripped off somewhere in the distance. Even farther away, I
heard the muffled voices of guards. The vast, dark, and empty
hallway where I sat was silent. I didn’t move. Something felt
off—like it was
too
silent.

I strained my ears, forcing myself to hear
more, but all I got was silence and the drip, drip, drip of the
leaky pipe.