Worse yet
Elara
If I breathed, I died. If I blinked too fast, I died. My mere existence was a green light for all those who probably wanted to kill me, or maybe use me as a weakness for someone else.
“I get it,” I said. “I’m grateful I’m alive.” I stretched out my arms, making it a little more dramatic. “I know, your sister was kind enough to explain to me that if I mistakenly fart in public, I could die too. Yes, I know.”
Alejandro suddenly burst out laughing. His sister chuckled beside me.
“A good one,” she said.
At that moment, a strange maid floated into the room, bearing our food. She was different from the one who had taken me on a tour the day before. She had dark pink hair pulled back into a sleek bun. Her eyes were strangely elongated, and instead of pupils, she had slits like a cat. She bowed, but as our eyes met, her ears turned pink and she scurried out of the room.
My eyes found his sister’s, then went back to him.
“What?”
“I didn’t do anything,” he said, throwing up his arms in surrender. “Literally, I didn’t do anything. We’ve talked about this,” he said, a shadow of a smile playing on his lips.
Dinner was mostly in silence. I was hungry, too hungry to care about any conversation, in fact, and I supposed they were too. The meat was medium rare, the sauce was juicy and spicy, and the side… was also meat.
“Seriously, is everything you eat meat?” I asked once I was done eating.
“You didn’t seem to complain when you were eating it.” Alejandra crossed her legs at the ankles. In her hand was her glass of wine as we lounged in the sitting area. Her brother stood by the window, a glass of bourbon in one hand, the other resting against the frame.
“We tried vegetables,” he said, “but for some reason, we’re weaker when we don’t eat enough protein.” He turned. “A good try, but I don’t know.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t taste good.”
Alejandra clicked her tongue, sat up straight, and put her wine aside. “Let us begin your lesson for the night,” she announced, clapping her hands together and moving over to a nearby table where my books had been placed.
“We have an old tongue,” she said as she came closer. She plopped down on a chair with the books on her lap and spread them between the both of us. “It’ll take forever for you to hear it, and forever for you to even master it. Our script is more like characters rather than words, and some of it requires a growl. I think you’d just grate up your vocal cords if you tried to speak it. But you should at least understand it to some extent, it will be used when they want to speak against you. Only by elders, however. Most young, like myself and my brother, opt for the common tongue understood by all races.”
“It’s only the elders that like to speak in it,” her brother interjected. “Sometimes I think most of the young don’t even understand it. Many aren’t interested, only those taught by the old systems would know the language and how to speak it. It would do you more good to learn it, at least to some extent, than not to.”
Alejandra handed me a book. I grabbed it, flipped through the first few pages, and my eyes nearly popped out. It was intricate, full of symbols, and even being what appeared to be the rudimentary level, it was still complicated. It kind of reminded me of that thousand-character thing in Chinese, and for some odd reason, I felt as though it would take me decades to learn the basics.
“There’s a quicker way,” she said, beginning to open her book, pulling out a pen and a black sheet of paper from the drawer beside her. “Call it the cheat code, if you must.”
I spent the evening relearning their alphabet system. She told me that I didn’t need to say everything, but I just needed to know how it sounded. Some of them sounded like genuine grunts and growls, and when I asked her to use it in a sentence, I didn’t understand anything. Some of it came from the back of the throat, others sounded like Mongolian throat singing, but one thing was certain—it was a beautiful language. The way their tongues rolled when they spoke it, the brother and sister duo tended to converse in it once in a while as Alejandra taught me.
I slept late, and the morning after, I woke up to grind again. That night, however, I had a strange dream. I dreamed I hovered above a plain, and I dreamed that I soon stood in that place. I remembered I saw that strange woman from before, but she wasn’t speaking in my language. She spoke in the old tongue, as Alejandra had called it. I could pick out a few letters, but that was it. None of it made any sense to me—I simply stared at her. She switched finally back to English.
“I understand,” she said. She raised her hand to my forehead and flicked it, and it stung so painfully I felt the pain when I woke up.
The day was very similar to the one before. I ran, I was taken to the gym, but instead of Alejandra putting me through the gym, her brother showed up in a sleeveless tactical suit. His bulging biceps were the star of the show, in fact. He picked up a set of weights and handed them over to me. They were small, nearly inconsequential, but I was happy.
I was happy until he led me to a punching bag and told me to punch.
“Punch,” he said. “Keep the weights in your fists and punch.”
I punched once, and he shook his head.
“Come on, I thought the Beta would have taught you better than that.”
I rolled my eyes and did it just as Lucas taught me.
“Good,” he said. “Now give me twenty.”
He went behind the punching bag, held it firm while I punched away. I didn’t feel anything at first, but when I did it on the second arm, both arms started burning. He then led me through what looked like an obstacle course, yelling orders at me, calling me a slob as I ran through carrying those same weights. If I dropped them, he would flick me on the forehead. If I moved too slow, he would push me from behind.
That was it. Alejandro was worse than his sister, and that was saying a lot. By the time the day ended, I concluded they were both just as sadistic.