Chapter 185 Estella's Story
POV: Estella | The Shelter, Rookeries
I have been here for three weeks and I am still waiting for the part where it stops.
This is what the facility taught me, which is that nothing good continues. Good things in the facility were tests. A kind word from a researcher meant they were preparing to do something that required you to be calm first. Extra food meant they were measuring your response to positive reinforcement. The one time someone gave me a blanket without being asked I could not sleep at all that night because I kept waiting to find out what the blanket was for.
The woman named Isla gives me things without telling me what they are for.
She is not like anyone I have been around before. She does not take notes when she talks to me. She does not look at my hands or my eyes in the way researchers look at things, which is the look that means they are seeing data rather than a person. She sits at my level, which nobody in the facility ever did because sitting at someone's level means treating them like they are the same as you, and in the facility we were never the same as anyone.
I am eight years old and I have been in the facility since I was five and I do not remember very much about before five, just a woman's voice and the smell of something I cannot name and a feeling of being held that I cannot access clearly but which my body still knows the shape of.
The facility called me Subject Fourteen. The woman named Isla called me Estella on the first day and has called me Estella every day since, which is a thing that is so simple it should not matter and which matters more than I have the words to explain.
Ash is the other thing.
Ash is ten and has been in the facility longer than me and is somehow not broken the way some of the older ones are broken, not hard-gone, not shut all the way down. Ash explains things. Ash explained to me on the third day that the doors here are not locked from the outside, which I had noticed but had not believed was permanent, and walked me to each door and showed me it opened from the inside, and then walked me back and did not make a face about the fact that I needed to do it twice more before it became real information rather than just words.
Ash sat with me for four hours the night I could not stop shaking, not talking, just there, which is what I would have wanted if I had known what I wanted.
Today in the main room there are colored blocks and four of the younger ones and Ash is organizing something with rules I cannot follow from the outside and I am watching from the edge and the wanting to join it is a feeling I do not fully recognize because wanting things in the facility was dangerous and I have been unlearning it slowly and it keeps surprising me when it comes back.
Ash says something to me. Come play. Simple, quiet, not a command.
I look at the woman named Isla across the room and the question I have been carrying since the first day comes out before I mean it to: will they send us back?
She crosses the room. She sits on the floor at my level. She tells me I am staying. That this is my home now.
I look at her face for the signs that mean a thing is not true, the small movements around the eyes and the set of the mouth that the facility taught me to read because reading them was the only early warning I had. I look for them and I do not find them.
I look back at the blocks. I look at Ash.
And something happens that I was not expecting, that I do not have a name for yet, that starts in my chest and moves through my hands, and the blocks on the floor rise six inches off the ground in a neat circle and hang there for three full seconds before I lose the thread and they fall back down with a clatter that makes the younger ones shriek with delight.
I did not know I could do that.
Ash is staring at me. The woman named Isla is very still in the way adults are still when something has happened that they need a moment to process. One of the fae healers in the doorway behind me makes a sound, low and quick, and says something I cannot hear to the person beside her.
Ash says, slowly and with enormous care, "Estella. Do it again."
I try.
The blocks rise again. All of them, twelve of them, higher this time.