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The bed is rough beneath her body when Riley finally opens her eyes to the first beams of light coming in from her window, a few chilly breezes passing through the weak barrier and attacking her vulnerable skin from fighting with the blankets in her sleep. She mumbles something uninteligible even for her, before shrinking into herself and hiding under the safe and welcoming sanctuary of her blankets.
Expect they are not. The colours are wrong, the texture is wrong, the smell is wrong.
No. Not her blanket.
FEDRA’s.
The first minutes after waking up are always the worst these days, the warm minutes where blankets feel warm and the silence carries snores just out of hearing, the temporary surety of a hug from her mother and a pat from her father just down the hall in a few minutes.
As if its her room that will greet her the moment she stops hiding under the covers, her old teddy bear from Abuela’s mother whose skin, once a rich golden brown going by Mother’s memories, was gray and harsh waiting by the bedstand, her pun book which Riley was just beginning to read without Father’s help right beside it.
As if.
There’s no far away snore when Riley raises from her bed, blanket puddling around her legs which she quickly grabs hold and folds in the very messy but passable way Father always did.
It doesn’t look like his folding.
Her eyes stay still, head empty of thoughts, of pains and all the sorrow that follows her during the first rays of the day to the moment she is forced to turn off her lights and sleep.
Not that she ever sleeps much; most of the days Riley had to endure long hours of staring at the roof before the exhaustion could claim her, and those times are always tempered by dreams– no, memories.
Of Mama, and Papa, and the way their neck snapped once the FEDRA guard pushed the lever. Of their hugs, warm breakfasts around their tiny table where both her parents would lie about having already eaten so she could get whatever few bites they had earned this time.
Caught dealing with some smugglers, which had suspicious contacts with fireflies, whoever those might be. Dangerous enough to warrant hanging sentence for a few pills to treat the fever Riley had at the time.
It was a week ago. Her fever had already broken out, even before FEDRA had broken into her apartment to take her to their facilities. Had broken out while her parents were away, trying to find something for it.
And now she had no fever, and no Mama or Papa, and the folded blanket had nothing similar to the way Papa folded it.
The blanket flew across the room, hitting the far wall and falling into the vacant bed.
Her mysterious roommate, whom Riley had yet to see.
Some guard, a fat and short woman with dark skin and long braids that seemed tall only due to Riley being barely six years old, had informed her the girl was in infirmary. Apparently she was born wrong – “no, she was born too early, kid” –, and sometimes her body would get sick like Riley during her fever, but more dangerous.
The guard, Monica if her memory was right, said she was due to get back in no time, and that Riley would have to learn how to share her space with another trinee – “It’s trainee.” She said the girl was quiet and weird, but that Riley would like her.
She wants to meet the other girl. Shame her lungs are hurting.
Someone knocks on the door.
Guard Monica had been the only one to knock before invading her room these last days, her voice always quick but soft on her ears, like how Mama used to say her own Mama sounded. The other guards’ voices always made her remember her parents’ wiggling bodies.
“Trainee Riley?”
Guard Monica.
“Going!” Riley replies, her hands clumsy as she wages war with her hair. Mama always helped get it tamer, but…she ended up leaving her room with hair flattened on one side and fuzzy on the other, only remembering too that she was supposed to ‘get in position’, which was basically standing but with feet wide.
She hasn’t figured out why she needs to do that every time. It was a boring position, and she has forgotten it most times; different from many kids her age who have been living here for long, Riley hasn’t been drilled to do them every time, one of the only things she was really supposed to do back home was helping dusting the few belongings they had
But at least Guard Monica doesn’t really pay much attention to her faulty position, instead nodding once and taking a step to the side.
A girl.
A very scrawny, very small girl.
Riley is only too happy to notice that she was a full head taller than her.
“This is Ellie,” Guard Monica says, gesturing to Ellie, her face scrunched up in something that Riley thinks must be confusion, but it’s just adorable. “This is Riley, your new roommate.”
“What happened to that girl, the mute?” Ellie asks, still staring at Riley as if she is a ghost or something.
She is weird.
“She got– she won’t come back. Bad people took her,”
“Bad people Fireflies?”
“Yes,” Guard Monica sighs, looking from Riley to Ellie with tired eyes: “We will try and find her, but for the time being you and Riley will be sharing dorms. If we dont’t find her, she will stay.”
Ellie nods, finally giving up on the perpetual stare she had just given Riley; instead, Riley watched as Ellie turns her head just slightly to her side, and scrunches her eyes again in confusion. It is cryptic, and weird, and Riley is starting to feel like there is someone else around them, someone that Ellie would be staring at that intensely.
But no. There is no living being aside from them and a weird purple dot flying somewhere beside Riley.
A purple butterfly.
She has no idea how it had managed to get into the headquarters.
“Today, given the special circumstances, I will let both of you have the free morning to accommodate each other and clean this damn mess together, but by evening I want both back in class."
The girl beside her scowls and rolls her eyes, making a show out of brushing her hair aside, and whispers so softly Riley knows no one had listened aside from herself: “she talks too much.”
“I like her.”
“Then I don’t like you.”
That gives Riley a jolt, head popping when she turned it to the side and then down to see an angry girl watching with too much disgust in the face of a four-or-so years old.
“That’s unfair!”
“Not for me.”
“Alright girls, calm down. I will let you two here, and if I hear about any of you getting in trouble during the morning, I will come and take you straight to the Hole.” The guard says it like an name, an method of torture which Riley has a bit difficult to come to terms, much less understand how it works.
Nonetheless, Ellie freezes, and her shoulders rose up until they touched her cheeks.
“Yes, guard Monica.”
“Of course, Guard Monica.”
“Good.” She nods, and leaves them to their own devices just like that.
Ellie turns back to her, confusion still heavy in her eyes. Riley thinks of some way to cut the awkward silence, but falls flat when Ellie takes one last glance behind her back, as if seeing something only visible to her, and opens her mouth to speak:
“You look like my older sister. But younger.”
Sister? I thought she was an orphan?
The sentence gets her by surprise, not only because going from what Monica had said, Ellie had no living family, but also because… Ellie was paper white.
And Riley very much isn't.
“I do?" She chooses to settle into; she puts on her best smile, feeling only vaguely responsible towards the smaller girl who must be between four and six, and tries not to think about her now dead family, “Where is she?”
“Yes. Same hair.” Ellie states, as her head turns from Riley to somewhere beside her, multiple times, face blank.
It was fucking cryptic
Mom would kill her if she heard her thoughts just about now.
“She is dead.”
Oh.
Riley pitches together some words she remembers Papa saying to Mama when her grandma died; she glues it together to apologize, but Ellie is much more fast and continues:
“She was from the south, I think. But died.”
“I am s–”
“–Eight years before I was born. I think.
What.
The other girl, Ellie, is barreling through the door in the next moment, ignoring the unspoken question suffocating Riley from inside.
The purple butterfly quickly followed.
Riley is sure butterflies couldn't exist in those headquarters.
And she is sure her new roommate is just a bit crazy.
How.
How to both of them.