Her name is Maori Xu. Somedays, she needs to repeat that, over and over again. She is afraid that she might forget, like how she forgotten her age, how she forgotten how long she'd been there, how she'd forgotten how her mother smelled like.
Her name is Maori Xu. She was going to be the first Asian American president of the United States of Prithvi. She was a freshamn in high school and aiming for Yale. A straight A student. A Kharva human, who wasn't going to go into the field, thank you very much.
Her name is Maori Xu.
The room is small. Exactly fifteen by forty footsteps. There are only two pieces of furniture in it, a desk and a chair. Every square inch of Maori's living space is flooded with paper. Each paper has twenty-five names. Each name has a number next to it. And each number is a death sentence, give or take two.
The room has no openings. The ceiling gives off light. She doesn't know how they get in, but after they knock her out with that damned chloroform, there is always food in front of her.
These are the facts of Maori's life.
She remembers the day when she first discovered her species. It had been Kharva, which was ironic, considering she had never been much good at math. She had assumed it would have been something like Kalatva or Indira. Of course, she had been thankful that it wasn't Samsara or anything like that.
She had been so stupid.
Kharva. Mathematics. The ability to guess the answer to a purely mathematic question and only be off by exactly two digits in either direction.
She had thought this was a harmless ability. Something she'd never get in trouble with. She had been wrong.
She was fat. It had troubled her a lot, back before she had been kidnapped and forced to go through everything that had happened so far. She had just liked to eat, did it whenever she was studying, leaving grease stains on her science notes.
People liked to tease her about it, how she ate all the time and didn't have the metabolism to match. She had tended to shrug it off, laugh with them, then walk off without them noticing how stiff her smile was.
Now she turns in perfectly stain-free papers and feels a hollowness in her cheeks.
In some cultures, they throw a party after a girl's first period. For her, all she got were a few tampons alongside her usual food. She had to teach herself how to use them, smearing blood everywhere and being forced to wipe it off of her hands on her clothes. She had probably been in the room for two months at that point, judging from the state of her torn and ripped sundress.
It's stupid, but she had thought that when she would go through her first period, her mother would be there for her.
The next day, a new dress is laid neatly next to her food.
They came in the middle of the night, quiet in a house full of noise. Maori didn't notice them over the heater's hum, didn't hear the floorboards creaking and groaning over the lazy rotations of the fan at the lowest possible setting. Didn't hear the sound of a car pulling up over the hundreds on the highway.
She didn't know what happened to her parents. She didn't know what was told to her friends. She didn't know where she was. She didn't know how old she was now.
She would never forget the smell of chloroform following her into unconsciousness.
It had been chance when she discovered what exactly she was. She hadn't done her math homework, so she had just thrown in random numbers and turned it in. So the terror was very real and very petty when she saw the red "See me" slashed across her paper.
She hadn't expected what came next.
"Do you realize that all of your answers were exactly two digits off?"
She had not.
Then her teacher excitedly quizzed her, asking questions like '43 to the fifth power?' and she had answered just two shy of perfection.
She didn't know what was going to happen next.
There is only one name on the paper this time. It directly contradicts one of the facts she's reshaped her life upon. Usually, she is given exactly one thousand names and is forced to finish them or she will not get food.
There is only one paper. There is only one name. She will only write down one number. This is a direct contradiction.
Ben Picktorn.
The number is 17. He will live for seventeen more years.
This time, when they knock her out, she wakes up in an alley, blinking up at the sun that she had not seen for who knows how long, in a city she does not recognize,and in a new sundress.
ns 15.158.61.20da2
