It's hard to focus at first, between tears and panic and the dim light and strange shadows, but after a few deep breaths and a renewed commitment to focus, Iana notices a few things.Ianaeveli Tigenet wrote: ↑Fri May 16, 2025 4:05 pm Now that she is alone, there is nothing holding her back, not even herself, and for a moment, Iana finally just succumbs to tears.
How long will it take the others to find her? What if Garnyn's condition is worse than she and Katen thought, and it turns out that something truly awful has happened to him because of Iana? What if nobody is coming for her at all?
The worst part is that she can't even wipe her own eyes because her hands are still bound to the chair.
After a little while, though, the storm passes, and she manages to come back to some kind of focus. She does know what to do in a situation like this, she tells herself. She does.
Look around. Look for clues. Gaps in the wall. Anything that might tell her where she is; anything that might tell her how she can escape.
If nothing else, it will keep her mind off of the panic.
One, this room is absolutely solid. There don't appear to be any cracks or gaps in the walls or ceiling, no windows or other doors. Which tells her this is either an underground or internal room. Which suggests that Chavon and those cooperating with him at least know that much protocol of interrogating a valuable asset: don't give them an easy escape, even if you're confident they're not able to free themselves from their restraints.
Two, there are a lot of boxes in this storage room, really not much more than a closet, and some of them are even labeled. It's difficult to tell exactly what's written there -- some of the words are too small to read from this distance -- but several of them bear the words Nsuya Tiya Enterprises. The exact organization she and Garnyn had uncovered in their library work. And there's something more. It looks like the words are superimposed over a logo of a stylized flying insect.
A firefly.
As Iana studies the boxes, she notes that whoever stacked some of them wasn't particularly careful. Some of the stacks, three and four boxes high in most cases, wouldn't take much more than a determined push to get them to fall over. Do it right and one stack could bring down two or three others in the process. Well-aimed, it could easily overwhelm an unsuspecting person. A captor, perhaps.
Of course, there's the entire problem of being tied up.
Iana hears voices outside the door, and a few moments later it opens to admit someone carrying a tray with a metal cup and a plate with what appears to be a few pieces of dark bread and some pale cheese. The tray bearer is a human woman of early middle age, judging by her facial features, though her dark hair is showing signs of gray. It's cut very short, possibly having recently been shaved but now growing out. She's square-shouldered with an athletic build, a criss-cross network of scars on her upper left arm visible due to her sleeveless shirt. A line of earrings climbs up the outside of her left ear and she walks with a slight limp on the left side. The closer Iana looks, she realizes that the left side of the woman's mouth doesn't track with the right: the faint disgruntled sneer she wears only shows on the right side of her face.
She stops a few steps away from Iana and the door swings shut behind her. "Well, shit," the woman says. "They didn't fucking tell me I was going to have to hand feed you." She takes note of Iana's hands and feet bound to the chair. "I don't get paid enough for this horseshit." Along with the asymmetric facial expression, the woman's words are slightly slurred.
