Part Thirty

Margaret Scully tipped the cup up to the young man’s lips. Even with her encouragement, he barely sipped at the tepid liquid.

Their new jail room was growing crowded. Across the bare floor, the trio of computer geeks was scrunched against the wall. All three pair of hands were manacled. There would be no more untied rope, no more futile attempts at walking out unmolested.

And the young British man was failing before her eyes, no matter how much she willed him to live.

"Nigel, can you hear me?" she asked. She was growing increasingly angry at their captors. Children or not, they knew that this man was injured and should be in a hospital. They were little automatons, operating with the cold efficiency of machines. A chill ran through her as she realized that these little soldiers would kill without a second thought.

She’d done all she could to make her new roommates comfortable. Besides her and the baby, only the young Englishman remained unbound. Not that the boy – she resolutely refused to think of him as more than that, though he was probably in his twenties – was in any condition to threaten anyone. The monster who called himself Attila had been here sporadically, requiring the injured man to translate antique gibberish from fragments of parchment and pottery and stone. Nigel meekly complied with the demands despite his body’s downward spiral.

Her mind seethed with anger at their captor, the madman behind the abduction and imprisonment. Left physically unable to fight her captor, she allowed her mind to dredge up a list of extremely unladylike words aimed at the monster. Then, in a moment of pure, unadulterated hate, she imagined him in absolute agony.

Go to Part Thirty-One.


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